One of the technologies that is a politically popular solution to global warming is called carbon sequestration. The idea is to collect exhaust gases from major carbon dioxide emitters and pump it back into massive caverns underground.

That has some attraction to supporters of fossil fuels who are concerned about global warming. With this technology, they claim you can have your cake and eat it too. Get massive amounts of energy from massive amounts of fuel, and then bury the emissions from burning it.

Try an experiment on your car or truck. With your truck running, put a plastic bag over the tailpipe. See how quickly it is filled with emissions. While as much as 80% will be unchanged nitrogen that was taken in, about a fifth will be carbon dioxide, and the rest rather noxious chemical products such as nitrous oxide and hydrocarbon derivatives.

It takes 14 parts air to 1 part gasoline to have clean combustion. Coal plants require approximentally 60 parts air to 1 part coal to burn cleanly. Coal has about 4 times more carbon needing to bond together to release the energy contained in its hydrogen. Think about the size exhaust pipe your truck would have to have if it burned coal. And they want to store that all from going back into the atmosphere.

Undoubtly, scientists will find ways to seperate nitrogen in emissions from more harmful gases, and that will make it a little easier to store. That seperation process will not be easy and will require a lot of energy. Not to mention the energy required to collect, compress, and pump those emissions underground once again.

That energy comes from burning more coal and oil. That releases more carbon emissions that have to either be emitted or stored. Some estimates suggest that it might take as much as a quarter to half the energy produced by a carbon sequestoring power plant to sequestor the carbon dioxide.

There has to be a better way then wasting fossil fuels to sequester carbon dioxide. We can conserve energy. We can produce more energy locally and look to emissions free renewables. We can burn lower carbon fuels like oil and natural gas. None of those will switch off the massive amounts of carbon dioxide we are releasing into the atmosphere every day, but they can help reduce our emissions.