I just finished last year's "green" bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman, and I gotta tell you, I'm not optimistic about preventing this planet from beoming a seething oven by 2050. My grandkids are gonna need an awful lot of sunscreen, and probably filtration masks.
Short of someone miraculously inventing flying trees, which--running on nothing but water vapor--convert carbon dioxide into oxygen faster than we can pump it into the atmosphere, the planet is screwed. By my calculations, to offset current CO2 emissions we would need about 100 billion of these flying trees, we need them five years ago, and they need to convert CO2 into oxygen a whole lot faster than ordinary trees. Even if the technology existed, which it doesn't, what company can be trusted to build 100 billion flying trees? What country can be trusted to launch them?
