Guilt Free Motoring?

I love internal combustion. The sound of my Accord is Salieri to the Boxster’s Mozart, while the distinctive putt-putt of the VW [Real] Beetle is like some endearing melody from childhood, or maybe the rap version of Eensy Beensy Spider (yes, there is such a thing). The ICE is probably the most refined machine on the planet. In contrast, electric drive has all the elegance and soul of a washing machine. Nonetheless, I think global heating threatens civilization, and so I drive with guilt. In so far vain attempts to assuage that guilt, I skim anything dealing with capturing and sequestering carbon, in the so far vain hope that in this version of the Iliad, Achilles won’t die, and I’ve attended talks on the subject at places like MIT. I’ve even concocted wild schemes for personal absolution like cutting my trees and burying them in the peat under my backyard, and growing new trees. Nothing helps. And forget spewing particulates into the atmosphere, because even if that mitigated global heating without bringing on a new ice age–fat chance that we’d get it just right–it would do nothing about ocean acidification from CO2, something that will likely kill off most of our seafood. But now comes a little ray of hope from the 10 January issue of New Scientist.

The magazine describes a variety of schemes for scrubbing carbon, and sucking it right out of the air. And while several of these require such high temperatures–800-900 degrees Celsius–that the net benefit is likely scant, one can do the job at just 40oC. Its inventor, Klaus Lackner of Columbia U, thinks the cost of collecting the CO2 could be low enough ultimately to sell it to greenhouses. Fruit and vegetable growers pay up to $300/ton for concentrated CO2, in order to boost plant growth.

David Keith of the University of Calgary tells New Scientist that once governments price carbon high enough to justify investments in capture and sequestration, it may become commercially feasible to “…capture CO2 and combine it with hydrogen to make fuel,” eliminating net carbon emissions by recycling element number 6. Then we could all drive easier and breathe easier at the same time.