Climate Change - Think Globally. Act Locally.

Think globally. Act locally. Ask your congressperson to signal acceptance of an equitable Climate Change agreement with China and India at the December International Climate Conference in Copenhagen. China & India accumulated emissions total only 13 percent of man-made greenhouse gases. They want a shot at the United States’ and European life style achieved with cheap coal while emitting 75% of accumulated human emissions.

Americans should not rely on Sharon Begley’s reasoning, “China and India Will Pay” (page 14, Newsweek, Sept 7, 2009) to persuade China & India to act. Ms. Begley points out that China and India are in for climate hell with rivers that stop running because the Himalayan glaciers are gone, more droughts between larger floods, and the sea rising over poor people in a storm surge. With this future, Ms. Begley expects China and India will stop bringing their people out of poverty with cheap coal power.

However, the PODenergy.org team suggests a different approach. PODenergy is one example of a process that produces renewable energy and food while increasing sea life diversity and cleaning ocean dead zones. It also has an option to capture and sequester fossil carbon from the air. Capture-from-air would allow us to offer to sequester legacy and current fossil carbon while the funds paid by fossil fuel companies to sequester the carbon are also subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Because the solution is based in the ocean, it is available to nearly every nation.

The solution, ocean algal-biomethane, is based on the fact that it is hard to prevent bacteria from producing methane and carbon dioxide from biomass. (Have you been able to prevent your stomach from producing gas?) The late 1990's research by the National Renewable Energy Lab has determined how much algae can be grown in open ponds per year. Copious research has been done to define how much plant material converts into how much methane. The book "Anaerobic Digestion of BioMass" includes data for kelp and other aquatic plants. Oil companies have conducted a lot of research on the solubility of methane and carbon dioxide in water under pressure. This extensive research has been combined into designing a sustainable ecosystem. A computer model suggests the ecosystem produces economically competitive renewable energy and fish for hungry people with the option of sequestering legacy carbon dioxide.

The existence of the PODenergy process allows you to make two suggestions to your congressperson:

1. Start a US-China-India joint research project on open-ocean algae-to-energy+carbon storage+food+species diversity.
   
   
2. Signal acceptance to “The U.S. will cease production of greenhouse gases and commence storing legacy greenhouse gases, proportional to China and India doing the same.”
   

Mark E. Capron is a registered professional engineer in Oxnard, California with experience in ocean, wastewater, and renewable energy engineering – www.PODenergy.org