A Superior Court Judge in Fulton County, Georgia has ruled that construction of Dynegy’s Longleaf plant be halted until it is assured the plant will limit the amount of carbon dioxide it releases.

The original permit would have allowed the plant to emit 9 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, something the court said was unreasonable.

The court cited the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling recognizing that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act.  It’s the first time any court has applied the ruling to an industrial source.

Commenting on the ruling, Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign said:

“Coal-fired power plants emit more than 30% of our nation’s global warming pollution.  Thanks to this decision, coal plants across the country will be forced to live up to their clean coal rhetoric.”

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius rejected construction of a new coal plant in that state, saying global warming is a public health threat.

It isn’t known yet whether Dynegy, the largest coal plant developer in the country, will fight the ruling.  Dynegy has more new coal plants planned in the country than any other developer.

Coal Related Posts:

Florida Weighs Clean Energy, Coal Plants

Does Coal Have a Role in “Clean” Energy?

e2 energy: “Coal & Nuclear: Problem or Solution?”

Tangled Up in Green: A Tale of Two Energies

That’s the message from “Stop Trashing the Climate,” a report prepared by The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and Eco-Cycle, a non-profit recycler. The study finds that waste prevention and increased recycling and composting could reduce as many greenhouse gas emissions as are produced by 21 percent of the U.S.’s 417 coal-fired power plants.

Why? There are two basic reasons. One, by trashing stuff instead of reusing or repairing it, we create the demand for new resources … and extracting, manufacturing and transporting those resources generates carbon dioxide. And, two, by tossing biodegradable materials into landfills instead of composting them, we’re creating emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is shorter-lived but 72 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

“Recycling is as important for climate stability as improving vehicle fuel efficiency, retrofitting lighting, planting trees and protecting forests,” said Brenda Platt, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and lead author of the “Stop Trashing the Climate” report.  “By avoiding landfill methane emissions, composting in particular is a vital tactic in the battle to stop Arctic ice melting. Biodegradable materials are a liability when buried and burned but an asset when composted.”

The report asserts that “A zero waste approach based on preventing waste and expanding reuse, recycling and composting is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective strategies to protect the climate.” It also notes that, per megawatt-hour, a trash incinerator produces more carbon dioxide emissions that a coal-fired power plant. Incinerators also waste three to five times as much energy as recycling helps to conserve.

“A zero waste approach is not only good news for climate stability, it’s also good news for America’s businesses and economy,” said Eric Lombardi, a report co-author and director of the Boulder, Colorado-based Eco-Cycle.

“Stop Trashing the Climate” urges a local and national 20-year goal of zero waste. We can get there, the authors argue, by not subsidizing landfills and incinerators, putting an end to waste incineration, composting biodegradable materials and expanding the nationwide infrastructure for reuse, recycling and composting.

As part of World Environment Day, community supporters of better recycling and composting lobbied officials in several parts of the country, including Tallahassee; Providence, Rhode Island; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Los Angeles; and Massachusetts.

Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival in Powys, Wales, Wallace Broecker suggests the way forward must surely lie with the construction of millions of “carbon scrubbers.”

These carbon scrubbers would be giant artificial trees that would pull CO2 from the atmosphere via a specially designed plastic and the gas would either be liquefied under pressure to be pumped underground or converted to mineral.

So how exactly does this all work? From The Guardian:

The team [led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York] says [the device] can trap the CO2 from air on absorbent plastic sheets called ion exchange membranes, commonly used to purify water. Crucially, it has discovered that humid air can then make the membranes “exhale” their trapped CO2. The discovery was “some serendipity and some working out,” Lackner said. “When I saw it the first time, I didn’t believe it.

Guardian coverage in full with a full explanation of the potentials behind the project.

An extremely interesting idea and one I hadn’t personally come across before. The concept appears to me to be a hybrid of Isaac Asimov and Lego and not at all off-putting.

There will of course be those who bleat, maintaining that these pretend trees are going to look somehow ugly. These same people casually watch the news each evening but always find it infinitely more interesting to wander over to the fridge when there’s some feature detailing further destruction of rainforest.

Personally, I find the concept of 60 million of these devices constructed worldwide (the figure given in the BBC report) not nearly so offensive a view as a bunch of apes driving around in machines yelling at each other in a smog of road rage and inconsideration.

Source:

BBC Click here for initial source.

Image Credit:

garryknight at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

The accumulation of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere can be a difficult concept to visualize (maybe something to do with the fact that CO2 is invisible). So if you’re a visual learner like me, you’ll want to watch this short from the Energy Saving Campaign [45 seconds].

Residents of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are outpacing the national average decline in gas consumption, according to a new report by the Sightline Instutute.

In the last 8 years, residents of these states have cut back by about a gallon per week, for a total gas consumption reduction of 11%. In the Pacific Northwest, gas usage has fallen to its lowest level since 1966, while CO2 emissions from gasoline have fallen by six-tenths of a ton per capita since 1999.

Clark Williams-Derry, Sightline research director, said that this was like “every driver taking an annual, five-week holiday from their cars.”

Williams-Derry attributed the trend to changing driving habits and more fuel efficient cars. Public transit ridership in Portland and Seattle is at an all-time high—the highest level nationally in 50 years.

Despite the positive trends, population growth has still made up the difference where decreasing per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are concerned. As a result, total CO2 emissions in the region have been roughly flat since 1999. The NorthWest’s gasoline consumption is also almost twice as high as the global average for high-income nations.

But we’re still beating the rest of the country, and no doubt these positive trends could be strengthened by the right policy environment.

“We’ve made progress, but adopting smart policies such as a cap-and-trade program that includes highway fuels can extend our gas savings,” said Williams-Derry. “It’s our best shot at protecting ourselves from rising prices at the pump, while reducing climate-warming pollution.”

For more information see Sightline’s report page and the full report on gas consumption.

Posts Related to Gas Consumption and the Pacific NW:

• Canada Unleashes First Carbon Tax in N. America
• US Will Export $440 Billion For Oil In 2008
• U.S. Gasoline Still Among World’s Cheapest
• The Growing Need for Fuel Substitution, Efficiency, and Conservation
• Portland’s Grease Wars: Battling for Biodiesel-Bound Cooking Oil

Photo Credit: Sightline Institute

The four-year-long study by atmospheric scientist Lawrence Meany concluded that human respiration and conversation could be responsible for up to 12 percent of the greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere every year. And, Meany discovered, that percentage appears to be growing.

“At current global population growth levels — about 77 million people per year — the contribution of human exhalations to carbon dioxide concentrations could reach 15 percent by 2025,” Meany said. “Such rising impacts from basic human physical activity suggest the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) might have vastly underestimated future projections of greenhouse gas levels.”

Ironically, Meany further noted, the IPCC’s continued efforts to negotiate a global successor to the Kyoto Protocol are actually themselve contributing to rising amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“It’s always been a cliche that politicians, and sometimes scientists too, are full of hot air,” Meany said. “Unfortunately, my findings indicate this is, in fact, literally true.”

Oh, and by the way … April Fool’s!

The only way to stabilize Earth’s climate, according to new research, is to cut carbon emissions to zero … and to do it quick.

Climate scientists Ken Caldeira and Damon Matthews reached that conclusion after taking a new approach to future climate modeling. Rather than analyze what it would take to stabilize carbon dioxide levels, they crunched data to determine how much carbon we could continue pumping into the air without warming the Earth any further.

The answer they got was: none.

“Most scientific and policy discussions about avoiding climate change have centered on what emissions would be needed to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Caldeira said. “But stabilizing greenhouse gases does not equate to a stable climate.”

In Caldeira’s and Mathews’ model, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations slowly begin dropping only if emissions go to zero. And, even in that case, the Earth remains warm for another 500 years.

On the flip side, any emissions more than zero result in further warming of the planet.

“What if we were to discover tomorrow that a climate catastrophe was imminent if our planet warmed any further?” Caldeira asked.

That might be a question we’ll have to answer soon. Amazingly, though, Caldeira remains hopeful.

“It is just not that hard to solve the technological challenges,” he said. “We can develop and deploy wind turbines, electric cars, and so on, and live well without damaging the environment. The future can be better than the present, but we have to take steps to start kicking the CO2 habit now, so we won’t need to go cold turkey later.”

An http://www.greenprinteronline.com dispatch.

When companies make the shift to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chain, paper is one of the first – but perhaps most overlooked – ways to shed those office carbon pounds.

But the carbon, environmental and cost savings benefits of switching from virgin paper to more sustainable paper didn’t escape Sustainable Business Design - a consulting firm that provides carbon footprint, greenhouse gas audits and “The Low Carb Corporate Diet” ™ service.

Nancy E. Landrum, Ph.D., of SBD demonstrated that a local, multi-site client who had not thought about paper purchasing as a way to “go green” experienced “immediate environmental and financial success in their quest for green” by simply making the change to recycled paper.

But how big of a success was it exactly?

“The final combination of paper choices recommended to the client represented a 10% cost savings, 13% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, and 35% fewer trees when compared to their previous product,” says Landrum.

And, if offering climate change and carbon strategies that work wasn’t enough, Landrum oversees a blog worth reading at http://www.sustainablebusinessdesign.blogspot.com, check out the January 30 post for a list of useful webinars like “A Guide to Green Purchasing (Feb. 20)”. It’s like attending a green learning conference across the country minus the across country flight emissions – we are loving it.

Green Printer offers ultra sleek, sustainable and 100% post-consumer paper to help your organization save trees and reduce your carbon footprint - the easy and cost-effective way. More details at www.greenprinteronline.com.

Organized by “Focus the Nation,” the teach-in — scheduled to culminate on Thursday, Jan. 31 — aims to get millions of students, teachers, people of faith and other citizens together in various locations to discuss just one topic: how Americans can start tackling climate change now.

A project of the Green House Network that’s being directed by Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College, Focus the Nation set out to sign up 1,000 colleges and universities across the U.S. for the teach-in. Organizers have more than met that goal, with 1,600-plus organizations planning to participate as of Tuesday, Jan. 29: from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, to Western Wyoming Community College.

The event officially kicks off on Wednesday, Jan. 30, with a live, one-hour Webcast of “The 2% Solution” starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Earth Day Television. The interactive program will feature, among others, Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University; Hunter Lovins, president and founder of Natural Capitalism Inc.; and Van Jones, an attorney, green jobs pioneer and founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Why “The 2% Solution?” Becaue keeping global warming below about 4 degrees Fahrenheit tops will take an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by developed countries by mid-century. That’s a cut of about 2 percent per year.

So what happens after Jan. 31? Following the teach-in, Focus the Nation is urging participants to set up roundtable discussions with their elected representatives to discuss solutions to climate change. Organizers are also looking ahead to what they’re calling a “critical month in human history”: February 2009, the month in which the newly elected U.S. president and Congress start setting their agenda for the nation.

Can we really expect the nation’s leaders to take a drastic turn for the better one year from now? Time will tell, but it’s certainly a goal worth focusing on.

Graphic of the Earth’s geological time scale courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

The Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences has just received $590,000 to support research into how diet affects a cow’s methane emissions. Livestock are blamed for 28 percent of the world’s human-caused emissions of methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Photo courtesy of Man vyi at Wikimedia Commons

Citing the latest numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Time Magazine reports that Texas has the distinction of being the state with the biggest carbon footprint in the Union.

Photo courtesy of Ealdgyth at Wikimedia Commons

Though I’m still not 100-percent convinced, Lovelock’s arguments are factual, rational and highly persuasive. So I thought I’d take a similar crack at making the case for nuclear energy as a way to help curb our greenhouse gas emissions … maybe in part to clarify my own mixed feelings about the matter.

Here goes:

1. First, there’s a truly powerful pro-nuclear argument I’ve never seen given much attention before: according to the Keystone Center’s “Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding” released last year, failing to replace existing nuclear power plants over the next half-century would actually increase carbon emissions by 12.5 gigatons. Unless we’re planning on replacing all the nuclear facilities set to go off-line with something other than coal or natural gas plants, we’ll be making climate change worse.

2. As scary as the “what-if” scenarios for a nuclear reactor failure are, the reality has — so far — proved much less so. The World Health Organization (WHO) carried out several studies after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster; one, conducted 19 years later, concluded that 75 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident. Other WHO findings: 28 deaths among first-responders in the year after the accident could be directly linked to acute radiation sickness; there was a large increase in highly treatable tyroid cancerns among young people and no clearly demonstrated increases in leukemia or other non-thyroid solid cancers; and the lifetime risk of cancer deaths among those exposed to Chernobyl radiation was about 3 to 4 percent higher than average. (You can find the complete digest report here.)

3. By comparison, the health impacts of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the U.S. were minuscule, with no attributable illnesses or deaths. The Keystone Center’s “Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding” last year said the average dose of radiation to the region’s 2 million people was about 1 millirem, with the maximum exposure to individuals right outside the site at less than 100 millirem. By comparison, a full set of chest x-rays delivers 6 millirem of radiation, and a year’s exposure to natural background radiation gets you 100 to 125 millirem.

4. Participants in the Keystone Center “Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding” all conceded that “on balance, commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. are safer today than they were before the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.” In fact, an industry study in 2003 found that even a direct-side impact by a large commercial airliner wouldn’t cause a loss of coolant at a nuclear power plant.

5. A National Academy of Sciences study found a low risk of widespread harm from either a terrorist attack or a serious accident involving spent nuclear fuel. And the Keystone Center’s “Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding” found that “the risk of a major accident at a nuclear facility is not seen as a significant risk by investors today.”

6. A 2001 study by the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland (quoted in “The Revenge of Gaia”) found that, beteween 1970 and 1992, nuclear power had the best safety record of all major energy sources, both in terms of total deaths and deaths per terawatt of energy produced each year. The results for the top four sources were coal: 6,400 total deaths, 342 deaths per terawatt per year; hydro power: 4,000 total deaths, 884 deaths per terawatt per year; natural gas: 1,200 total deaths, 85 deaths per terawatt per year; nuclear power: 31 total deaths, 8 deaths per terawatt per year.

7. A life-cycle assessment by Meier Engineering Research (thanks redcraig!) found that nuclear fission energy actually had a lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emission rate than solar (using an eight-kilowatt, building-integrated photovoltaic system for the assessment): 15 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent per gigawatt-electric of electricity, compared to 39 tons for photovoltaic. Of course, those rates were considerably higher for fossil-fuel sources like natural gas (469 tons) or coal (974 tons).

8. Nuclear power makes economic sense. According to the Energy Information Administration (thanks again, redcraig!), operation, maintenance and fuel costs per kilowatt-hour for nuclear plants are more than twice those for hydroelectric, but nearly a third less than those for fossil steam energy and two-thirds less than either gas turbine energy or small-scale photovoltaic or wind energy.

9. During the nuclear testing heyday of the Cold War era, the superpowers set off numerous nuclear weapons; in 1962 alone, test bombs equaled the output of 20,000 Hiroshima warheads. Such tests, Lovelock argues, released radioactive materials into the air equal to two Chernobyls a week for a whole year … yet no proven health damage to humans was observed in subsequent years. (For more details, see “The Revenge of Gaia,” pages 94 - 95).

10. Finally, Lovelock argues — and it’s hard to disagree with his view — that “a continuous supply of electricity is an essential requisite for civilization.” Nuclear power, unlike wind or solar energy, fits that bill.

All that said, I still have doubts about the viability of nuclear power as our way out of dangerous climate change, and I don’t believe my concerns are the result of a conspiracy by environmentalists, as some pro-nuclear types suggest. I’ll take on the “con” side of the issue in another post soon.

The process works something like this: concentrated solar power from a giant solar furnace is used to superheat a set of catalytic cobalt ferrite rings that, once activated, literally rip carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules apart. As a result, CO2 is transformed into carbon monoxide, which can be converted into methanol, jet fuel, or even gasoline.

Sounds a little too good to be true, but researchers say it works and claim a prototype facility will be completed by April.

The idea of recycling carbon dioxide is not new, but has generally been considered too difficult and expensive to be worth the effort. But with oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel and concerns about global warming mounting, researchers are increasingly motivated to investigate carbon recycling. Los Alamos Renewable Energy, for example, has developed a method of using CO2 to generate electricity and fuel.

Splitting CO2 makes a little more sense once you understand that the original intention was to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for use in the proverbial hydrogen economy. The concept of recycling CO2 has a nice ring to it too, especially if the technology is combined with a coal power plant. CO2 from the plant’s exhaust gases could be captured, reduced to carbon monoxide, and then turned into liquid fuel.

On the other hand, this sounds like a big waste of solar energy when so many other options are available. Don’t expect to see CO2-to-fuel centers any time soon, either:

“This invention, though probably a good 15 to 20 years away from being on the market, holds a real promise of being able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while preserving options to keep using fuels we know and love,” she says. “Recycling carbon dioxide into fuels provides an attractive alternative to burying it.”

Yeah, you got that right.

For more information:

CSM (01/04/08): Scientists Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2
SNL (12/05/07): Sandia’s Sunshine to Petrol project seeks fuel from thin air

Photo Credit: Sandia National Laboratories

Source: truthout.org

This is the third year for the competition. The concrete industry is looking for opportunities to boost the perception of concrete as a green material, since the mining, processing and transportation of concrete is responsible for 8% of all carbon dioxide produced by human activity.
Like plastics, concrete is a versatile and widely used material, but there are a number of undesirable consequences of the production of the material that have architects, engineers, and other designers looking for alternatives and for better ways of producing the material.

There are two categories in which entries can be submitted: I- Design an environmentally responsible Recycling Center focused on reusing today’s materials to preserve tomorrow’s resources, or II- Design a single element of a building that provides a sustainable solution to real-world environmental challenges. Registration deadline is Feb. 8, 2008 and the deadline for submissions is May 14, 2008. Prizes include US$10,000 to be divided among the top winners in each category and a copy of PCA’s suite of concrete design software with an array of structural engineering resources, awarded to each winning school.

Link: 2007 PCA Design Competition Winners

Image source: Portland Cement Association

Carbon sequestration will be used in this new coal-fired power plant to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity.

The town of Mattoon, Illinois rejoiced when the developers of a $1.8 billion low-pollution power plant announced the selected location. This rust-belt town will no longer be primarily known as the bagel capital of the world. The 275-megawatt prototype plant will generate both electricity and hydrogen. Carbon dioxide emissions will be captured and pumped deep into the ground.

The Department of Energy quickly issued a warning about the experimental plant, stating that it might cost too much and urging a reassessment of the design. The public-private partnership between FutureGen and the DOE entails the DOE providing 74% of the required funds. This plant will provide information on the feasibility of carbon sequestration.

Matthew Wald of the New York Times explained the technology that will be implemented by the plant on All Things Considered: “They take the coal, and instead of grinding it up and burning it, the way you do in a conventional plant, they cook it, and it gives off two gasses: hydrogen, which is benign — when you burn it you get nothing but water — and carbon monoxide, which we think of as a pollutant, but here as a fuel gas. You mix the carbon monoxide with water; it grabs hydrogen out of the water, so you then end up with carbon dioxide, nicely separated, and more hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen to make power, and then you have this nice clean flow of CO2 that you can dispose of.”

In 2006, coal power plants generated about 50% of the nation’s electricity, while emitting roughly 40% of the total carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers capturing carbon and pumping it underground to be a likely solution for slowing climate change. Although carbon sequestration has the potential to significantly decrease emissions, the word clean perhaps can never accurately be used to describe coal.

Putting the carbon emission aside, coal mining is responsible for extensive environmental damage. Forests and streams are destroyed, impacting water quality and wildlife habitat.

Despite the environmental impacts of coal mining, the low-emissions plant in Mattoon, IL is certainly an improvement from business as usual. This prototype plant will help answer some of the questions that surround carbon sequestration and its feasibility for mitigating climate change.

What if I told you the Federal Government would be paying to experimentally inject 1 million tons of carbon dioxide into the ground under Illinois? And what if I said the CO2 would by supplied by an ethanol plant owned and operated by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)?

You’d say I was crazy, right?

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy awarded $66.7 million to investigate large-scale carbon sequestration programs in Illinois. The money was awarded to the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium, one of seven regional carbon sequestration partnerships funded by the DOE and consisting of private businesses, state entities, and local universities in the Illionois-Kentucky-Indiana geographic region. This is all part of the DOE’s 10-year initiative to establish and commercialize carbon sequestration.

The MGSC plans on injecting 1000 tons of CO2 into the earth’s crust per day every day for three years, at a depth of about 5,500 feet. Geologists working on the project estimate that the Mt. Simon Sandstone Formation in Illinois can hold up to 100 years of carbon dioxide emissions from major point sources in the region, keeping it sequestered for millennia.

The partnership will inject one million tons of CO2 into one of the thickest portions of the Mount Simon Formation testing how the heterogeneity of the formation can increase the effectiveness of storage and demonstrate that the massive seals can contain the CO2 for millennia. The results of this project will provide the foundation for the future development of CO2 capture and storage opportunities in the region.

The most striking part of this arrangement is that the CO2 source is an ethanol plant in Decatur, IL, operated by none other than ADM. News sources don’t clarify the type or production volume of ADM’s ethanol facility, but this information raises serious concerns about ethanol’s pollution profile (see an earlier post for the latest on ethanol).

Call me a Luddite, but carbon sequestration seems closely related to other ill-conceived strategies for mitigating global-warming, including coal-powered jets, launching giant reflective discs into space, or seeding the ocean with iron to increase phytoplankton CO2 uptake. Will ’sequestered’ carbon dioxide stay underground, or will it find a vent and leak slowly (or dramatically) back into the atmosphere? (For an excellent bibliography on this topic, see MIT’s research on Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies.) We’re certainly adept at pulling things out of the ground, but injecting a gas into the Earth’s surface is a whole new ballgame.

It looks like we don’t get much of a choice, however. According to the Government:

Advancing carbon sequestration is a key component of the Bush Administration’s comprehensive efforts to pursue clean coal technology to meet current and future energy needs and meet President Bush’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions intensity 18 percent by 2012.

Let’s just pretend this isn’t really happening.

Energy.gov (Dec. 18, 2007): Energy Department Awards $66.7 Million for Large-Scale Carbon Sequestration Project
GreenCarCongress (Dec. 19, 2007): DOE Awards $66.7 Million for Large-Scale Carbon Sequestration Project; Ethanol Plant the CO2 Source
Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium

Photo Credit

That aside, India is looking towards the future, and with a population estimated to sit at 1.12 billion people, and rising pollution levels, India is a country that needs to look to said future.

India is planning to 'fertilize' – or seed – an area of the South Atlantic, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, with 20 tonnes of non-toxic iron sulphate. At first, one worries about pollution, but you have to read on to see the brilliance of this. First of all, the 'seed' material is non-toxic, and therefore will not harm the ocean in any way. Secondly, the 'seeding' is intended – and proven – to raise the levels of phytoplankton – a tiny floating surface algae – that is responsible for 50% of the Earth’s photosynthesis, and thus, removal of 50% of the worlds carbon.

California based Planktos Inc., among others, have already tried this method, and found that it is indeed a viable method to help the environment. In fact, back in the early 1990’s, a region of the Pacific Ocean was 'seeded' with iron dust and saw a 20-fold increase in the local phytoplankton population, with a corresponding decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide by roughly 2,500 tons within a period of 2 weeks.

Since that time, the level of phytoplankton globally has dropped by 25%, and a renewal of said algae is hoped to restore a certain balance.

"India will be particularly hard-hit by global warming, so it needs to adopt mitigation measures more urgently," Victor Smetacek, NRI scientist and bio-oceanography professor at the University of Bremen, Germany, told the Hindustan Times.