Back To The Drawing Board

Researchers announced this week that they are perfecting a procedure designed to turn pollution into a type of plastic used to make everything from DVDs to eyeglass lenses. The effort is being touted as a way to capture and use climate change–causing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources instead of releasing it into the atmosphere or burying it underground.

"One is producing a material from CO₂ instead of just discarding it," chemist Thomas Müller of the Center for Catalysis Research at RWTH Aachen University in Germany said yesterday at a press conference at the semiannual meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. "It can be a contribution to solving the CO₂ problem." (Full Story)


The only problem: it requires additional energy to convert the CO2. So in the end it just creates additional CO2. The only way it can work, to reduce CO2 emissions anyway, is to use additional clean energy power sources. . . wait a minute. If they come up with clean energy to power this, will there be any CO2 to convert? I think we have a fundamental flaw here.

[Photo via bgs]