Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wise plant adds to life cycle
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Pete Sarjeant
Sarjeant is retired from Westvaco and moved recently to Bedford.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (whomever this may be) is appealing and trying to obstruct the state board's permits for the Dominion VA Power plant in Wise County by citing a failure to meet Clean Air Act requirements, namely providing for means to capture the carbon dioxide pollution.
This suit is pure nonsense and hopefully will be thrown out of court as facetious and without merit. As well, it disregards the economic benefits this new electric generating plant will provide and is pure hokum. It demonstrates a complete lack of any scientific analysis.
Let me explain basic biochemistry: Carbon dioxide is a normal, very low component of air (about 1,400 ppm by weight). Dry air is composed mainly of nitrogen -- 79 percent and oxygen 20 percent -- with small amounts of inert gases such as argon. Water vapor in moist air can take up as much as 10 percent of the weight of wet, humid air.
Both CO2 and water vapor have the property of reflecting and retaining heat. Hence the moniker greenhouse gas.
Plants, shrubs grasses and trees require CO2 for life. They absorb it along with water and chemically split the oxygen out of CO2 and expel it, freshening the air with O2. The carbon then combines with the water to produce wood. A 40-foot tree just standing there has 2 tons of water in it and 2 tons of dry wood (cellulose, a carbohydrate) which has almost a ton of carbon in it, all collected from the very small proportion of CO2 it finds in the air with its leaves.
Carbon dioxide also is absorbed in all our lakes, rivers and the oceans to help produce all the shells of clams, snails and oysters, etc., using minute amounts of calcium chloride. Amazing! So who cares if there is more CO2 getting into the air? Plants and snails love it.
Animals, fungi and people on the other hand must have the oxygen in air to survive. We burn the carbohydrates (sugars) in our blood to convert them to energy and, you guessed it, CO2. But any extra CO2 in the air is rapidly picked up by the plants and trees. That is why its concentration is so low and why we must protect our vegetation.
So CO2 is not a pollutant and moreover is necessary for life as we know it. CO2 goes into the trees and is converted to the oxygen which we breathe. We exhale CO2 which goes back to produce more wood, etc., in a complete and seemingly endless cycle.
So why do we have these ignorami in the so-called Environmental Law Center trying to stop the cycle of life?
Well, I am thinking they know not what they are doing and are not troubled to find out what life is really all about.
They are anti-life.
