The Plastic Plan
Apologies in advance for another somewhat political entry.
Given the current state of everything, there is little hope that the easily available oil reserves won't be exploited until they are eshausted. There is also little hope that anything like the Kyoto protocol will prevent this from happening rather soon. For well-known reasons this is not good at all. So maybe those governments and institutions that care about the environment should try a different strategy: We could move forward with the exploitation of oil reserves, but instead of burning the oil and blowing all the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it could be bound in plastic.
I don't know how much energy is needed to convert oil into plastic, so this would have to be checked first. Also of course the plastic should not be burned itself. It should either be recycled or composted. Or it might be used for things that don't get thrown away quickly, like walls and streets.
As far as I know, the technology for recycling and composting plastic is already working well. The only thing that needs to be done then would be to set up such a system (on a very large scale) and massively support the production of the relevant kind of plastic.
This is the plastic plan. Does it make any sense?
Yes. This is SUCH a great plan. I may write about it in my paper. Do you mind? He he, ha ha.