Some of Babylon’s buildings are stupefyingly impressive. Once the environmentalists’ lies switched from “global freezing” to the more solid sub-structure of “global warming”, millions of lost souls have flocked to their banner.
Funding opportunities seem endless. One of the latest, and most potentially profitable, lies concerns “the need to sequester carbon dioxide underground”. This, we are assured, will “stop global warming”. No mention is made of temperature cycles that follow solar output, which is the cause of “climate change”. Such facts get in the way of funding, so are dropped down the memory hole.
Pennsylvania environmentalists now want to use old coal mines “to sequester carbon dioxide”. No one knows how this will be done, but many grants will be granted to those who can come up with “ways to make the earth safe for future generations”.
Consider: It has been estimated that there are about 3.7 billion cubic miles of atmosphere. Carbon dioxide represents .03% of that, so there are about 111,000,000 cubic miles of carbon dioxide in the air.
To date, about 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) cubic yards of coal have been removed from Pennsylvania. Most of that was strip-mined, but lets be charitable to the environmentalists, and say that half of it was taken from deep mines, whose tunnels remain behind. So, there are a total of five billion cubic yards of mine space available to “sequester carbon dioxide” in underground mines. There are 5,451,776,000 cubic yards in a cubic mile, so, at best, there’s about 1.1 cubic miles of underground mine space available and 111,000,000 cubic miles of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
So, there is enough room for a little over 1/110,000,000 (one one hundred and ten millionth!) of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be stored in Pennsylvania’s unused mine tunnels. If it’s compressed, to hold maybe two or three ten millionths of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, it will leak out. Pennsylvania’s coal mine fires can’t be put out because air leaks in. The same thing would happen, in reverse, to compressed carbon dioxide.
It’s hard to imagine anyone saying “that’s a good idea!” with a straight face, and even harder to imagine that anyone could be that dumb. But, it is easy to imagine Pennsylvania politicians and environmentalists jumping on a crashing bandwagon.
