The Utility of Light: Getting Real with the Existing Energy Infrastructure.

Warning: Spoiler dead ahead!

He starts this post with Joni Mitchell, rambles for a couple thousand words and surprises with:

"Over the last several years I have been visiting a book in a certain library near here. The name of the book is Carbon Dioxide Chemistry: Environmental Issues. (Ed. Jan Paul Pradier and Claire Marie Pradier, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 1994.) Here you can read about the thermodynamics of the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to give methanol, for instance and discover that the Gibbs free energy of this reaction is - 9.1 kJ/mol, meaning that if you put a bunch of hydrogen and a bunch of carbon dioxide in a vessel and went away for a long time, maybe a few million years, when you came back, most of the carbon dioxide would be converted to methanol. If you don't want to wait for millions of years, you can add a catalyst, say one containing ruthenium supported on a mixture lanthanum oxide and nickel.

Don't do this at home. It generates a lot of heat, this reaction, and you might start a fire."
(about halfway down the page)

At the bottom of the page is a poll. If you wish start in the middle, read to bottom, take poll.

Or not. From DailyKos

Poll

Is this diary techno babble?

	I hate it when jet setting executives like to pretend they have special insights. They're such assholes.
	NNadir is a liar and this diary is not techno babble.
	NNadir is a liar and apparently he is too stupid to know the difference between methanol and DME.
	NNadir you have failed to give the free energy of various intermediates in carbon dioxide reduction.
	This diary would have benefitted from a broader discussion of electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide.
	I have a special technology for the prevention of carbonization of electrodes in electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide, but I'm not telling you because it's proprietary.
	The Japanese will not tell us about their sterically hindered ethanolamines for removing carbon dioxide. This is just like the time they wouldn't tell us how they made Godzilla.
	Exxon won't tell us how to remove carbon dioxide from waste streams because to do so would be to acknowledge climate change.
	Greenpeace.
	This diary fails to discuss the kinetic perfection of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase.
	RuBisCO is a crappy catalyst, and I can't believe that it is still in use in all living systems after billions of years.
	This diary is not techno babble. It's just babble.
	It sounds like it may be reasonable to use carbon dioxide separation technology for something other than sequestration.
	If King Kong had better RuBisCO, he would have gotten up the Empire State Building faster, well before the biplanes could get to him.
	Go away NNadir. You bother me.