We like to bury things we don’t know what to do with below the ground: garbage, toxic waste, nuclear waste, chemical waste and now carbon dioxide. 

Carbon capture and storage – often referred to as CCS – has been hailed in some quarters as the solution to climate change.  And why not?  The largest source of carbon dioxide emissions are fossil fuels, which are literally the remains of carbon-based life forms from ages and ages ago that are found underground.

So, if we can find a way to capture carbon dioxide emissions once they’ve been released, why not return the carbon from whence it came?

It’s a question that will be the focus of an upcoming conference in Washington, D.C., when scientists meet to discuss the latest research into CCS technologies.  The conference, taking place November 16 to 20, is a biennial event that was started in 1997.  It’s being organized by MIT and the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), with support from the U.S. Dept. of Energy. 

The viability of CCS technologies – both whether they can work and whether they can be deployed in time – is controversial.

Recently the IEA called on the Group of Eight industrialized nations to spend $20 billion over the next decade on CCS demonstration projects.  Although the G-8 countries agreed to build 20 large-scale demo projects by 2010 at a July meeting, the IEA has said that current investment levels fall far short of what’s needed to get there.

In fact, a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that slow-paced progress by the Energy Department and other agencies has “left critical gaps that impede our understanding” of the potential use of carbon capture and storage technologies.  Along with technological challenges, the report also concluded there are regulatory and legal hurdles that must be overcome. 

Some work, though, is underway.  Shell has just announced that it will begin a field test of carbon capture sequestration in Alberta, Canada, with support from the government’s Energy Research Institute. 

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the recent credit bailout included some $2.5 billion in tax incentives for the development of CCS.  And both presidential candidates have said they support field-testing the technology, which is key to the development of so-called clean coal.

The Dept. of Energy, however, backed out of its first major CCS project – FutureGen – in January, citing rising costs. The project was planned for Mattoon, Illinois.

So, it seems for the time being at least, that CCS is locked in a one-step forward, one-step back kind of hitch.  And even if it holds the promise its backers herald, it may be some time before we can solve our climate conundrum by burying our carbon waste underground.  

This is so HOT. 

And I almost missed it.  But I took a minute to visit SolveClimate, an excellent blog about climate change, earlier tonight and found a notice about the new PBS documentary “HEAT” just in time to tune in. 

The full program, which was produced by the Frontline producer Martin Smith, is available to watch for free on the PBS Web site. 

“I have reported on the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the rise of Al Qaeda, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Smith. “But nothing matches climate change in scope and severity.”

The report, split into four chapters, investigates how governments and major companies, such as Exxon Mobil and General Motors, are responding to the threat of climate change. 

It starts with a brief introduction about climate-change impacts that are already being witnessed, and then continues to China and India, where development is expected to send the world’s carbon dioxide emissions skyrocketing over the next few decades. 

And from there the central question has been posed: if developing countries currently plan on using coal and other fossil fuels to bring a higher living standard to their populations, what are developed countries doing to demonstrate another way?

To answer the question, Smith presses the auto and coal industries for information about their efforts to develop electric cars and “clean coal.”  Pairing the two industries was a wise journalistic choice. 

Besides the fact that cars and coal are the largest sources of CO2 emissions, by setting the two side-by-side Smith is also able to draw a comparison between the ways that cleaner technologies have been pursued by both industries.  At the same time, he is able to pull in how the United States government has contributed to these pursuits, or non-pursuits. 

What emerges is not a reassuring picture.

While the electric car actually made it to market, it was “killed” by the Big Three automakers, and the U.S. government failed to intervene.  And, though “clean coal” is dependent on the controversial process of storing CO2 below ground, the U.S. government has invested huge sums in its development. 

In fact, Smith gets David Ratcliffe, the CEO of the utility Southern Company, which is one of the world’s largest emitters, to admit:

“We haven’t even come close to defining what are the legal liabilities and what are the permitting requirements” for removing carbon from coal and sequestering it underground. 

Along with the full program, the Web site features individual interviews with many of the key players that weighed in during “Heat.”  T. Boone Pickens – the oil billionaire who has been much in the news as of late for his efforts to develop wind energy and snatch up water rights – is in the lineup.  New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner, and Jeffrey Sachs are also included, along with some 11 others. 

The Web site also provides information about how much venture capitalists are investing into various alternative energy sources (solar and biofuels are the big winners).  And there is a breakdown of the presidential candidates’ positions on climate change and energy policies.  

While the U.S. Congress has failed to pass legislation that would establish CO2 emissions reduction goals, individual states have been getting busy. 

According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, at least 31 states have created plans that outline climate-change “mitigation” goals.  The plans outline a mix of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, from forest restoration efforts to energy-efficiency improvements. 

Last week, the state of Florida became the latest to jump on this new climate-planning bandwagon.

Republican Governor Charlie Crist issued an executive order in 2007, which tasked the state’s Department of Environmental Protection with developing a plan to deal with climate change. The result – “Florida’s Energy and Climate Change Action Plan” – was released Oct. 15.

The plan outlines 50 recommendations that its makers calculate would reduce emissions 51 percent below 2005 levels, and 33 percent below 1990 levels.  The reductions would be accomplished by making changes in a number of sectors: energy supply and demand, agriculture, forestry, waste management, transportation and land use.

As opposed to costing the state money, the planners estimate the policies will save the state $28 billion between 2009 and 2025, an average net savings of $18 per ton of greenhouse gas emissions removed. 

Along with “mitigation” policies, Florida’s plan also addresses “adaptation” measures, which look at how to prepare the state for changes in climate that it may be too late to avoid.  According to the plan:

Adaptation represents a unique challenge for Florida. The product of the adaptation investigation is a comprehensive planning framework to guide Florida over the coming years and decades to manage climate impacts that Floridians will likely face regardless of the success of state, national, or international mitigation efforts. 

Adaptation was a controversial concept for many years in environmentalist circles, the fear being that if it received attention it could undermine efforts to gain support for mitigation policies.  Some believed it might prompt people to ask ‘why change if we can adapt?’

The tide is now turning, however, as policymakers and officials are starting to worry about how climate change could impact sea level, water resources, and storm frequency, among other things. 

Florida, in particular, is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and higher storm surges. 

Wrapping Greenland in a giant blanket, putting trillions of lenses in space to deflect the sun’s rays, using seed-bombs to replenish forests – these are just a few of the wild ideas examined in the new series “Discovery Project Earth.”

The series, which launched on the Discovery Channel in late August, looks at possible technology fixes for our current climate woes. 

Unfortunately, the last episode aired on September 19. But you can still learn all about these ideas through an interactive Web project that was created as a complement to the series. 

Videos about each of the fixes are featured there. But there’s also a very cool section where you can read a “lab book” for each of the ideas, and learn about how they are being tested.  In addition, there are interactive timelines and graphics to explore. 

And, perhaps most cool of all, there’s a game called “Global Protection Squad” that lets you play the crazy scientist trying to save the world with a big idea.   

Not all of the ideas covered are brand-new per se.  In fact, scientists have long talked about putting something into the stratosphere to block the sun’s radiation.  The idea came into vogue after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 sent clouds of aerosols skyward, lowering global temperatures by almost a degree. 

Of course, there are plenty of concerns about these kinds of climate interventions, often referred to as “geoengineering.” As just one example, see a study published in the journal Science in May linking aerosol-injection schemes to the depletion of the ozone layer:  

The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion to Proposed Geoengineering Schemes
By Simone Tilmes,^1* Rolf Müller,² Ross Salawitch^{3
“The large burden of sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth and enhanced the destruction of polar ozone in the subsequent few years. The continuous injection of sulfur into the stratosphere has been suggested as a “geoengineering” scheme to counteract global warming. We use an empirical relationship between ozone depletion and chlorine activation to estimate how this approach might influence polar ozone. An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO₂ would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.”}

Still others have worried that even talking about some kind of engineering solution for global warming is dangerous. The thought is that if people believe we can innovate our way out of this climate conundrum, they won’t think it’s necessary to put an end to our reliance on oil and coal as energy sources. 

Given our current failure to uncouple development from increasing CO2 emissions, though, powerful technological fixes may begin to gain more and more currency.

In fact, the Royal Society dedicated a special edition of its “Philosophical Transactions” to the topic of geoengineering in September. At the same time, it announced that it would launch a major new study of such technologies this fall.