Can bad fashion save the icecaps?
With rapid melting in the Arctic, and potential glacial
instability in Antarctica. the planet’s
present cryosphere is in a spot of bother. The root cause of this is warming
from the heat trapped by greenhouse gasses, mostly CO2. But while many
suggestions have been made for reducing CO2 output, as yet there are relatively
few mothods for capturing those emissions which are still occurring. And with
international agreements lacking enforcement mechanisms, a new push for Coal in
the US,
and decades of record rates of emissions growths, humanity clearly needs
someone to police the worlds emissions. And we don’t need any old police. We
need fashion police.
Although many proposals have been made for finding ways to
prevent our hunger for fossil fuels from ruining the atmosphere, not nearly
enough of these strategies have included the use of tacky clothing. And yet,
the potential for horrific fashion statements to save the world should not be
underestimated. The reason for this is that ultimately, the easiest way to
scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to react it with an alkali or
alkali earth oxide, thereby forming a carbonate
mineral. While silicate weathering will do this naturally over a
50-100kA timescale, we can’t really afford to wait that long. Roasting
carbonates obviously won’t accomplish anything, since that simply makes the
alkali oxides available by releasing CO2. However, there are alternatives.
One way to generate an effective carbon dioxide scrubber is
to split salt (from ocean water) into its component sodium and chlorine. The
sodium will rapidly (on a geologic timescale) oxidize, hydrate, and carbonate,
forming NaHCO3. This should be reasonably effective, so long as we can
sequester the chlorine that is produced as a byproduct. And here is where the
tacky clothes come in. During the latter part of the 20th century, outrageous
costumes were constructed out of the polymer polyvinyl chloride. If we can
simply manufacture enough disco pats, fake leather jackets, and not-so-Sunday
dresses, that will sequester the chlorine from salt electrolysis in the world’s
wardrobes, so that the sodium can be used for atmospheric CO2 drawdown.
Doing a bit of math here, with annual emissions of about 29
billion tons of CO2, we will need about 15 billion tons of Na to scrub our
emissions. This requires approximately 55 billion tons of PVC to store the
chlorine left over from the salt decomposition (powering the electrolysis is
left as an exercise for the reader). Luckily, due to the large world
population, this works out to only about 8 tons of PVC per person per year, or
about 21 kg of PVC per day.
None of the PVC outfits I can find for sale on the internet
at this hour appear to contain 21 kg of material. They are generally a little
bit flimsier than that. And even with a new steampunk, burlesque, gothic, and
disco outfit every day for every man, woman, and child on Earth, we are still
looking to be short by a factor of 50. Buying 21 kg of new PVC outfits a day
would necessitate a costume change every 7 minutes. Luckily, there are other
things which PVC can be made into.
For example, the credit cards used to purchase PVC outfits
by people too brazen to stoop to cash are made of PVC. And while they only
weigh a few grams each, most people do have a few. Similarly, the music to which
PVC clad people traditionally dance comes from an archaic form of grooved PVC
platter known as a “record”. Buying 140 LP records a day will put all of the
world’s citizens at their PVC quota without having to wear anything at all.
So fear not, reader. There is hope. with enough old time
music and garish clothing, anything is possible.
