Carbon Dioxide

The drillers have gnawed through a mile of rock here, almost down to a 600-million-year-old layer of sandstone where they hope to bury about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to the annual emissions of 220,000 automobiles. The $84-million project, of which $66.7 million comes from the Energy Department, will help determine whether storing greenhouse gases underground, so-called sequestration, is a viable solution for global warming. The project by Archer Daniels Midland Co.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set tonight to announce a groundbreaking agreement by California's biggest timber firm to begin marketing its vast forests as a weapon in the fight against global warming. The announcement comes less than a week after the Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules that allow Sierra Pacific Industries to sell its trees' ability to absorb harmful carbon dioxide from the air. Environmental groups immediately raised questions about the timing, so soon after the administration pressed the California Air Resources Board to approve the new protocols.

Soldiers here fired off 12 million pieces of mortar, rifle and artillery ammunition on the training range last year, exercises the Army now knows generated 58.8 tons of carbon dioxide. This post south of Colorado Springs is the first in the Army to begin tracking greenhouse gases emitted by its barracks, tanks and training activities. The next step: cutting emissions by nearly a third. "What we're doing at Ft. Carson is the first deliberate effort to calculate our carbon 'bootprint' and do it in a way that's based on real data," said Tad Davis, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for environment, safety and occupational health.

Washington politics has played a key role in both the nation's rush toward coal-fired energy and the current pullbacks and delays. During his 2000 run for the White House, George W. Bush promised to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, curbing emissions that contribute to climate change. But he reversed course shortly after taking office in 2001, saying that Vice President Dick Cheney's energy policy task force had advised against it.

UCLA scientists have synthesized a new class of sponge-like crystals that can soak up carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas in industrial emissions. The crystals -- zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs -- are grids of metal atoms and organic molecules that loosely trap carbon dioxide as it drifts into microscopic pores. The researchers believe that atomic charges hold the gas in place.

Giving another boost to its U.S. operations, Occidental Petroleum Corp. said Monday that it would build a $1.1-billion plant and pipeline in West Texas to handle carbon dioxide that would increase the oil company's production in the region. The deal with Oklahoma City-based SandRidge Energy Inc. would increase Occidental's oil and natural gas production in the multistate Permian Basin by the equivalent of at least 50,000 barrels of oil a day within five years.

The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday. The new numbers, which some scientists called "scary," were a surprise because experts thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007.

When Doug Gronau looks out the window of his Iowa farmhouse, he sees a profitable investment in the effort to stop global warming. Most people see cornfields. His cropland, which he is prohibited from tilling, is a greenhouse gas credit, packaged and sold on the Chicago Climate Exchange. An anonymous trader snapped up the field's ability to absorb carbon dioxide to offset -- on paper -- a tiny portion of the carbon dioxide emitted by some distant factory. Gronau, 57, expects a check for $2,800.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, a draft White House report was leaked to news outlets. The report, a year overdue to the United Nations, said that the United States would be producing almost 20% more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it had in 2000 and that our contribution to global warming would be going steadily up, not sharply and steadily down, as scientists have made clear it must.

Economists, some environmentalists and a growing gaggle of politicians are pushing a grand strategy that a market mechanism -- known as "carbon cap and trade" -- can rescue us fastest from a climate catastrophe. But early evidence suggests that such a scheme may be a Faustian bargain. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the chief proponents of the market view.