A new process to harvest the carbon dioxide from smokestacks and convert it into baking soda is exciting the scientific world.  By equipping industrial plants with this technology, we can prevent these large amounts of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.  It probably won’t solve our climate change problems, but it’s sure a step in the right direction.

This got me thinking, though.  If it’s possible to convert the CO2 emissions from industrial plants into baking soda, what’s to stop the same process from converting the exhaust from the millions of vehicles on America’s roads as well?

Remember when I suggested that we should be paving our roads white instead of black, so as to reflect more of the suns rays back out of the atmosphere?  Well, having every car on the road leaving a fine dusting of white baking soda everywhere it goes seems like a pretty simple solution for the short term.  This does cause a few problems, however:  1) the frequent overturned-vinegar-tanker incidents we have will suddenly be a lot more catastrophic, and 2) the amassing white powder might reflect TOO MUCH of the suns rays, putting us into a permanent winter.  Hopefully these two problems will simply cancel each other out;  when too much baking powder piles up, it will increase the frequency of vinegar tanker crashes, turning the baking powder back into CO2 where it can enter the atmosphere and encourage global warming.  It’s win/win, really.

This sudden abundance of baking soda could also provide one major missing piece of another plan I’ve been trying to get off the ground for some time: controlling the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

We truly are living in an amazing technological time.

Defined tags for this entry: climate change, global warming, I solved it, research, science