War on carbon emissions? Is that a good description of what we are in?

Question

If so how are we doing? Is it a war in which we can hold our own? Are we making the right preparations to gear up our efforts considerably?

= ^_^ = some confusion between 'need' and 'want' perhaps? Lets see what others think.

Mr Jello in a way I agree that it is a restriction on freedom but freedom to cause damaging changes to our climate is not a freedom worth having. But then I know that you do not accept that damage is being caused.

autopilot ! You paint a rather bleaker picture than I would but if even a fraction of what you predict occurs it would demand action.

paul diamond thanks but I think a lot of people do care

Not James I agree not much of a war really - but it takes time to mobilise for a war.

mick t an interesting question as to what society does with a conscientious object in a "war" against carbon emissions?

Trevor I like this answer but am puzzled by the reference to proposals to use sodium hydroxide to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Sodium hydroxide is quite an expensive chemical, being produced by electrolysis, an energy intensive process. I found a cost from 2002 for educational use http://ed.icheme.org/costchem.html - £210/tonne By my reckoning one tonne of sodium hydroxide absorbs only .15 tonnes of carbon giving a cost of £1400 per tonne of carbon removed in the sodium hydroxide alone without the capital or running costs of the equipment required. Having some experience as a lead process engineer in the design of equipment where similar principles of absorption occur I wonder if any qualified engineers have done the sums on the design of such scrubbers as I suspect they would be very large and costly It is much easy to remove CO2 from power station flue gas as the CO2 concentration is higher with lower gas flows and higher concentration gradients driving absorption.

More nitpicking. Having worked in the oil industry I know of no bulk uses of sodium carbonate. Perhaps you are referring to carbon dioxide which can be used to enhance oil recovery from reservoirs. Here amine scrubbing would probably be required which can be regenerated by heating, the released CO2 being pumped underground

uk.recycling I think science agrees that the ice cap is thousands of years old http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3090279.stm The name Greenland may have been a con to encourage new settlers although even today parts of the south are very green in summer.

Thanks Trevor for the additional details on the processes and the links.

Answer 1

Some others have picked up on the vernacular of 'war' but I guess you're using it in the context of 'war on crime', 'war on want' etc and in this respect I believe it is an appropriate term. You and I are both in the UK; perhaps we have more colloquial connotations of the word 'war'.

How are we doing in our war on carbon emissions? Some individuals and organisations are doing very well; some countries are making progress and have reduced their emissions including the UK and many of our European neighbours. Beyond Europe there have been limited successes, the Japanese are doing quite well, so too are Russia and many of the former Soviet states.

Can we hold our own? Carbon emissions are one part of a larger problem, reducing carb ems to zero would eliminate 72% of the anthropogenic component of climate change but to return the climate to it's natural state requires an approx 90% reduction in carbon equivalence emissions, if we could also eliminate all nitrous oxide emissions then we'd be getting somewhere. However, this isn't practical and I believe we need to be fighting this war on more than one front. Reducing our own emissions helps but we need to encourage other countries to follow suit whilst exploring other ways of limiting the effects of climate change through geoengineering schemes, my preferred choice would be to use sodium hydroxide to sequester atmospheric CO2, the resulting byproduct then being used to make glass and used in the oil industry. Effectively we’re adapting the existing technology used in scrubbers in power stations and moving it out of the power stations into the open atmosphere. Based on the current proposal each unit would remove the carbon emissions of 18,000 people so it’s not like everyone would need one in their garden.

Are we making the right preparations? I seem to have already answered this point to an extent. I believe we’re making some of the right preparations (and some wrong ones) but need to diversify. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that rarely gets any media coverage and around the world teams of scientists are investigating a range of ‘weapons’ we can use in our war on carb ems.

We have the technology and resources to win the war although this will be many decades away, what we need now is the political willpower and impetus to act.

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EDIT: Re your additional details.

There's several variations on the chemistry approach to carbon sequestration but they all work on the lines of a chemical reaction involving carbon dioxide. One method which uses sodium hydroxide does so in 'atomised' format, the droplets react with atmospheric CO2 to produce sodium bicarbonate. Calcium oxide is then added so the NaOH can be recovered and reused, the residual CaCO3 can be heated and the CaO also recovered for reuse leaving behind CO2 for disposal underground. This is the approach favoured by Dr David Keith.

A similar scheme using NaOH has been proposed by Prof. Klaus Lackner, this was the scheme I had in mind when writing my earlier answer. The byproducts of the reaction would be used to make synthetic petrol and / or synthetic diesel.

The capital costs of such schemes will be expensive, there are no published figures that I'm aware of so we did our own calculations a while back and came up with a figure of £360 billion to implement worldwide and about £120 billion annual running costs.

The sodium hydroxide would be expensive but in method one it's recycled so would only require periodic 'topping up' and in method two the synthetic petrol produced could be sold commercially and the system could run at a profit.

These white papers have a lot more info...
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/7b1.pdf
http://www.centre-cired.fr/perso/haduong/files/Keith.ea-2005-ClimateStrategyWithCO2CaptureFromTheAir.pdf

Answer 2

The actual war is not about Carbon, in fact global warming does not exist.

The war is about the powerful few controlling the many weak. This war has always been around, sometimes Carbon is replaced for religion, other times it could be resoure shortages.

If global warming existed then why did the Vikings use Greenland as a farming colony? What happend to the sheet ice covering the land? Perhaps they had huge outboard motors an their longboats casuing global warming and thus melting the ice?

If you want to be prepared for this war then just take these few simple steps; contact the government and agree to be a slave, agree that they can control your every action, agree to give away your freedom!

Don't beleive the global con!

Answer 3

Not much of a war really is it?

I used to run a Range Rover V8 for many years and still would if I found I needed what it can do neccessary (as many actually do).
The sort of car that gets a 'bad rep' from the 'Greens'.
What they don't tell you is that it would take that car around 40 years to put the same level of CO2 out as a jet flying once across the Atlantic.
What they also don't say is that the V8 can and does last for 40 years. If you bought a traditional family saloon it would have been scrapped and replaced upwards of 5 times in the same term and at what cost to the environment in terms of new resources and manufacturing?
Actually it is a typical war.
One fuelled my misinformation and media focus on a 'common enemy' we can all relate to who once again isn't to blame.
Are we doing enough?
America has around 5% of the global population and accounts for around 25% of the CO2.
If the rest of the world did the same (and believe me it is trying as it has to compete or die in a free market economy) we would need the entire solor system to be as habitable and supportive as this planet just to survive as we do in our grandchildrens lifetimes.
If it's a war you want you can have it.
But this time lets 'invade' the right people.

Answer 4

You hit the nose on the button!!!! YES! That's what it is. A WAR!!! We need to think this way if we are going to solve this problem. There can be no other way out. We must fight this poison in the air before it makes more global warming distruction. Then so many animals will disappear from our earth. There will be no beutiful ice caps on our world and all the major cities will be under the sea. Most of the land will be scorched with a desert and famine will happen everywhere. We will have large hurricanes and many devastating natural destructions because of our actions of today. Unless we can stop this c02 emissions from all the oil and gas we use, we will be punished in many bad ways. So we must wage war! We must fight! If we do a good fight on this now we may stop calamity in the next few years. If we don't take this serious today, then we are finished.

Answer 5

The carbon emissions story is similar to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq story. It is simply propaganda to support a political agenda with no basis in reality.
Carbon dioxide is not pollution, it is a natural and vital component in our atmosphere. Without it there would be no plant life and therefore no animal life on this planet. All the oxygen in our atmosphere comes as a by- product of photosynthesis which need CO2 to work.
In my early career, I was a glasshouse technician and we used to add CO2 to the air because it made the crops grow better.
So, in this war, I am a conscientious objector

Answer 6

No we're in a war of personal freedom. We're being enslaved for some mystic cause, because the oracle, the consensus, says so.

Added note: Freedom to cause damage? Please. If that was true, you would have a case in a civil court. It would be the same if I damaged your car. There is no damage, this is only a scare tactic. Hitler used the same tactic to whip up hate towards Jews.

Don't Europeans ever learn from the past?

Answer 7

Please don't start calling it the "war on carbon." We already have drugs and terror, do we really need another "war"?

I asked a question about that term the other day: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApTk0OC9GhicMp1LCfoh2Ojsy6IX?qid=20070817114152AAUslUH

Answer 8

its not a war since nobody cares about it.