Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [105]
“Two is not enough.”
“What?”
“Two is not a big enough number for this kind of thing. There is never the Two This or the Two That. You need at least three, maybe more.”
“But I only know two.”
“You must think of some more.”
“Okay, sure.” Frank was falling asleep. “You have to help me though. The question will be, what’s the third good correlation?”
“That’s easy.”
“What?”
“You think about it.”
For some reason no one was hanging out at Site 21 these days. Maybe the heat and the mosquitoes. Back at the farm Frank yanked weeds out of the garden rows. He cut the grass of the lawn with a hand scythe, swinging it like a golf club, viciously driving shot after shot out to some distant green. At night in the dining room he ate at the end of a table, reading, bathed in a sea of Tibetan voices. Sometimes he would talk to Padma or Sucandra, then go to bed and read his laptop for a while. He missed the bros and their rowdy assholery. It occurred to him one night in the dining hall that not only was bad company better than no company, there were times when bad company was better than good company. But it was a different life now.
At work, Frank was passing along some great projects for Diane to propose to the president. The converter that could be put in all new cars so that they could run on eighty-five percent ethanol could in a different form be added to already existing cars, like smog-control devices had been. Legislating that as a requirement would immediately change their fuel needs, and overwhelm their limited ability to make ethanol, but Brazil had shown it could be ramped up pretty fast. And there were advances on that front coming out of RRCCES, another offshoot of Eleanor’s work, carried forward by other colleagues of hers, in which an engineered enzyme allowed them to get away from corn and start to use wood chips for their ethanol feed stock, and might soon allow them to use grass; that biotech accomplishment was another kind of holy grail.
Burning ethanol still released carbon to the atmosphere, of course, but the difference was that this was carbon that had only recently been drawn down from the atmosphere by plant growth, and when they grew more feedstock, carbon would be drawn down again, so that it was almost a closed loop, with human transport as part of the cycle. As opposed to releasing the fossil carbon that had been so nicely sequestered under the ground in the form of oil and coal.
On that front too there were interesting developments. Clean coal had, up until this point, only meant burning coal and capturing the particulate load released to the atmosphere. That was called clean, but it was a strange issue, because the particulates were probably lofting into the high atmosphere and reflecting sunlight away, creating at least part of the so-called “global dimming,” meaning the lower levels of sunlight that had been reaching the surface of the Earth in the last few decades compared to when it had first been measured. So that cleaning up coal burning in that way might actually let more light through and add to the global warming overall.
As for the carbon dioxide released when coal was burned, that had not been a part of what they had been calling clean coal. But now their prototype plant’s blueprint included a complete plan for burning coal and capturing both carbon dioxide and particulates before release. None of the elements were speculative; all existed already and could be combined. It would be expensive; it would mean that each coal-burning power plant would become a complicated and expensive factory. But so what? It could be argued that this was only another advantage for the manufacturers of such plants. Public utilities, private investors, ultimately it didn’t matter; it had to be done, it had