Uncharted Territories with Tomas Pueyo...

[Philip Costa]

SOLAR ENERGY -- THE SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING!

Part one:

 

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In the future, we will still have CO₂ credits.
But instead of allowing companies to release CO₂ into the air…
Credits might allow companies to capture CO₂. 

What if carbon goes from pollutant to resource?

How is this possible? Because CO₂ will not be seen as a pollutant anymore, but rather as a resource.

CO₂ Is a Resource

Humans dislike CO₂ in the air because it causes a greenhouse effect, traps heat, and increases the planet’s temperature.

But plants love it. That’s what photosynthesis is: plants’ use of energy to extract carbon out of thin air so they can use it to build their body.

The bottom molecule is random. In reality, photosynthesis produces sugar, which doesn’t look like that. The idea is that plants combine the carbon from the atmosphere with the hydrogen from water (and oxygen from either), and produce molecules that have all three, emitting O₂ as a byproduct (aka pollutant, originally).

Plants love CO₂ so much that they’ve been extracting it from the air for billions of years, releasing O₂ as a byproduct pollutant, as we saw previously.

Now that we’ve got CO₂ back to levels last seen about one million years ago, plants are happily consuming it, growing 20%-40% faster than before¹. With more CO₂, they will grow even faster.

However, adding more CO₂ might not continue growing plants faster. As we saw in The Nutrients of Life and a Better Alternative to Iron Fertilization, as CO₂ is fully released as a limiting factor to growth, additional CO₂ might not do anything. Source.

So plants see CO₂ as a convenient way to access carbon that only requires a little energy. If we could help plants capture carbon faster, we would do it. But plants have evolved for millions of years and they’re still not there. Plants are inefficient at capturing sunlight to absorb CO₂². And remember: It took them 2.5 billion years to get carbon to pre-industrial levels. If we want to extract carbon from the air before the Earth warms up too much, we need a faster way to do it than relying on plants, and we can do that if we, too, view CO₂ as a resource.

MORE TO COME!