Comments on: Is carbon storage just a pipe dream?

Tests and funding are moving ahead, but researcher says that plans to drastically cut pollution from power sources are overly optimistic.

[ToddWBeaver]

I don't know if it's a pipe dream; but it's probably not going to do much good.

Plants do a really good job of sequestering carbon. We could grow algae, the algae absorbs carbon and then convert the algae into diesel.

A better proposal might be to capture the carbon and turn it into fuel.

[mlamonica]

Growing algae from power plant pollution is being pursued as well. Probably the best known algae company is GreenFuel Technologies. Yesterday, I did a story on how Canadian researchers imagine using algae to eat up carbon and clean toxins in the Alberta oil sands. There are links to other algae stories as well.
http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9939463-54.html

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that the scale of carbon storage that's being envisioned would sequester a lot more than you could with algae.

[William Crow]

Is honest journalism just a pipe dream? We're now in a global cooling cycle.

[Nicholas Buenk]

I understand the world has a lot of coal left, and as they say waste not want not. And oil and natural gas are expected to be in depletion before 2030, forcing emission reductions in the use of those resources. So climate change is really about coal, it's the fossil fuel that is in plentiful supply and will last.
But carbon capture doesn't make much common sense to me. They want to store massive amounts of gas underground, yet how can they possibly be sure that there will be no leaks?
Really we should be looking to proven technologies like nuclear.

[nonein2008]

Maybe time to release CO2. The earth stopped cooling 10 years ago. There has been a precipitous drop in temperatures over the last 16 months. The oceans have cooled. April was below the 114 year average temperature. Since cooling is much more damaging to mankind, maybe we'd better start to look at alternative scenarios to warming?

[greenpdx]

Trees are still the best source of carbon sequestration we have available.

Low-tech, inexpensive, and offer a host of other benefits, as well -- in addition to being the ultimate renewable resource.

Your average mid-sized mature tree will sequester 48 lbs of carbon per year.

Let's start by planting more trees.