I forgot to save 20 million tons of CO2

I my previous post I pointed out that turning off computers instead of letting them idle costs more than it saves. But I forgot to save 20 million tons of CO2. The obvious solution is to plant trees but I am not sure where we would plant 40 million acres of trees a year.
So we’ll need to use the computers for something that directly offsets the CO2 production. I suggest donating the idle CPU time to research projects similar to the following:

Materials science:
Better tires, more than any aftermarket accessory could allow the current generation of cars to achieve better mileage and therefore reduce CO2 production without waiting 10 years for the current generation of cars to be mostly changed out.
Better alloys and plastics to make the next generation of cars more fuel efficient without the Big 3 and the American people having to give up SUVs and trucks.

Better combustion chamber and boiler designs for coal plants. Also systems that allow older coal plants to retrofit and partly use coal gasification for a significant percent of the BTUs.

Designing ultra-efficient devises, right now sequestering the waste CO2 uses almost as much energy as burning the fuel creates.

Alternative energy research:
Affordable high efficiency solar cells, low noise, low profile, but efficient wind turbines, and hydro-energy solutions that can survive extreme environments but not damage ecosystems.

Superconducting or low resistance power lines to reduce transmission loses.

Biological sciences:
Genomic and proteomic studies to design organisms that can effectively produce biofuels, without the need for irrigation, fertilizer or converting land from food production.

Genomic and proteomic studies to design biological solutions for sequestering carbon.



Earth sciences:
Studies on how to reduce the effect of the produced CO2 on the atmosphere and climate.

Studies on where to put the captured CO2 for safe, long term storage.

Any one of the projects yielding results has the potential to offset the additional CO2 of leaving computers on.

To have a direct impact on the fact computers use a lot of energy these projects would be excellent directions:

RAM that retains information when unpowered. So the difference between the computer being on or off is whether or not new information is being written.

Solid state mass storage, to replace spinning harddrives.

OLED or better yet high color, fast refresh digital ink monitors.

There are lots more but these components consume a lot of the power in an “idle” computer, or stand between powering down being a tractable option.