Lately I think I’ve been obsessed about issues related to oil prices, oil consumption, alternative energies, and it’s for two reasons.
Starting from the supposition that global warming is directly related to CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and that there’s so much talk out there about shifting our energy source from oil, gas & coal to new sources is the smartest thing to do since:
- We could reduce CO2 emissions (and most likely global warming)
- By saving energy, or using cheaper energy we save money
These pair of reasons seem pretty attractive, but I keep thinking to myself the following…
Are we asking ourselves the right questions? Is this the only way to solve the problem?
The world pretty much runs on an oil-gas-coal based energy/economy, if we’re pessimistic we won’t have time to replace the whole damn thing even if we found the best energy source tonight, while we change we’ll probably still be emitting a lot of CO2, try convincing all the countries in the world into shifting, maybe the political problem might be harder to solve than the scientific problem.
Having said that, now I ask you, and maybe I didn’t hear Al Gore talk about my following questions during his Inconvenient Truth movie, maybe I don’t know crap about chemistry (I don’t as the matter of fact), but…
Why can’t we try to clean part of the mess while we figure out a way to stop the mess?
Is it impossible to have CO2 broken into something else? Is it impossible to do something else to let the infrared radiation bounce out and stop the greenhouse effect, why is it always the solution to stop doing something, why can’t we clean, or transform these gases into something else and actually make use of them?
It seems to me (here I go with the conspiracy theories again), that maybe this is the best way to convince the world that we need to shift onto a new energy model cause the rulers of the oil economy know it’s not viable for the next 100 years or so, and they want to prepare us to accept the new fuels they will sell us by having us believe the new technologies will be the salvation of mankind?
It seems to me that we could put our brightest minds into cleaning the high levels of CO2 to let the infrared radiation out and start cooling the planet.
How about we figure out a way of cooling the caps? We can certainly heat shit up? how about we think of a way to cool the polar caps so they don’t melt?
I think there’s a lot of alternate solutions, wonder if the entire scientific community is stuck on the super hard solution of having the whole world change.