Al Gore: World's First "Carbon" Billionaire?
Climate change may be serious stuff for many of us, but for Al Gore, it’s seriously profitable. He’s about to become the world’s first "carbon" billionaire:
Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.
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The Future of Architecture
Photo: Tom Bonaventure/Getty Images
There’s also speculation about recreating processes like limestone formation -which usually takes nature thousands of years- that eats carbon from the air.
Nanoarchitects are aiming to speed the process up to a matter of days. They believe it could be done simply by coating the walls of buildings with tiny droplets of engine grease. The grease would be laced with a common salt such as magnesium chloride. When the magnesium reacts with carbon dioxide in the air, a solid magnesium carbonate pearl begins to form.
This serves as the seed for the growth of white, wheatsheaf-shaped carbonate crystals. The large surface area of a droplet of grease maximises the interface between the magnesium and the atmospheric carbon, speeding up the rate of the reaction. Within days, the grease would be transformed into a sparkly crystalline coating similar in appearance to heavy frost or snowfall… A green city…would look like Narnia under the White Witch, crystal white and beautiful. The carbon choking our planet could become a harmless decorative feature.
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Graphene, The World's Thinnest Material
Graphene is a new material made of carbon sheets only one atom thick:
“It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
“A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.
Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it’s as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.
It has applications including solar cells, computer chips, and whale tanks onboard stolen Klingon birds-of-prey.
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