The Climate Change Solution We’ll Never Know About
Apparently, a gov’t lab knows how to suck CO2 out of the air - when are they going to tell us about it?
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release reads like sterilized lines from a chemistry major’s textbook. You can’t mistake the stoic prose, a bucket full of technical alcohol splashed about to remove any sense of humanity from the person who wrote it. Make it worse, since Livermore is a government lab it’s more than certain that the final went through endless drafts and bureaucratic authorizations before we landed on the elongated “Livermore scientists develop CO2 sequestration technique that produces ‘supergreen’ hydrogen fuel, offsets ocean acidification.”
What, if anything, did sequestration suddenly have to do with CO2? The two seem worlds apart, unless the science enthusiast who wrote the press release seemed adept enough at Search Engine Optimization to assume usage of a political buzzword would catch the eyeballs of a few otherwise dismissive reporters. While there was hope of clever semantic twists, a deeper dive into the document offers no hope of a simpler, user-friendly read for the masses:
“The team demonstrated, at a laboratory scale, a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution while producing hydrogen fuel and other gases. The resulting electrolyte solution was shown to be significantly elevated in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2.
What does that mean? If we take a quick stab at translation, it basically says that scientists have somehow mastered a technique that sucks those pesky CO2 emissions right out of the atmosphere. Rather than being stuck in policy neutral about how we keep ourselves from spitting out so many harmful toxins into the air, all we’ve got to do is build and mass market technology that – maybe - acts like a gigantic Dyson vacuum cleaner. It’s probably not that simple, but you get the drift.
The added bonus is that extra hydrogen made from the process can be used to save the oceans. An attempt at bringing it down to earth is seen here when the writer compares the “ocean acidification” mitigation to “an Alka Seltzer neutraliz[ing] excess acid in the stomach.”
This could probably be the biggest solution to climate change since warning scientists and skeptical conservatives declared war over it. It’s an almost V8-moment-like approach, solving air and water pollution in one fell swoop. Wouldn’t this warrant a major announcement and increased federal funding? A breakthrough worth - at least – a dramatic shift in the sequestration debate showing just how critical federal funding is for research and development. The White House, stuck in first term gear and too skittish or too cute to punch through any substantive legislation on climate change, could even use it as a new talking point to gin up support for a U.S.-led global CO2 elimination tool.
Perhaps that’s asking for too much. The Daily Mail gets it – uh, yeah, fam, this is what you would call a “breakthrough.” He we are stuck again with lamenting yet another instance when the science community either refuses to or just can’t creatively message important developments for wider public consumption. Instead, they opt to keep it all too themselves – yet, bust out with the occasionally pompous snicker or complaint about society’s woeful lack of scientific literacy. In the meantime, making sure we have clean air to breath might be more crucial than knowing Kim fixed Kanye an artery-clogging soul food buffet. But thanks to Livermore and a self-absorbed media industrial complex, the lot of us will never know.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is Washington Correspondent for The Philadelphia Tribune and Politics Contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @charlesdellison.
