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Letter of support email sent to Climeworks
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Clifford J Thompson
to Climeworks
Thank You for Climeworks!
Dear Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher,
I'm currently living in Silicon Valley, California but because my family were Kaiser International engineers, growing up I ended up in Fribourg, Switzerland from 1964-7 attending and graduating from the Villa St. Jean École Internationale, whose alumni I'm still in touch with thanks to our (unfortunately closed) Facebook Group (attached print screen), where we share all things Swiss and I just share-posted about the Swissinfo story "The world’s first Swiss CO2 washing machine".
When Al Gore 1st started showing "An Inconvenient Truth" here, & after the show us theatergoers were left wondering how changing light bulbs & reducing tire air pressure was really going to take out current continuous global CO₂ emissions, let alone back out that from the Industrial Revolution, as a concerned citizen with an engineering background, I kept my eyes peeled for any seemingly more realistic effective solution, many of which began to appear on various non-exclusively-entertainment-focused television stations such as National Geographic, Science/Discovery Channels, Public Broadcasting Service, etc., many of which "solutions" seemed, frankly, harebrained & even more potentially disastrous in terms of consequential runaway ecological response impact (giant orbiting sunglasses, vast oceanic algae blooms & the like). Only one solution emerged that appeared sensible, straightforward and safe, that being the direct air capture technique then being proposed by Columbia University geophysicist Klaus Lackner, inspired by the work of his 12-year-old daughter for an 8th grade Science Fair CO₂ Air Capture Project, which Klaus evolved into a "synthetic tree". Then Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched "Climate CoLab", a call for CO₂ mitigation proposals, so I wrote one up recommending Klaus' tech and submitted it to MIT, as well as forwarded copies to the White House/President Obama/Energy Secretary Chu, Stanford University & several United Nations CO₂ summits including Paris Cop21, in the process creating a simple website to log and track the effort. The proposal aims to remove all human-added CO₂, about 600-900 Gigatons from the Industrial Revolution to the present, using a forest of Lackner's shipping container sized synthetic trees, each tree pulling 90 Kilotons of CO₂ per year, requiring a forest of 10 - 1 million to do the job in 1 - 10 years, according to my rough calculations using the best figures I could find at the time. I'm submitting this information to you because my Facebook post included a link to your YouTube interview "Climeworks - Capturing CO2 from air" in which you allude to larger scale Climeworks machines putting an increasingly significant percentage dent in the removal of total global excess CO₂, & so thought sharing my proposal might serve to inspire and encourage your efforts &, I hold out the hope, may one day lead to a scaling up of the tech resulting in total excess removal and atmospheric re-normalization. Following are links to the proposal and its components:
● MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Climate CoLab proposal "End Global Warming & Climate Change Now"
● Proposal project website: "End Climate Change Now"
●● Overview (video): "Stunningly, the core technology was worked out by a 12 year girl for her 8th grade (prize winning) Science Fair Project"
●● Supplemental: “The Coming 'Perfect Storm' of Natural Disasters”
Again, deepest thanks for your Climeworks - with our current US disastrous political situation, capstoned by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, I feel I must paraphrase a famous line from Star Wars - "Help Us, Altruistic Switzerland, You're Our Only Hope".
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Sincerely (& another Star Wars line, "May The Force Be With You(r efforts)",
Cliff Thompson
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