Sir Richard Branson, along with Al Gore, recently offered US$25,000,000 to anyone who can find a way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere at the rate of at least a billion (a thousand million) tons a year and I have been giving it some thought.
They probably mean the development of a physical process to actively reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but this is what all the plants on earth are already doing as I described in the posting below "The Other Side of Global Warming". What the world is basically doing now is taking the oil that formed from prehistoric plants and burning it in car engines to get the solar energy that was absorbed when these plants lived and releasing that energy to drive the car.
When those plants of long ago were growing, they pulled CO2 out of the air and used the energy of the sunlight to split the one carbon atom from the two oxygen atoms. The oxygen was released back into the atmosphere while the carbon atom went to build the plant's structure.
Unfortunately when the oil, the fossilized remains of these plants, is refined into gasoline and is burned in car engines, oxygen is taken out of the air and combined with carbon atoms from the gasoline to recreate the CO2 molecules that were broken up in the plants during prehistoric times.
Thus, by burning gasoline we are putting all that CO2 that has been underground and out of the atmosphere for so long, back into the atmosphere. The result is global warming because CO2 acts like a greenhouse in the earth's atmosphere.
Normally, the sun radiates energy to the earth, which absorbs it but re-radiates some of it back into space at a different wavelength. CO2 in the atmosphere does not affect the incoming radiation but it blocks the radiation that is being re-radiated by the earth back into space. So, the earth gets warmer.
Since we have released much of the carbon that was being held underground for millions of years back into the atmosphere, why not simply reverse that process? Plants operate on a cycle in terms of carbon and carbon dioxide, CO2. As the plant grows, it pulls carbon out of the air to build it's structure, as described above.
When the plant dies and decays, oxygen in the air combines with the carbon in the plant to return CO2 to the atmosphere. Since atmospheric oxygen is ordinarily diatomic, consisting of two atoms together, we get the two atoms of oxygen combining with one of carbon.
Why don't we recreate the burial of billions of tons of carbon underground and out of the atmosphere? What if all the grass that was mowed every summer was compacted into blocks and buried in a disused mine or somewhere that it could not decay and return it's carbon to the atmosphere? The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would decrease.
There is all kinds of regulations about recycling garbage, why not do the same with mown grass and other plant matter? Maybe some use could even be found for the blocks of grass, as long as they could not decay. We have done a pretty good job of finding all manner of uses for discarded automobile tires.
Even if this was done on all the lawns on federal or local government properties in the U.S., Canada and, Europe, it may virtually solve global warming by permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere. I do not expect to get any money for such a simplistic solution but the way to solve this may well be low-tech and labor-intensive instead of high-tech.
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