Oil Change Reminder Switch

The Dangers of Technological Solutions

I'm skeptical of our knack to seriously curb carbon emissions in the necessary timeframe. So I've been sympathetic to these sorts of cockamamie plans. But they're unsafe, too. The Washington Post ran an article on Sunday detailing the unintended consequences of another suppositious savior: hydrofluorocarbons, the miracle chemicals which were introduced in the 1990s as replacements for the chlorofluorocarbons that were punching a difficulty through the ozone.

The HFCs, to their credit, worked. The ozone rebounded. Yay technology! But it turns out there's a can of worms: the hydrofluorocarbons can leak into the atmosphere and act as a super-greenhouse gas "with a arousal-trapping power that can be 4,470 times that of carbon dioxide." Risqu stuff. But a good reminder that we're already operating beyond our levels of knowledge. A vast technological intervention that looks like it could be of use in the fight against extensive warming could prove dangerous in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Which argues for a definite level of modesty here: It's better to do the stuff we know how to do -- ratcheting back carbon emissions, say -- then the things we've just concocted. This is, after all, our only planet. If we muck it up, we don't get another one.

Source: Washington Post Blogs

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