carbon dioxide

It’s no secret that the world is warming, but a new report published by the World Wildlife Fund suggests we may not have as much time to mull solutions as we think. If the world doesn’t commit to green technologies by 2014, the report says, runaway global warming and economic meltdown are all but unstoppable.

Even before a single ounce of natural gas gets burned in a home or power plant, massive amounts of CO2 have already been released. The process of extracting natural gas releases carbon dioxide pent up in the same wells as the gas, thus adding to the climate-changing impact of the fuel.

To help lower the global warming impact of one of the world's largest natural gas fields, General Electric has supplied Chevron, Exxon Mobile and Shell with enough compression "trains"--the pumps and turbines that do the sequestering--to create the world's largest carbon sequestration project. The trains will pump 3.3 million tons of CO2 released from natural gas mining back into the ground every year. That's the equivalent of taking 630,000 cars off the road.

In an attempt to both strengthen the US's negotiating hand in the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks, and to prod domestic lawmakers into swifter action on lasting legislation, the White House has told the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with new rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists have repeatedly touted the possibility of turning algae into biofuels. Now a Florida-based company called Algenol is working with Dow Labs in Texas to convert carbon dioxide produced by algae farms into ethanol, which will then be used to make plastics. Even better, the oxygen byproduct left over from the conversion can be used to produce cleaner, more efficient coal power.

The Big Picture: Carbon-restricting legislation, if enacted, will discourage the use of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Natural gas is cleaner but still emits carbon dioxide when burned. Both will be used for decades, but carbon-capture technology could clean them up until they can be replaced completely.

Where We Are Now: 1,460 GW
What We Need by 2050: 3,830 GW (all of it clean)
Tech to Watch: Carbon-to-cement

Despite all the talk about carbon capture, carbon footprints and carbon trading, carbon dioxide only causes nine to 26 percent of the greenhouse effect. That means that the majority of warming results from gases with a much lower media profile than the paparazzi-trailed starlet of global warming, CO₂. In honor of last weeks’ report in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which identified a brand new greenhouse gas, PopSci.com counts down the gases that bring us bikini weather in Antarctica and beachfront property in Montana.