by Ezra Klein
I'd meant to link to this the other day, but Eugene Robinson is saying very sensible things about efforts to "capture" the carbon emissions generated by coal plants.
[W]ould the stuff stay down there? The whole point of the exercise, remember, would be to keep the carbon dioxide from getting into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to climate change. The idea is to confine it in specific types of geological formations that would contain it indefinitely. But scientists acknowledge that they can't be certain that the carbon dioxide will never migrate.
Scientists and engineers will have to prove that the possibility of a sudden, catastrophic carbon dioxide release from a storage site is exceedingly remote. I say "catastrophic" because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and a ground-hugging cloud would suffocate anyone it enveloped. That is what happened in Cameroon in 1986, when naturally occurring carbon dioxide trapped at the bottom of Lake Nyos erupted and killed 1,746 people in nearby villages. Presumably, storage sites would not be located near population centers.
To read the full article: http://voices.washingtonpost.
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