Gloria Flora
One conference speaker was Gloria Flora, who became something of an environmentalist hero when, as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service she stood up to higher ups and refused to rubber stamp proposals to allow gas wells into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a protected area along the Rocky Mountain front range in Montana. She's been on the lecture circuit for some time-- I remember she came to my college, in the late 1980s.
Nowadays she's working with an outfit called the Biomimicry Guild. Biomimicry is, according to the guild's website,
is an innovation method that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies---new ways of living---that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.
I'll admit upfront that although I get a general sense of it, I really don't understand what the guild does, and I suspect that whatever scientific and/or industrial work it accomplishes isn't what's appealing to the crowds that come see Flora speak. Rather, I'm guessing, it's the groovy sounding nature of it all. But, what do I know? Maybe the assembled government workers and MBAs key in on the techno biomimicrystuff to a degree that leaves a lowly reporter in the dust.
Regardless, Flora made a statement that floored me: a company called Novomer is work on an industrial process that will "remove CO2 from emissions and turns it into bocarbonate, which is then used to make hard ceramics for building material." This will, said Flora, " help solve global warming."
Nope, that's not right at all.
Sure, CO2 can be, and is, used in all sorts of industrial processes. Earlier this year, Chemical and Engineering News published a nifty article that explores some of those uses, including the Novomer application, but noted that:
"There can be little doubt that CO2 currently has the highest public profile of any molecule," chemistry professor Christopher M. Rayner of the University of Leeds, in England, told C&EN. Rayner served as chairman of a workshop on converting CO2 into chemicals, held in July 2006 and sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). He also published a review article recently on the potential of CO2 in synthetic organic chemistry (Org. Proc. Res. Dev. 2007, 11, 121).Since the early 1990s, the number of papers on CO2 has been rising "almost as fast as the atmospheric level of CO2 itself," Rayner said. This trend reflects the growing effort to develop technologies to separate CO2 from industrial flue gases. But part of the rise likely is due to some researchers not understanding that using CO2 as a raw material "can only have a very limited effect on reducing the greenhouse gas's contribution to global warming, simply because of the sheer scale of emissions," he added.
The approximately 115 million metric tons of CO2 used annually by the global chemical industry really doesn't compare to the approximately 24 billion metric tons of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Doing the math makes it obvious that CO2 capture and sequestration will be necessary, regardless of how much CO2 industry ends up using as a feedstock.
So, whatever the benefits of CO2 as a material for industrial uses, there's no possible way that it will "solve" the global warming problem.
I worry that people will pick up on such statements and use them as justification for not taking global warming seriously. Hoping for some miracle techno fix that will easily "solve" global warming is misguided.
|
