The opportunities of carbon dioxide – and their cost to life per se

• Published date: 02 November 2021
• Publication title: Mercury

To an appreciable degree, the notoriety of these fossil fuels and their resulting anthropogenic gases, especially carbon dioxide, has received a fair amount of publicity. These include the scale and extent of their coverage in the biosphere and their cost to human, animal and plant life.

And so in this age, we find ourselves faced with the prospect of a severe global warming accounting wholly to our conduct. Our immediate task is to evaluate the opportunities that carbon dioxide presents.

Its controversial profile, notwithstanding, it is a prodigiously abundant waste product. The urgent question therefore is whether or not carbon dioxide can play a facilitating role in the provision of electricity.

Of electricity, many things can be said all along its operational value chain, including its vast array of uses. Electricity is so pervasive that modern livelihoods and the lifestyles they support are not conceivable without it.

The starting point is how it is generated. Only when it begins to flow, life’s many cycles, domino-effect like, become possible. So critical is its utility that even alternative energy machinations like solar panels and wind turbines can only be fabricated through a process that involves electricity.

The electric-powered vehicles are no different. The batteries they use need to be charged with electricity. As of this moment, so much of the electricity is generated from fossil fuels. And in the process, a lot of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

With a smaller global population and with no major cities, we have had our primary heat sources from cutting down trees and for propulsion, celluloid energy was converted from agricultural waste products. Looking back at this early stage of rudimentary technology intervention, there are important lessons to be learnt.

The most important of these is about populations. A smaller population located in non-urban settings and busying itself with subsistence farming has produced negligible amounts of greenhouse gases.

Beyond certain population thresholds, however, increasing exponentially every decade and rapidly urbanising, there is a general technological explosion that attends to this trend, requiring an enormous amount of energy beyond the intensity capabilities of farmed renewables.

This population and environment correlation possibility is sobering.

It suggests two mutually exclusive options, which are very difficult to negotiate. The one is that the environment has a sensitive...