Chicken Little panickers always are wrong. They spew gloom and doom over. Their biggest failing is assuming the future will be as it is today.
Three articles in two days have come my way to show a brighter future that will sprout from the ingenious of mankind.
Conversion process turns pollution into cash
Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have developed a promising electrochemical system to convert emissions from chemical and power plants into useful products. Specifically, they have worked out a two-step cascade reaction to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and then into ethylene, a chemical used in everything from food packaging to tires.
Waste not: Turning food scraps into renewable energy
Using anaerobic digestion, energy can be created by converting food wastes into biogas—a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide—to generate renewable energy. Notably, additional CO₂ isn't being added to the atmosphere.
Could we make cars out of petroleum residue?
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a way of making these lightweight fibers out of an ultracheap feedstock: the heavy, gloppy waste material left over from the refining of petroleum, material that refineries today supply for low-value applications such as asphalt, or eventually treat as waste.
The new carbon fiber cheap to make. Equally impressive is that such material can have compression strength, meaning it could be used for load-bearing applications.
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