Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Geoengineering your Carbon Footprint Away




About 15 years ago I was an official US delegate to a UN climate change conference in Amsterdam.    This wasn't the main conference where climate treaties are voted on but an associated scientific conference sponsored by the UN as part of the overall climate treaty process.   I first heard about the idea of a "carbon footprint" at this conference.  

At this meeting all the attendees were given a small booklet that contained a diagram showing how many passenger jet trips a person could make without producing excessive amounts of CO2.  According to the booklet, I had just released so much CO2 by flying from Alaska to Europe that I shouldn't be allowed to fly on airplane for another 20 years.  I had just travelled to a conference dedicated to preventing climate change, and in doing so I had apparently emitted so much carbon that I personally had just increased global temperatures by 0.000001° C.

Today calculating a "carbon footprint" and then selling "carbon offsets" that are supposed to counteract the effects of the carbon releases has become a business.  Google the words "carbon footprint" and you'll find dozens of calculators that you can use to estimate how much carbon you release during your activities and how much you'd have to pay to "offset" that carbon.  Play around with these calculators and it soon becomes apparent that the best way to do the worst thing in carbon footprints is to fly somewhere.  Jet travel releases huge amounts of carbon.

There is another UN climate change conference going on this week, this time in Lima Peru.  If a US diplomat travels roundtrip from Washington DC to Lima to attend this meeting, his jet travel will result in about  3,195 pounds of CO2 being added to the atmosphere.  Thats a staggering amount of CO2 for one trip by one person, especially considering that many thousands of people will attend the Lima UN climate change conference.    The conference itself, not counting the air travel, will emit another 50,000 tons of CO2.

Removing all that CO2 from the atmosphere is not a simple task.   Consider the efficiency of various geoengineering proposals in dealing with just one person's CO2 emissions for air travel to Lima:  (a)  freezing it out of the air would create 1.5 tons of frozen CO2 that would have to stored and artificially kept cold in giant refrigerators forever (2) pumping it out of the atmosphere using biochar would require growing, charring and then storing about 3 tons of charcoal (3) Pumping it down into the Antarctic Ice Sheet would require bringing 3-5 tons of chemicals or buckyballs with amines to Antarctica and (4) and don't even think about trying to cycle that CO2 out of the atmosphere by breaking lots of rocks or raising ant farms----it ain't gonna happen.

Hopefully the delegates at the UN Climate Change Treaty in Lima will be able to craft a binding treaty to reduce global CO2 emissions.  If they need some encouragement to reach agreement, I hope somebody gives them a little booklet showing just how much carbon they all personally emitted into the atmosphere to attend yet another conference on stopping climate change.


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