A rhetorical question, but the correct answer.
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If everyone had been exposed to back-packing,they might be able to discern between need and want.Seventeen Terra-Watts might not be a number fixed in cement,in a western world without continuous Hedonic adaptation driven by Madison Avenue?
Again,public education!
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The hippys were right! Too bad the got seduced into playing the derivatives market instead of making biochar.
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Originally Posted by Xist
How many of you say that we need to stop using gas now and only drive electric vehicles?
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Me — just as soon as Arcimoto ships my reservation number. I'll be insufferable.
I found something on Bjorn Lomborg that was only eight minutes, well within my attention span, so I watched it.
Nothing short of an Ice Age will preserve the current paradigm.
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Maybe humankind won't go down without a fight. In Iceland:
BBC news:Turning carbon dioxide into rock - forever
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The Hellisheidi power station, 25km (15 miles) outside Reykjavik, is Iceland's main geothermal plant, and is one of the largest in the world.
Since experiments began in 2014, it's been scaled up from a pilot project to a permanent solution, cleaning up a third of the plant's carbon emissions.
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I'm not sure how much CO2 a geothermal plant puts out, but that's where the science is happening.
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Porous rock
The breath-taking Icelandic landscape - with its hot springs, geysers and black beaches - is mainly made of basalt, a dark-grey porous rock formed from cooling of lava.
And basalt is "carbon's best friend", because it contains high amounts of calcium, magnesium and iron, which bind with the pumped CO2 to help it solidify into a mineral.
Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a geologist working for CarbFix, ... says. "Fresh basalts are like sponges, with plenty of cavities that are filled with the CO2.
"Iceland is particularly favourable for this type of CCS simply because of the amount of basalt it's got".
Last year, 10,000 tonnes of CO2 were "digested" by CarbFix.
Yet this is tiny fraction - less than the yearly emissions of 650 Brits or 2,200 American cars.
And it becomes even more insignificant against the 30-40 gigatonnes of CO2 (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) that modern humans pour into the atmosphere annually.
Despite its relatively small scale, experts anticipate CarbFix could be easy to repeat - thanks to the ubiquity of basalt around the world.
"Basalt is actually the most common rock type on Earth, it covers most of the oceanic floors and around 10% of the continents. Wherever there's basalt and water, this model would work", says Sandra Snaebjornsdottir.
Large basaltic areas are found in Siberia, Western India, Saudi Arabia and the Pacific Northwest.
Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
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Also,
e. coli, what can't it do?
Sandia Labs News Releases:Riding bacterium to the bank
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Sandia researchers tailor E. coli to convert plants into renewable chemicals
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