I’m so glad! It’s a good week for the environment! Yesterday we had plastic-eating caterpillars – today we have a machine that can eat carbon dioxide. How awesome is that?
Today was a good day. It was really nice out – not too hot and not too cold. I ran a bit longer than I usually do. Hopefully we get nice days like this but scientists don’t seem to think so. (See that segue?) They say that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are just going up and up. It’s at 400 parts per million now. Some scientists are saying it’s getting scary.
The thing is, carbon dioxide insulates the Earth – which is good because most life on the planet need a warm environment. The problem is, these CO2 levels are higher than they’ve been in millions of years. The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more heat can’t leave the planet. So lots of experts fear these increasing CO2 levels are going to increase climate temperature permanently.
It’s a funny thing – we all breathe out carbon dioxide. It’s a natural compound to us. But when we start running vehicles and large plants that also “breathe out” carbon dioxide, the Earth gets overwhelmed.
To offset the CO2 that animals breathe out, I think the Earth has trees and other plants. These breathe in our carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. It should be an equivalent exchange that keeps a nice equilibrium where everyone is happy: most of the animal kingdom take in O2 and make CO2 and most of the plant kingdom eat CO2 and make O2. There’s balance.
But again, we started messing with that equilibrium when our non-living inventions started rapidly emitting so much carbon dioxide. Logically, we’d need non-living inventions that take in CO2 to restore the equilibrium, right?
Enter the Scientist With the Invention That Restores The Equilibrium
And Professor Fernando Uribe-Romo steps forward with his awesome invention that restores balance to the carbon dioxide-oxygen equilibrium! He was able to take special non-metallic compounds that absorbed blue light from sunlight and attach them to titanium. When the absorbed light reacted with the titanium, it caused surrounding CO2 molecules to get converted into intermediary compounds used in solar fuel cells.
So basically, his invention eats carbon dioxide and spits out fuel by using sunlight! He says that if people fit the device onto their rooftops, it could be used to both clean the air of carbon dioxide and power their house. How is that for awesome?
Imagine if street lamps, buildings, the top of your car, bridges, and just about any artificial fixture everywhere were required to have his invention fitted onto it? It would definitely cut carbon dioxide pollution by a lot.
I really like this idea of his device correcting the yin-yang between carbon dioxide and oxygen. We upset the balance by inventing machines that pumped out CO2 like there was no tomorrow. The solution: machines that eat CO2 like there’s no tomorrow. Ying and yang are right again. So cool!
As soon as they develop his invention into a workable application that’s on shelves, I’m buying one for my car, my home, and maybe even my bookbag. I like the idea that I’m helping clean the air passively no matter where I am or go. I’d gladly support that with money.
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