The Cutting-Edge Answer to Carbon Sequestration: Dumping?

by Kim, February 3, 2009 at 12:44pm

It sounds suspiciously simple, but apparently it is possible to take the carbon absorbed in plants through photosynthesis and simply throw it away. Yes, "away," that mysterious place that the environmentalist movement has been trying to say doesn't exist for years. This time, it's not to a landfill, nor (yet) to outer space. It's the ocean. Apparently the deep ocean can act like a deep freeze, keeping carbon on ice, and effectively neutral, says the New York Times.

Is it just me or does it seem like dumping huge amounts of a foreign material, even if it's crop waste, is bound to change the delicate balance of the ocean ecosystem. Yet the numbers are powerful. Scientists "estimate that large-scale agriculture produces enough waste worldwide that dumping it in the ocean could reduce the global annual accumulation of CO2 by 15 percent."

Read the full article here.