Honeydew from the Land of Oilrigs and Cowboys

I have been in Alberta attending chemistry conferences this last week. I made three presentations to good attendances and kind comments. Did some networking (I actually had people sliding their business cards into my hand in passing and giving me the "call-me" gesture) and re-newed some old friendships.

But most of all I attended seminars and lectures.

All about chemistry.

All of them using Powerpoint.

From 8 AM to 8 PM.

For five days.

Man, my brains are dribbling out my earholes.

I must admit to not really adjusting to the Alberta lifestyle so well. It seems to largely feature driving fast and recklessly in large pick-up trucks. Yes, gas is $ 1.30 a liter out here but I guess that is just part of the package. I just left Taco Bell reflecting to myself that I had just come to Alberta to purchase "Mexican" food prepared entirely by Chinese immigrants (they had one designated English speaking woman who shouted orders at the crew in Mandarin). Welcome to the wild west.

I spent the better part of one day listening to the Green Chemistry / Petroleum Chemistry people. I pass for clever in some parts and God-like omniscient in some others but I had a hard time cutting through the language of some of those folk. In one talk it came out that the Petroleum industry has just committed one billion $ for sequestration of CO2. Even in Alberta that is the kind of money that makes people slow down to look. Sequestering CO2 is collecting it and hiding it in mineral formations either chemically as carbonates or under pressure. What is amazing is that after listening to some of the best scientists in the area I could only conclude:

1) at this time we do not have a process that works for any more than 0.1% of (*current*) CO2 emissions

2) that China is currently bringing a new dirty coal fired electrical plant online everyday (yes kids, e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y)

3) if we were to discover a process today that worked, the industrialisation, ethics and environmental approval process in North America would mean that viable use could not occur for 10 years. We do not have such a process.

In terms of CO2 we are totally screwed. The genie is out of the bottle. We have lived a blessed and extravagant lifestyle in front of a watching world for several generations now and they feel entitled to the same thing. Very soon every family in China, India and Indonesia will want a computer, a car and a refrigerator.

After listening, talking and thinking I was only able to conclude one thing. The ONLY short and long term solutions that we have to atmospheric CO2 are to stop emissions and to plant trees. We seem to be socially incapable of the former but I have hopes for the latter. It was therefore amazing to read an article in the New York Review of Books by Freeman Dyson (LINK) that essentially says that we do not have the time or ability to create new industrial processes to solve the CO2 problem once we emit CO2. Dyson said that we DO have the ability to genetically manipulate trees to make them "carbon eating". In my opinion that is brilliant. The only working process that we know of that gets rid of atmospheric CO2 is the natural plant carbon cycle. We just need to tweak the genetic thingees in the trees and they will save us. Tolkien was right, our salvation rests with the ents. We will all soon be tree - huggers.

I'm comin' home.