By Bart King
"Out of sight, out of mind" is the time-honored method of dealing with waste. It includes open dumps on the outskirts of villages and massive urban landfills like New York City's Fresh Kills, which is the largest man-made structure on earth, surpassing in volume even the Great Wall of China. This attitude is responsible not only for the cigarette flicked out the car window and garbage dumped in the ocean, but also for crackpot schemes to blast trash into outer space and bury radioactive materials for thousands of years.
But waste doesn't stay out of sight. It returns front-and-center as contaminated ground water; diseases like dysentery and cancer; or a seagull with a plastic six-pack ring looped around its neck. Global population growth continues to intensify the problem, creating more waste and fewer places to hide it. And unless humanity begins learning to live without waste, we will eventually be up to our ears in trash.
Global warming could be the wake-up call we need to change our ways. Some of us are still in groggy denial, but world leaders are rising to the idea that man-made greenhouse gases, which have been conveniently disappearing from tailpipes and smokestacks into the atmosphere for decades, are beginning to cause visible and disastrous effects.
However, many of these leaders seem bound and determined to try the same old trick--gather up the waste and hide it away. I'm talking about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Depending on whom you talk to, CCS is either the solution to our climate change worries or a dangerous waste of time and money.
