Computer-rendered image of Climeworks’ Mammoth direct air capture plant.

I’ve got this really brilliant idea.

No, wait – hear me out.

Let’s suck all of the carbon out of the atmosphere so all plant life on earth dies.

Reuters:

The world is failing to cut carbon emissions fast enough to avoid disastrous climate change, a dawning truth that is giving life to a technology that for years has been marginal – pulling carbon dioxide from the air.

Leading the charge, the U.S. government has offered $3.5 billion in grants to build the factories that will capture and permanently store the gas – the largest such effort globally to help halt climate change through Direct Air Capture (DAC) and expanded a tax credit to $180/tonne to bolster the burgeoning technology.

The sums involved dwarf funding available in other regions, such as Britain which has pledged up to 100 million pounds ($124 million) for DAC research and development. That compares with $12 billion in federal spending to drive demand for personal and commercial electric vehicles, Boston Consulting Group estimated.

While bids for the U.S. DAC hub funding were due on March 13, the government and some companies have yet to fully disclose details about the applications, many of which Reuters is reporting for the first time. The Energy Department expects to announce winning bids this summer.

Worsening climate change and inadequate efforts to cut emissions have thrust the issue known as carbon removal to the top of the agenda, and U.N. scientists now estimate billions of tonnes of carbon will need to be sucked out of the atmosphere annually to reach a goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

While much of that will come from natural solutions such as planting more trees or increasing the ability of soil to sequester carbon, permanent carbon removal like DAC will also be needed.

Have they considered planting MORE “more trees”?

Yet the list of hurdles is long.

The biggest plant to-date is capturing only 4,000 tonnes a year and costs are high, the talent pool is fledgling and corporate buyers for the credits largely remain on the sidelines. The role of oil companies in the space has also raised eyebrows and developers must muster support for hubs from communities that have often been damaged by big energy projects.

Plus, the CO2 must be stored permanently.

The U.S. government has said it wants to back four hubs, and interviews with more than 20 state, federal, company and investor sources show at least nine applications have been filed in a first round, with two major Occidental Petroleum (OXY.N) projects also seen as strong contenders.

Most DAC processes use a liquid or solid that is engineered to naturally soak up carbon dioxide, then heated or treated to extract the carbon to be put underground.

But the energy to run the process, the factories, pipelines and storage is expensive. The jury is still out on whether it can be deployed at a scale big enough to affect the climate, at a cost the world can bear.

This is an absolute crime against the earth itself, and it is not something that is just going to destroy America.

The world needs to come together and destroy America.

And Israel. 

A piece of equipment called a distributor used to hold trays of limestone for capturing carbon is seen at the Heirloom Carbon Technologies facility in Brisbane, California.

“You cannot avoid me forever, human.”

I’ve heard vegans say that animal foods should be avoided in a healthy diet because animals accumulate toxins. But plants also accumulate toxins.

Daily Mail:

Plants can absorb tiny pieces of plastic through their roots that stunt their growth and simultaneously reduce their nutritional value, a study has found.

The findings from experts from the US and China are the first to provide direct evidence that nanoscale plastic particles can accumulate within land plants.

Widespread use of plastic products and the material’s ability to persist in the environment has resulted in an ‘enormous’ amount of pollution, the team said.

Existing research into the impacts of micro- and nanoplastics have mainly focused on their impact on marine ecosystems and, from their, on seafood.

Additional studies will be needed, the researchers said, to assess the extent of the impact these pollutants are having on both the yield of food crops and their safety.

This study shows that plants can accumulate tiny plastic particles, and plastic is known to mess with people’s hormones. Specifically, plastic is known to increase estrogen in men and decrease testosterone.

When you add that to the fact that most plants have natural estrogen-promoting substances in them that are recommended to post-menopause women who don’t produce the levels of estrogen that they produced in their youth, a lot about vegans’ appearance is explained.

Medical News Today:

Phytoestrogens may be beneficial for women looking to rebalance their hormones as they approach menopause.

During perimenopause, which is the period before a woman reaches menopause and stops menstruating, the hormone levels in her body will fluctuate and cause a variety of symptoms.

Perimenopause usually starts in a woman’s 40s and lasts until menopause. Symptoms of perimenopause include:

hot flashes
tender breasts
low sex drive
tiredness
irregular periods
mood swings

These symptoms can be unpleasant, and some women use hormone replacement therapy to help control them.

Phytoestrogens offer a natural alternative to the synthetic estrogen used in hormone replacement therapies.

When people stop eating animal foods, they normally increase their intake of plant foods. Eating more plants to try to get enough protein and nutrients increases exposure to these plastics and phytoestrogens.

Until plastics stop polluting the environment and getting in our foods, we should try to limit our exposure to it as much as we can. Getting your protein from meat and eggs is likely to result in a much more healthy hormonal system than trying to get it exclusively from plants even if the animal had to eat these plastic plants, because you eat much less volume of food overall.

The whole “ethical veganism” thing revolves around the fact that so-called ethical vegans want to avoid inflicting pain on living creatures.

Now we know for a fact that plants feel pain and are literally screaming in ultrasonic agony when they’re hurt.

Daily Mail:

A team of scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered that some plants emit a high frequency distress sound when they undergo environmental stress.

The researchers tested tomato plants and tobacco plants by depriving them of water and by cutting their stems and then recording their response with a microphone placed ten centimeters away.

In both cases, they found the plants began to emit ultrasonic sounds between 20 and 100 kilohertz, which they believed could convey their distress to other plants and organisms in the immediate vicinity.

…

The plants also seemed to respond with different intensities of sound to different sources of stress.

The poor little green things are literally screaming for help, trying to get their plant friends to help them or do something — anything — to alleviate their ultrasonically excruciating pain.

The plant is clearly suffering.

Not being able to notice the Plant Holocaust doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening.

‘These findings can alter the way we think about the plant kingdom, which has been considered to be almost silent until now,’ the group wrote in a paper summarizing their findings. (The paper was not peer reviewed.)

The researchers used the data they had gathered in a machine learning model to predict the different frequency of sound plants might emit under other conditions, such as during wind or intense rain.

The team believes that listening for different types of sound emitted by plants could help with precision agriculture and allow farmers to identify potential problems with the crops with less guess work.

Last year, another study found that some plants registered ‘pain’ after having their leaves plucked or even touched, which caused the release of a foul tasting chemical across their leaves, believed to ward off insects.

“Humans” truly are evil creatures. The moment they discover that plants scream in painful desperation, they start thinking of ways to leverage those cries for help for financial gain.

But the real victims here aren’t the suffering plants but the starving vegans who will starve even more.

Every vegan who eats a vegan diet “to save the animals” has a moral duty now to also save the plants, so the only things that they should be eating are the fruits that naturally fall from trees and bushes without human intervention.

Just as the reason we need hate speech laws is that people aren’t supposed to say things that make someone else uncomfortable, the reason everyone needs to go vegan is that people aren’t supposed to make their food uncomfortable.

The fact that children instinctively know this without needing their parents to tell them is proof of the need to invert the natural order and let kids rule over adults.