You Need To Stop Pooping To Help Solve ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

Warmists actually sit around and think about this stuff, debate it, investigate it (with taxpayer money, because almost no one else will fund it), and write about it

THE WATER IN YOUR TOILET COULD FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE ONE DAY

DAY AFTER DAY, you pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, whether you’re driving or turning on lights or eating meat. You can’t help it, because, really, no human can. But I bet you haven’t stopped to think about how the simple act of pooping is also part of the problem: Worldwide, wastewater treatment facilities account for 3 percent of electricity consumption and contribute 1.6 percent of emissions.

A drop in the horrifying bucket that is climate change, you might say. But researchers are beginning to explore how we might tweak wastewater treatment technology to capture CO2 instead of emitting it, as a way to slow the ravages of climate change. If their plan works out, at least our poop can be guilt-free.

Currently, the stuff you flush in the toilet or send down the drain ends up in a facility, along with liquid waste from industries like beer or wine making. All that organic matter sits in open-air tanks where microbes feed on it. They munch on the waste and release CO2 as a byproduct, and the facility then pumps the relatively clean (but far from drinkable) water out to sea.

On its own, a person’s poop is carbon neutral (save for emissions from growing and transporting food): Plants capture carbon from the air by way of photosynthesis, you eat the plants, you produce the carbon as waste. When those microbes eat that waste and release the CO2 back to the atmosphere, it ends up right where it started.

Except that the wastewater treatment facilities need energy to operate. There might be a way to tweak this process, however. Some microbes, like bacteria and microalgae, feed on CO₂ itself. “They would eat up the organic carbon and then convert the CO₂ into chemicals, for example ethanol,” says Princeton University environmental engineer Zhiyong Jason Ren, who co-authored a recent Nature review of potential carbon capture techniques in wastewater treatment. So one potential fix would be to replace the typical microbes used in wastewater treatment with these CO₂-guzzlers. “You treat wastewater but also you reduce CO₂into something more valuable.”

Valuable like????? The only thing mentioned is ethanol. Better yet, you could just stop pooping.

This focus on a new marketable product is intentional, to circumvent the biggest hurdle to carbon capture in all its forms: It’s just not profitable. A corporation has no incentive to, say, plant forests or install a carbon-sucking device on its premises if doing so only hurts its finances. Making carbon capture technologies take off will either require legislation to mandate them, a new business opportunity, or both.

Funny how government force always comes into play. And this article continues to go on and on, ending with

Let’s leave it at this: It wouldn’t be the worst thing if our poop helped scrub the atmosphere. It might even be just the place to start.