Chemistry of Energy and Global Warming

Before i get on topic - today is a snow day - there is an inch on the ground here, rare for southern oregon for snow to stick. On Tuesday, we were talking about the mid 50 degree weather and fooling the buds and flowers into appearing a bit early.

Climate change is a strange euphemism for messing with kulcha. The blatant harvest of energy from raw materials with a total disregard for final form is a root problems that gets handwaving from the people that do it because it is not profitable to change the form into something useful. Coal to electricity takes carbon from elemental form (0) to carbon dioxide (+4) output - a change from a very useful, energy storing middle of the range to the dead end outlying oxidized state. The government solution (which really does not want a solution, but have to do something because enuf people are worried) is to promote alternative energy via corn based ethanol. This takes carbon from useful partially reduced (-2) form to carbon dioxide (+4) output - a change from a very useful, energy storing middle of the range to the dead end outlying oxidized state. Methane carbon (-4) is the other end of the range from carbon dioxide.

The rate of environmental respiration on earth is really governed by the net of the activities of all living and breathing things. These have to be balanced of the photsynthetic energy harvest of organic scaffolding and the anaerobic activity of internal metabolism. I hypothesize that we are missing something in our accounting of energy through the forces of physics and logic that is fundamental to the explanation of what governs life on earth. Chemistry as a tool has been commonly accepted due to the predictive abilities of synthetic organic chemists - who have created a very direct pattern of building bonds and correllating the products with nature. Tools for illucidating chemical structure, spectroscopy and chromatography, have been developed to the point where we could begin the search for better understanding - but it wouldn't generate any immediate business profit. Cept for big pharma and big ag and y'know how scary that is.

Anyhow - the linking of oxidation with reduction in chemistry is like the linking of two sides of a coin. But each transfer of electrons comes with the change of other electrons in their energy wells. The ground state is most stable for each atom - but energy changes are handled by the rearrangement of orbitals and electron sharing to allow more energetic stable states - wells in the climb up the energy hill. There is really no crisis in energy generation, it's a storage problem. The solutions is not in organic fuel sources but in inorganic fuel storage capacity. That is why the hydrogen car has more potential than ethanol, IMHO.