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.