Skip to main content

World in a Carbon soup!!

Having just written a post on Carbon trading, a tiny news item piqued my interest.

The idea behind the experiment is very simple. Iron is one the vital ingredients for the phytoplankton growth. But iron is a mineral of short supply in the oceans. So, a company named Planktos are dissolving about 100 million tons of powdered iron in the ocean, and hope the plankton growth surges. The plankton uses the carbon-dioxide during its lifetime, and it is hoped when the plankton dies the carbon sinks to the bottom and is buried there forever. About 20% of the plankton 'fed' are expected to be 'buried' in the seabed.

The entrepreneurs hope to prove the experiment of iron-fertilization and then sell the carbon-offset to industries that are eager to buy carbon-credits.

The rallying pitch of the experimenters is the cost of carbon offset in very low compared to growing trees and other cleaning technologies.

This is precisely the point we had mentioned in the yesterday's post. Commercialization of the conservation efforts will blind to absurdity. Trees may be a little expensive option, but who said trees were the only meant to suck up carbon. Don't they have any other uses? Don't they help in habitat, ecology, rains, soil erosion, floods, saving other species, food chain and timber also. Or for the sheer beauty of it. Or the friendship at the least.

The biggest problem in the natural systems like afforestation or this experiment is the carbon absorption is not quantifiable. So you are chasing hypotheses. The utility can never be proven because it is part of a large dynamic system. So, it would not be surprising the experiment come out with flying colors and companies pumping money in to these schemes since this works out cheap - at the cost of environment. We are not even considering the collateral impact on the environment and natural cycles.

This "monetization of environment" as it is getting popularly termed is a great hoax. Lot of people will make lot of money by destroying their own home.

This fertilization experiment is totally absurd. Period. Carbon-credit is absurd. Period. Possibly, the carbon-credit advocates are alien prodigies bent on destroying the earth. They will possibly buy an intergalactic ticket with the money they make and rest will be left back hoping they had done something sensible.

Two Must-Read items:
Real Climate : Thin soup thin story
Financial Times: Industry caught in Carbon smokescreen

:) Falkor

Resource: A brief intro by FT on Carbon offset
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cognitive rules of business presentations

In his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work. The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary. The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details -- the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Value of dollar - Part 1

A Simple Perspective Will Do The date is 2000-05-28. Don't you get tired of all the bad news bears reminding you of all these instabilities, excesses, and 'potential' tensions in the global economy? After all, hasn't it always been like that? Yes it has, but not in money it hasn't. Increasingly, investors find it harder to know where to put their savings. What about Government Bonds? Wrong. Their recent record of capital losses have wiped out your guaranteed yields, probably because the stock market keeps crowding them out, and this even in a strong dollar and low inflation environment. Furthermore, there is no reliable liquidity and potentially poor quality debt in the corporate sector. Foreign assets? Wrong. Most of the world's economies are riskier, have been under performing, and also, there is this thing called currency risk. Like how is the average person gonna cope with currency...
Post a Comment
Read more

Depreciation of British Pound 1900-2000

When the Bank of England was formed the powers to create money was finally transferred to private hands. The creation of Fed in US, was just a part of this cycle. Though it is a common knowledge US Dollar has depreciated nearly 100% since the creation of Federal Reserve, the same is the case of all the currencies across the globe. For example, below is the UK Parliament data that highlights the depreciating value of Pound.
2 comments
Read more