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then be compressed for storage. Jennifer Kahn, who reported on this and other outre storage schemes in a piece for Harper's magazine in May 2004, suggested sardonically that the trees would function like a kind of atmospheric kitty litter. The Los Alamos press release that announced this project claimed that a mere twenty thousand of these ghastly trees would be enough to absorb all the CO from all the cars in the United States. Why stop there? "Cover the entire state of Arizona," Kahn suggested, "and there would be theoretically enough for all the cars in the world." Another lunatic scheme she uncovered was proposed by Craig Venter, the man who helped sequence the human genome. His group wants to create a synthetic microbe that will eat CO2 and excrete it as fuel. By 2004 they had already found several natural bacteria that consume C 0 7 and convert it into methane and hydrogen, and were looking to increase their efficiency. As Kahn said, laying on the irony pretty thick, "a policy that promotes the burning of irreplaceable resources at the expense of the climate makes perfect sense [in] a world not of humans but of posthumans, who eat carbon dioxide and shit coal."26

Another scheme would be to boost the oceans' appetite for carbon by sprinkling the sea's surface with billions of iron filings. Millions of acres of marine algae are, in effect, anemic. As National Geographic, which reported on this scheme, put it, what stops them from absorbing much more carbon is lack of iron, hence the "Geri-tol solution."27 Or perhaps we could just take the carbon out of coal. It could be done too: Coal could be induced to react with oxygen and water vapor to make pure hydrogen, plus waste gases including carbon dioxide, which could then be buried underground.

Burial, now given the grander word sequestration, was by 2005 the most popular of all the suggested technological remedies. It's a perverse twist on the ecologists' notion of leaving the carbon where it is—take it out, use it, then put it back.

In September 2004 the Toronto Globe and Mail reported on what it called a major four-year study that suggested something miraculous: The oil industry could squeeze more oil from almost depleted fields and, at the same time, take care of at least some of the carbon problem. That this seemed suspiciously neat, and the fact that a major Canadian oil producer, EnCana, was involved in the study, apparently gave the business writer no pause for thought. In any case the study was presented to an international conference of Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies by Malcolm Wilson, director of energy and environment at the University of Regina. The Globe and Mail quoted him as saying: "This wasn't a small pilot test, or simulated results. We're doing big tests in a real world environment."28

What happens is this: Carbon dioxide gas is injected into an oil well to mix with the remaining oil, making the oil less viscous, enabling it to be drawn more easily to the surface. The carbon dioxide, for its part, stays where it is put. The researchers used the opportunity to test the long-term storage of carbon dioxide. They concluded the gas can safely be stored in old oil reservoirs, "although further work must be done before greater certainty can be attained on a longer-term scale, say over hundreds of years." For its part, En-Cana said the study "is an example of how oil production can be increased while helping the environment." Ironically, EnCana didn't have enough CO2 of its own for the test, and had to import it from North Dakota, although Canada, a signatory to the Kyoto treaty, had seen its carbon dioxide emissions rise 13 percent between 2004 and the time the treaty was mooted, whereas the United States, which refused to sign, increased emissions by only 7 percent in the same period. (U.S. emissions in 2003 were actually below 2000 levels.)29

The United States has allocated some $110 million for sequestration research. But even if it shows good results, the old wells and mines will eventually fill up, so researchers are already contemplating using