Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [106]
The British government has already stored millions of tons of CO in depleted oil wells under the North Sea. They have been there for several years. So far, no problems have been reported. But several years, as environmentalists will insist on pointing out, are not the thousands that would be needed.
So the air is getting fouler every year, and the ticking time bomb of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases is set to go off any second? Well, yes, but that's not the only news. Though you would be hard put to hear it over the din of the breast-beating and lamentation, there is also some good news, rather more good news than the plethora of international studies cited earlier has acknowledged. Europe, as we have seen, has so reduced its emissions of sulfur dioxide, one of the worst aspects of coal burning, that even the most rigorous scrutineers among the Greens have declared themselves impressed. In 2004 the European Parliament voted for tougher standards on pollution caused by heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and mercury, and by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a group of over one hundred chemicals that are formed during the incomplete burning of coal, oil, gas, garbage, or even charbroiled meat or tobacco. In the United States, a national snapshot of air quality shows improvement for almost every kind of pollution—"with particularly dramatic declines in carbon monoxide, sulfur and lead. Between 1976 and 1997 levels of all six major pollutants decreased significantly, sulfur dioxide levels by 58 percent, nitrogen dioxides decreased 27 percent, ozone decreased 30 percent, carbon monoxide decreased 61 percent, and lead by 97 percent."31 But a new report published in 2004 by the National Research Council, while agreeing that significant progress has been made, particularly in the emissions that led to acid rain (mostly various sulfates), and while declaring that the Clean Air Act has actually achieved its purpose, nevertheless warned that "many areas are [still] not in compliance for ozone and particulate matter" and called on the national government to do more to cut emissions from older power plants, diesel trucks, and nonroad diesel engines.32 And the study did warn that more attention should be paid to the long-distance carriage of pollutants on the global winds.
Another interesting indicator of progress was a piece in Science questioning the notion of attempting to move to hydrogen-based fuels for cars, not because they are intrinsically a bad idea, but because "regulation-driven technological innovation has reduced emissions from gasoline-powered cars to the point where they have very low emissions per-unit-energy compared with other sectors and other transportation modes. This trend will continue, reducing the benefit of zero-emission hydrogen vehicles, particularly because many technologies (e.g., electric drive) can be used on both platforms."33 Despite these reservations, Iceland opened the world's first hydrogen filling station for cars in April 2003, and has announced plans to become the first completely hydrogen-based economy, fossil-fuel-free, by midcentury And even the born-again former Hummer driver, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed an executive order mandating hydrogen filling stations for every twenty miles along California's network of state-owned freeways.
Big Oil, too, has lumbered cautiously onto the bandwagon. Shell's former boss thinks the Kyoto Protocol is crucial because it forces businesses to put their best and sharpest minds on the task of reducing carbon emissions. Exxon, a notorious scoffer about the "ludicrous junk science" of global warming, is actually investing huge sums in energy efficiency, geological sequestration, and other low-carbon