Artificial Leaves Save the Planet?

100% natural, it writes. The product is 80% recyclable. No animals were harmed, no forests were cut, but keep it away from children. Why? This is what we hear and read each day while trying to stay as eco-friendly as possible. Somehow aren't managing to do so and if we ever do it could be too late.

Dandelion Environmental Consulting and Service Ltd.'s, new service calculated our ecological footprint and according to their report an average Hungarian person would need over 1.5 Earths for the lifestyle they live and for the pollution they create. Hungarians are not the worst…

Without crucifying any nation, let’s just say that any of us who sits on a plane or drives a car helps CO2 emissions which penetrate the atmosphere and will warm our planet for many years. Reforesting the whole planet would not help either because the decaying trees release carbon as well.

According to Klaus Lackner and Allen Wright, the solution could be something they call artificial trees. There's that word artificial again.

In Lackner’s lab at Columbia University he and colleague Allen Wright are experimenting with a type of plastic (artificial leaves). The plastic is a resin of the kind used to pull calcium out of water in a water softener. When Lackner and Wright impregnate that resin with sodium carbonate, it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. The extra carbon converts the sodium carbonate to bicarbonate, or baking soda.

Yay! Sounds overly interesting and quite incomprehensible for those who never really mastered the science of chemistry (like myself).

So now will we plant artificial trees all over the planet? And what would we do with the trapped gas, to where would be it released?

The two scientists have an answer for that too. We add hydrogen to the CO2 that we collected and convert it back into liquid hydrocarbons. If the energy for that came from renewable sources, engines that burned the fuel would emit no new carbon. The key here is to produce no new carbon, I suppose.

We could keep our cars and gas stations and maybe even have bigger cars and planes and still prevent Sweden from becoming an orange plantation. Maybe our ecological footprint could be narrowed down to one!

This situation reminds me of a South Park episode where the citizens were asked not to poop because the ozone layer was in danger. Those who did that ended up spontaneous combusting, so the idea was dismissed and people were asked to continue their everyday lives moderately.

If we look at the artificial leaves and trees from this aspect it seems like the optimal solution. We should continue living our lives, of course, try to be a bit “greener” day by day, but also work on a solution that prevents us from giving up too much of what we created, which is totally against human nature.