Our own Sangwon Suh is featured in UCSB's The Current!
With global emissions continuing unabated, climate change is proceeding at a startling pace. But a team of scientists from UC Santa Barbara and RWTH Aachen University in Germany have a new — and novel — destination in mind for all the carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere: chemical products.
Chemical production emits staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses via the energy it consumes and the carbon-based raw materials it uses. Sangwon Suh, a professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and his fellow researchers see an opportunity to divert billions of tons of CO2 from smokestacks into the chemical supply chain, if the world can create enough renewable energy to make the effort worthwhile. Their analysis appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.