bemoreeco

We didn’t want to do this, but some of the green ideas we hear about merit special attention. So from now on we’re going to highlight the dumbest green idea of the week. Winning wont be easy, the competition this week has been particularly fierce. Here are the top three entries:

1) Wallace Broecker and his Giant Trees

BBC News reports that Wallace Broecker, the man who coined the term ‘global warming’ has finally found its solution. Why not plant giant artificial trees to pull CO2 from the air? He claims that 20m of these “Carbon Scrubbers” could capture all the CO2 produced in the US.

With just an investment of £303bn a year, 60m of these 50ft high artificial trees could absorb all of the CO2 produced worldwide.

2) The ASUS6 Bamboo Laptop

Abi at Hippyshopper (via Techdigest and Gizmodo) contributes to the debate with a not quite so green laptop from ASUS. You can read about the original idea here:

What began as an environmentally-friendly laptop with a bamboo casing, has become a powerful beast of a laptop with a strip of bamboo glued on top. You can see the remarkable transformation from the two images below.

3) Environmentally Friendly Bombs

This one comes in from Earth First (Via: Yahoo News). Not content with dropping bombs on hapless oil-dwellers, the USA has decided to reduce it’s bad-karma footprint with these environmentally-friendly bombs. Unlike those toxin-spewing, debris-spraying, bombs of the Vietnam/Iraq generation, these ones have these derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon like TNT and most other bombs do. In initial experiments, G2ZT and HBT produced fewer toxic byproducts than common explosives. Still, they did generate some dangerous hydrogen cyanide gas.

And the winner is: The ASUS6 Bamboo(less) Laptop

Yes, the environmentally-irrelevant laptop takes it. At least the environmentally friendly-bombs and giant artificial trees were unflinchingly stupid ideas. ASUS didn’t so much flinch as run and dive behind a giant rock in the face of possible fire regulations. There is a lesson to be learned here, don’t announce and reveal a prototype unless you’re fairly certain it’s not going to catch fire (bonus tip: wood burns). Have some before and after images:

What it was meant to be:

And what it became:

 

Other contenders included the Amsterdam cycle path, Carbon Ration Cards and Recycled Alien Tables.