In this short and extremely general video, a representative of ExxonMobil explains Direct Air Capture (DAC), a set of technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Anyone seeking to solve this problem needs to deal with challenge that the concentration of carbon dioxide is extremely low, about 400 ppm or 0.04%, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen. Thus, the enterprise necessarily involves sucking massive volumes of air through a filter, a process that itself has a huge carbon footprint, looking for something that’s very scarce. The concept is doomed to failure, and everyone, including Exxon, knows this.
If Exxon were honest, they would admit it, and attack the problem from another direction, i.e., transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels. But we’re talking about the company that has known since the late 1970s that their products were slowly destroying our planet but conspired to withhold that information from the world’s people, including the scientists who may have been enable to deal with climate change before its ruinous effects set in.
Today, Exxon is throwing out more red herrings (like DAC) so that it can continue to bake the Earth. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “There are no words in the English language that describe acts like this. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even come close.”
About 40 years ago, I used to lie in bed on Sunday mornings with my coffee and Los Angeles Times opened to the real estate section: “Homes in Other States.” I recall voicing some level of buyer’s remorse, having just paid more for a who-cares house in Southern California, where I could have bought half a county in Oklahoma or Mississippi.
My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, would ask me, “But do you think you’d be happy living in West Virginia, with some of the most poorly-educated people in the country? Do you think that would forward your career and your overall life satisfaction?” She had a point, to be sure.
Today’s MAGA conspiracy theorists will tell you that people are leaving California in droves, because of things like environmental regulations. Yet that doesn’t explain why the Golden State, if it were a country, would have the fourth largest economy on the planet, and a house here identical to one in Alabama whose value there may be $200K would fetch about $1.2 million here.
People don’t come here for the wide-open freeways. We’re here for the beauty, the sophistication of so many people, highly educated people, and unparalleled business opportunities.
There’s a reason that Google, Oracle, Apple, Nvidia, Adobe, Salesforce, Facebook, Visa, Wells Fargo, Disney, etc. aren’t located in Arkansas or Louisiana.
At left we have John Fetterman talking to people so stupid they’ll believe that it would have been wrong for the British colonists to oppose King George III in the late 18th Century, or for the people of Germany and Italy in the 1930s to stand up against Hitler and Mussolini. What about the people in today’s dictatorships, i.e., the people in Russia, China, North Korea, or any of the other 50+ authoritarian regimes around the world?
Morons tend to agree with the loudest, most aggressive voice of nationalism, regardless of how little sense it makes.
It’s a great moment of opportunity for Fetterman.
Seminal astrophysicist Carl Sagan explains why uncomfortable ideas may be banned in religion, they must not be shunned in science.
This is an important concept in American life today, as conspiracy theorists are convinced that climate change denial cannot be considered in scientific circles.
I happened to bring this up in my interview with Dr. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution, who has been amassing data on global warming since the 1970s. He laughed, and explained, “If I could prove that human activity was not causing temperatures to rise, I’d be be one of the wealthiest and most famous scientists in world history.”
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