Trees and other green plants are nature's tools for sucking CO2 out of the air, but scientists say there aren't nearly enough trees to remove all the waste gas we've put into the atmosphere. So some are trying to create new devices that work like trees — like these "pine-tree looking pieces" of fabric being developed by researcher Klaus Lackner at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University.
Here's the skinny: CO2 traps heat. There’s about 40 percent more of it in the atmosphere today than there was in the millennia of human history before the Industrial Revolution, and that number is rising fast, since we just can’t seem to curb our thirst for fossil fuels.So what if there were a simple solution? What if we had a way to suck that excess the CO2 right back out of the sky?Well, actually, we do, says Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.“These are our best ways of capturing CO2 from the air,” Jones says as he walks under a canopy of trees on the school’s campus. “Trees evolved over millions of years to do this very efficiently.”Thing is, we just don’t have enough trees to fix our CO2 problem. In fact, the earth has fewer acres of trees every year. But Jones says that even if we planted trees everywhere we could, they still wouldn’t be able to pull enough CO2 out of the air to offset our emissions. Which for Jones means one thing. “We have to come up with a chemical tree that can effectively extract CO2 out of the air,” he says.Essentially mimic nature, only do her one better.The technical name for the idea is direct air capture. And it is a tall order — to improve on trees, which have been honed by millions of years of evolution. In fact, some say the technology will never be efficient or cheap enough.
Source:- www.pri.org