Environmental News Analysis

Environmental News Analysis

I choose an article titled “Forget Putting CO2 Under Rock- Let’s Turn It ‘Into’ Rock”. This article talks about a process that can turn CO2 into a solid and that this process will help with the pollution that CO2 causes. The author mainly focuses on the work Columbia University is doing on this process. From the headline of this article reader might get a sense that this is an opinion piece. The words “let’s turn into rock” sounds like that is the authors opinion. After reading it however the reader can tell it is not an opinion because the author never gives her personal view. In that sense the headline is a little misleading. Also CO2 might be confusing to some people who don’t recognize it as a chemical symbol, and might not know what CO2 is. The article opens and talks about how to deal with carbon emissions. It suggests one way to deal with it and that is putting it underground, and that would be a good way to clean up the carbon mess. The author starting with this tells me this is most important to the article that carbon emissions is a problem and there are ways to deal with it.

One disappointing thing about this article is that it is very short. There is a good amount of information given, but I would of liked to see more. This issue seems like a very serious issue but not much time is given to it in this particular article. There is a picture that goes along with this article and that is of a unnamed power plant with a ton of smoke coming out of it. I think this was done to show how much pollution carbon emissions cause.

To me the author seemed to be objective in her article. She didn’t seem to be taking sides in any way. She simple told what is being done to try to deal with carbon emissions. I do have several other criticisms when it comes to this article however. One is the lack of statistics and experts. She says that “Columbia University geochemists Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter calculated that a single rock formation in Oman could store up to 10 percent of all human-generated carbon emitted in a year.” She also tells about how the process works on how to turn the carbon into a solid. She also talks about how a project in Iceland plans to inject carbon dioxide–infused groundwater into volcanic basalt about 1,800 feet underground. These are the only two instances she talks about. I would have liked to see maybe more instances of this process being done and more facts that show that this process actually works. The article also lacks a opposing view. The article doesn’t state any opposition saying something like it doesn’t work or there are better ways to get rid of carbon emissions. The article ends with the author saying that “Scientists from Columbia and elsewhere will monitor the project to see if this approach could expand to handle the 28 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide humans emit each year.” I think this ends the article well because it gives the reader a reason to keep updated on the story because it is still ongoing.

Overall I give this article a grade of a C. Positives are the author was objective and ended the article well. The negatives are that the article is very short and does not give enough statistics or experts facts.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/dec/10-forget-putting-co2-under-rock-let.s-turn-it-into-rock

First blog

This is my first blog.