Synthetic Tree Way Better Than God's Trees

Katherine Mangu-Ward | June 23, 2009

While it lacks the aesthetic appeal and archetypal significance of its natural rival, this "synthetic tree" is 1,000 times faster at carbon capture than the real thing:

As the wind blows though plastic "leaves," the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide.

The technology is similar to that used to capture carbon from flue stacks at coal-fired power plants, but the difference is that the "synthetic tree" can catch carbon anytime, anywhere.

The artificial tree's designer, Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, told CNN he'd pit his "tree" against a windmill, too—thus spitting in the face of God and man.

"If you give me one of those big windmills which have those big areas through which the rotor moves—how much CO2 can I avoid? And if I had an equally sized CO2 collector—how much CO2 can I collect? It turns out the collector is several hundred times better than the windmill."