How Can We Stop the CO2 That Plants Store from Leaking Back Into the Air?
One question for Eli Yablonovich, an applied physicist and professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the director emeritus of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science.
How can we stop the CO2 that plants store from leaking back into the air?
e’re putting a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. It’s very worrisome. We need to solve the problem. Some people think there is no solution, but in engineering, everything can be solved. To say there is. We can actually remove the old carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere 10, 20, 30 years ago. How do we do that? You grow plants, and plants pull the carbon dioxide out of the air. If you have enough plants, you’ll pull out more than what is generated every year. To cover the burning of petroleum and natural gas, it will take about an extra one-fifth of existing row crops—which are corn, wheat, rice, and things like that. It’s a totally carbon-negative solution. Carbon neutral is yesterday’s news.
