Let's solve the problem

Hillary Clinton wants to give $100B a year to developing countries to compensate them for 'our contribution to the carbon dioxide problem'.

Wait a minute! For the kind of money, why don't we just extract all of the industrial carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? There is about 3 trillion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, with about 35% of it added during the industrial age -- so let's extract 665 gigatons of CO2 out atmosphere. 2050 seems to be our event horizon by which we must solve the problem or die, so let's take 40 years (from about the time this was written) to extract all 665 gigatons of industrial CO2, or about 17 gigatons per year.

It takes about 100 KW-hour to extract 1 ton of CO2 out the atmosphere. My retail residential electricity is about US $0.12 per KW-hour. A nuclear reactor costs about $3500/KW to build, and a Hyperion Power nuclear power module costs about $2000/KW -- converting that to KW-hours over the 7 year lifetime of the module gives me US $0.033 dollar/KW-hour. Now we're talking. This works out to be less than US $55B a year to extract all of the CO2 emitted during the industrial age.

Now that we've extract the CO2, now we need to break it down. In the presence of an iridium catalyst and 800 degrees C, CO2 pyrolizes to carbon and oxygen in an exothermic reaction -- that is, once you start it the process is self-sustaining.

If we're spending money, we can also produce hydrogen from water. That will raise the price from US $55B/year, but hey, we just spent a trillion on corrupt banks and politicians, so what's a few billion more? In the Bosch reaction, we can reduce the CO2 and hydrogen to carbon and water using an iron catalyst in another exothermic reaction. Or using the Sabatier reaction we can transform the CO2 and hydrogen to methane and water, but that leaves us with the problem of what to with the methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and burning it just produces the CO2 again.

Now the next question, is whether we really want to extract all of the "industrial" CO2 from the atmosphere. In Earth's ancient past as recently as 49M years ago, the atmosphere contained 4x to 7x the amount of CO2 today. Turtles and lizards cavorted at the poles. Something natural happened then to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere to plunge the Earth into ice age conditions. Where did that CO2 go? Is it lurking somewhere in the carbon cycle to pop out and cause real greenhouse conditions again? Are we so sure that the 35% increase in CO2 we've measured is due to the industrial age?

According to the Minkowski cycles we're due for another ice age in the next millenia. Will extracting the CO2 trigger the next ice age?