Greenhouse gas is not worth anything, it’s simply waste. But, as with any waste – once it piles up in tons and tons and tons it becomes a threat to the producers of the waste. And around the waste a market for waste management starts to grow.

Greenhouse gas, and CO2 in particular, is different from most other types of waste:
A: It can be turned into valuable material, wood in particular, in combination with other resources. And
B: It moves freely across borders, from nation to nation and even over continents.

While I and many with me believe that technology will actually prevail, and save us from burning up, the “CO2 Reactor” will not work for decades. We need to capture this gas now, and we need to use proven “technology” to do it. Well here’s some news: There is a great, working process called Photosynthesis that has been around for a couple of billion years, and that actually works!

To capture and store CO2 NOW all we have to do is to beef up the planets photosynthesis capacity, harvest the captured CO2 and keep it on the ground!

Capturing and storing CO2 is slowly becoming a new business opportunity for many third world countries. The social and economic effects are many and quite amazing:

• Get paid to plant a forest: The main thing to grow if you want to capture CO2 is trees. Forests are emerging, particularly in Africa, as pure CO2 capturing ventures. The execution cannot be digitalized or outsourced, it is done by the locals.
• Get shadow and water: The trees will provide shadow and the root systems will make the ground water level raise considerably. A forest landscape on the edge of the Sahara will lower the temperature at the surface with as much as 6 centigrade!
• Introduce forest agriculture: There is forestry, meaning growing a forest, and forest agriculture, meaning growing crops in the forest between the trees. Yes, with shadow and moist in the ground it is possible to grow wheat and other stuff within the forest – on places where agriculture was impossible before.
• Commercialize Biochar: Forestry and forest agriculture produce tons of biologic waste, containing tons of captured CO2 that naturally decompose back into CO2. There is a way, called biochar, of permanently keeping this CO2 out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, and it has been known for thousands of years. Why is it not exploited? – It could be a billion $ biz…
• And so much more: Forests hold the main natural recourses for medical production. Forests do NOT consume clean water, they PRODUCE clean water (anyone saying anything different is lying!). Forests are housing the richest animal life on the planet, providing us with ecosystems, in turn providing food, protein-sources, tourism, good TV, and much more.

We need to look seriously upon the possibility and opportunity to make the entire area around the equator between the north and the south polar circles into a green zone. I’m not kidding…

Yes! After a long long time, this ingenious idea has finally found its way to the world!

What is it? It is a way for people to compensate for the negative impact that their digital activities have on the environment.  It is simple: You use your computer to read this blog, that will consume electric power, in most cases generated by fossil fuels – emitting CO2 into the atmosphere.  You can compensate the emission simply by making sure that the same amount of carbon is sucked back down from the sky and kept on the earth’s surface. We, or our partners I should say, will do this for you by planting trees in areas of the earth where trees would never grow naturally.  Thus creating CO2 absorbing areas of the earth that would not be present without your compensation!

I got this idea one day when I looked at a GiverSign in my own email, thought about that our servers are all powered by wind and sun power, and realized that that part of my email was actually carbon free. Why not offer people to expand that to include their entire digital communication? Who would not like to send Carbon Free Email!?

You will also get an e-certificate that we created so that you can show everyone you know that your e-mail messages,  blog posts, and Facebook dwelling is CO2 neutral. And hopefully they will compensate their digital carbon footprint as well, and so the revolution begins… Click on the sign below to read more and sign up!

CO2Compensate.com – Carbon neutral computing for everyone!

I think it is beautiful! Don’t you?

Earth Hour 2009 – Sign up for Earth Hour!

And finally, this is worth seeing:
www.giversign.com

“We’re aiming to reach one billion people, more than 1000 cities, all joining together in a global effort to show that its possible to take action on global warming.”

Earth Hour 2009 by WWF – Sign up for Earth Hour!

• A tree will absorb about 2 metric tons of CO2 in it’s lifetime, most of it during the first 50-100 years depending on the kind of tree. Let’s calculate with an average of 20kg per year. (Note: Some scientists claim that a tree can absorbe 1 ton of CO2 per year, but that doesn’t make sense, does it?)
• A tree needs space to grow. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say 20 square meters.
• The Sahara, Arabian, Gobi, Patagonian, Great Victoria, Great Basin, Chihuahuan, and Great Sandy deserts together take up 15 trillion 400 billion square meters of land, absorbing zero CO2 in its natural state.
• That’s enough space for about 770 billion trees absorbing about 1kg of CO2 per square meter and year.
• The world’s countries are polluting the atmosphere with about 27 trillion kg of CO2 annually.

See, I’m on my way to save the world here! This tree-planting activity would take care of more than half of the world’s CO2 emissions, create millions of opportunities for developing countries and turn dead land into productive soil.

If we could only figure out a way to effectively, sustainably and responsively water the deserts…

Calculating the cost, monetary and environmentally, of fuel used to power the boat we find that it will in a near future surpass the cost of a full time employee. Think one step further and; putting a sail on the boat and hiring one more guy to deal with the sailing will pay of as a good investment.

What used to be the old will soon be the new in many businesses surrounding us.