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Title
Soot
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The first book is called Soot:
Man has burnt half the worlds hydrocarbons ever discovered - in just 100 years!
These took millions of years to accumulate and created our current environment. Now he pays the price of re-releasing all of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Read about what may happen as a result in the next 100 years in this exciting enviro-novel. Follow the experiences of Rex Cole as he helps deal with the man made environmental crisis that has some surprising repercussions. Will man disappear off the face of Planet Earth as the eco-system tries to regain balance?
By releasing the massive carbon stores that nature laid
down back into the atmosphere we are now recreating
the conditions that formed them.
Starting around the Carboniferous Period occurred from
about 360 to 286 million years ago through to the cretaceous period, in warm tropical greenhouse like conditions, algae populations exploded in the resulting warm shallow oceans that covered huge areas of the earth. They and the plants they evolved into sucked massive quantities Co2 (from 1950ppm, around 7 times greater than now) and other gases out of the atmosphere, cooling it 3c in the process. They laid down colossal carbon (Fossil fuel) deposits including oil, gas, coal and also deposited chalk and limestone and expiring oxygen in the process, locking up the Co2 underground. The temperate, oxygen rich conditions eventually resulted in the evolution and proliferation of higher forms of life, including us.
Mans use of buried gaseous, liquid (using half of the discovered reserves in a century,
in the case of oil) and solid hydrocarbons such as coal is being burnt in massive and unsustainable quantities. This wholesale releasing of greenhouse gases and particulates is recreating the very conditions that allowed the algae that produced it to thrive, namely warm shallow oceans in a high greenhouse gas environment. Unfortunately the environmental cost unsustainable of the use of buried carbon (what cost the very likely prospect of a wrecked global environment?) are being understated with the very real prospect of large scale drastic action being required. There is now strong evidence of runaway greenhouse gas releasing feedback loops starting to kick in such as methane release due to the wide scale melting of permafrost etc. It now appears that the current economic system has been missing the most important dimension (sustainability) and may lead to collapse as it has with past civilisations. The true cost of using buried naturally occurring carbon is actually massively above what it has been sold for and it’s continued use may have catastrophic consequences for all living creatures.
This is a complex global problem that has no borders and there is no world government and denying their own populations cheap hydrocarbons would pull the rug from under modern society and almost instantly lead to riots and chaos. Modern civilisations are driven by and intoxicated on these buried hydrocarbons that are imbedded in their food as fertilisers, direct and indirect transport, clothes footwear and textiles, houses and fittings, roads, transport and energy etc. All of us, even the environmentally enlightened, are indirectly soaked in oil up to our armpits. We spew it’s burnt, unburnt and particulate components and waste by-products into the atmosphere from tailpipes, chimneys and airline exhausts in mind boggling quantities worldwide every day, year in year out.
Resources of oil, gas and fertilisers are being mined faster than discovery, areas are overpopulated in a human monoculture nutrient and toxic waste is dumped with impunity. Our kids play with a “free” plastic toy made from middle eastern oil that was shipped to Asia, refined and moulded with a huge amount of energy, packaged and transported on a ship spewing hydrocarbon waste to a local fast food outlet only to end up in a bin then a waste tip a few days later, having almost circumnavigated the world to get there. As a result of our wild carbon intoxicated party we now have the hangover appearing in the form watch glaciers retreat; icefields and permafrost thaw and melt on a globally significant scale in the Arctic, Iceland, Greenland right down to the Antarctic and most place in between. Oceanic acids levels and oxygen depleted dead spots are proliferating on top of changing climate affecting currents that are leading to more common and intense weather events leading to floods, hurricanes and fires. Greenhouse gas induced climate changes are exceeding consensus forecasts and warning bells are being rung by many eminent and respected researchers and scientists. This is happening now and it appears it will only accelerate in the future.
It is now clear that if civilisation as we know it is going to continue at anywhere near current economic standards and human population levels, let alone those forecast, drastic and urgent action is required - now. This includes the sustainable replacement of buried naturally occurring carbon sources, capturing and storing those excess gases already released, and a reduction in particulates. To finance this colossal paradigm shift large but simple taxes will need to be placed on these unsustainable energy sources and the full proceeds directed to the capital cost of alternative technologies. A global war against atmospheric carbon needs to be declared and appropriate funds to fight it without economic return need to be allocated by each government world wide, as nature has already started to strike back indirectly at us in an attempt to adjust to the unnatural conditions that we have thrust upon it.
Initial attempts to grow ethanol and other fuel replacement crops on cleared forest or agriculturally valuable land is clearly not the answer as it is clearly just robbing "Peter to pay Paul" and leaves the environment and poor impoverished. Modern nuclear is good for carbon free base load but waste issues remain unaddressed and it appears uranium resources are finite. Many excellent but largely one dimensional technologies and inventions have been or will be developed to enable the collection of solar radiation or its by-products such as wind, wave and thermal energy. Algal production is looking highly promising as it is rich in oil for biofuels, food stocks and carbon sequestration etc on relatively low value land but face low yields and remote tropical locations in pond situations and seemingly high cost excess of it’s value in vertical photo bioreactors. Clearing a pristine forest and planting a monoculture of palm oil trees appears to beat it hands down, cost wise, as no value is attributed to the biodiversity devastation caused. Problems arise when many of these stand alone innovations are costed that inhibit their use and reducing the scalability of mass produced parts.
So how are to address the problems of greenhouse gas abatement nutrient waste, the high level embedded hydrocarbons in energy, food (reduction in food miles and misuse of land) sources and fertilisers, the need for carbon sequestration, reduction of particulates and the release of Co2 in a meaningful way within a few years in a relatively cost effective manner that allows people to grow protein and other foods within a reasonable environmental footprint?
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