A&A

Took the opportunity Sunday to head up to North Campus and check out some materials in the Art&Architecture collection. Got what I needed; then afterwards, feeling a little empty of purpose (as some library trips are bound to make you feel), I took some time for myself admiring the carillon from below. Then, up in a high parking lot, I discovered that the poured-concrete bases of parking-lot light poles make the perfect backstop for letting your shoulders and neck open up and back (just squat, and the shape of the concrete does the rest). Now that's great post-library tension relief!

Tomorrow or the next day I should have a chance to assimilate all the information from my library trip and put together the best possible proposal from a chemical engineering standpoint. Then it's a matter of running it past the right people............

At this point I have a number of folks locally who are asking, whenever they see me, how things are going with the CO2. Half-joking in some cases, half-expectant in others, it's all the kind of genuine support that I most appreciate. My thanks go out to you.

First Contact

OK, so today I finally contacted an industrial engineering specialist regarding my concept for carbon freeze. Google scholar is just such an incredible resource for quickly finding the right people to be talking to about any research subject. Anyway, now it's time to play the waiting game. Luckily, I'm more interested in global progress on this issue than I am in being the one who provides the solution. That difference alone makes waiting somewhat less excruciating.

I'm off to India for a couple of weeks, so if you don't see any new posts for a while, you'll know why. Hey, who knows -- maybe by the time I get back someone will already have answered Al Gore's call and claimed the $25million. Now that world wouldn't be such a bad one to walk back into.

Startup

Some of you have known for a while now that I've been playing with actionable, large-scale concepts for carbon sequestration. If this term isn't familiar to you, it's because the media haven't been doing much to inform us that we'll soon be spending billions of dollars to pump climate culprit carbon dioxide into reservoirs in the seafloor. I'm all for planning to avoid global climate catastrophe, but this plan seems like a huge waste -- isn't there *something* useful we can do with all this carbon dioxide? Maybe make lots of Perrier or something? Isn't it dangerous to pump that much CO2 into a reservoir in contact with the living oceans? Doesn't CO2 dissolve coral reefs? It just doesn't seem all that well thought-out.

And yesterday, in a surprise at least to me, Al Gore and Richard Branson (of the Virgin mega-empire) have come together to offer a prize of US$25million for the first person to come up with a way of removing 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next ten years in the battle to beat global warming. If I've been letting my work on this project languish, then languish no more! It's time to find out for real whether my working concept can actually make the kind of difference the world needs.

So right now I've focused on a single workable, industrial application for dealing with the CO2 problem. If it works out, it will eliminate the need for sequestering CO2 in underground caverns or anyplace else. If you're interested in following my work as this concept develops, then watch this space. I hope to post at least weekly, that is, in the hope that my progress warrants it.