Hey It's 2024. Let's Bash Africa For Not Solving the World's Climate Woes

Hey It’s 2024. Let’s Bash Africa For Not Solving the World’s Climate Woes

Imagine a machine that could extract CO2 out of the air using only electricity from solar panels then combing it with water vapor over a catalyst to form methane gas. The waste product would be oxygen. (BYW, this technology does exist)

Then African villagers could go to the store where the machine resides and fill their canister with the methane for just a few cents. When she arrives home, she cooks dinner with that methane on a small two burner steel stove. The methane gas combines with oxygen from the air to create the heat to cook the food, with the byproduct of combustion being water vapor and CO2.

If you diagram out the sequence of events it makes for an interesting story. Electricity, which is free from the solar panel, is used to drive the reaction of captured CO2 and water (also free) to make the cooking gas which is then burned to form the original components: CO2 and water.

So, there is no net change to the atmosphere; CO2 in and CO2 out. If there was no solar panel there, the solar energy would end up as heat raising the temperature of the ground. But, the presence of solar panels converts that energy to electricity and work(in the physics sense of the word) is done to make the cooking gas. The heat that we didn’t get from the sunlight hitting the earth show up now as the heat from the stove to cook the food.

So, everything balances out, right? Not exactly. Nearly all the energy captured from the solar panel does end up as heat after all, except any of that energy which has caused matter to change it composition. When you change the structure of matter, you have captured the energy needed to perform the change. In the case of cooking, a good deal of that energy went to alter the fiber of the meat and vegetables. If you think that is not capturing much energy, remember the last time your mom cooked a baked potato or a chicken breast, it took quite a while.

That African woman, by buying cooking gas at the local store and making a family meal is probably is doing an order of magnitude more to avoid global warming than you or I are doing in a week.