TIMES VIEW Store it but after proper testing The proposal to store carbon dioxide in the depths of some of the world's deepest oceans is not a slapdash solution put together by myopic scientists as some environmentalists would have us believe. Instead the concept is the creation of concerned climatologists who have been warning of the dangers of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere for more than three decades now. Moreover, it's not a short-term answer to the prospect of looming climate change but a safe way of tackling global warming. About 480 billion tonnes of the gas could be sequestered in the waters of the deep Pacific, equivalent to the carbon pollution from about 16 years of the world's current fossil fuel use. The idea is to capture CO2 at major sources such as power generating stations, which produce one-third of global emissions and steel and cement production centres, and transport them to deep-sea drill ships to be injected directly to the ocean floor. At depths greater than 3,500 metres the pressure would be enough to compress the gas into a slush that would settle on the bottom. Eventually the slush would dissolve but the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2 -rich sea water mixes into the surroundings. In any case, virtually all the CO2 released in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel burning will ultimately find its way to the deep sea too if nothing is done about it. No one is rushing into the project mindlessly. The scientists are asking for small-scale pilot experiments to be conducted first so that they can assess the impact on deep-dwelling organisms and their ecosystems. Only if the damage is minimal and can be contained would the entire project be operationalised. So far, however, environmental organisations are not even allowing such pilot experiments to be conducted. This is short-sighted. If marine disposal of carbon dioxide proves to be economically viable, other more powerful forces will definitely want to intervene and deep-sea disposal will commence without adequate testing and evaluation. Is that what environmentalists want? COUNTER VIEW Leave ocean beds alone Narayani Ganesh What scientists like Wallace Broecker of Columbia University are advocating when they plead for experiments in deep seabed injections of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions is a dangerous policy proposal. Instead of destroying enemy resources, we'd be killing off organisms at the bottom of the sea that could be a vital link in the chain of life on the only home we know, Planet Earth. We're poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we live off. We're cutting down forests and melting down the North and South poles. We're intruding deep into millennia-old ice by drilling holes into them for experiments. We're littering outer space with trash. With global warming, ocean waters are turning acidic, bleaching coral reefs and compromising marine life. The world's highest mountain peak, Mt Everest, is also the world's highest garbage dump. The global appetite for energy is turning monstrous, and is growing faster than our efforts to find renewable replacements for fossil fuels. Isn't it time to stop and do things differently? Deep-sea ocean beds are probably the last frontier on earth, relatively free of toxic human footprints. For this very reason, life in these pristine secret places might hold the keys to our future collective survival. Must we destroy these last vestiges of environmental sanctity that hold out hope that some day we might actually reverse the wrongs heaped on the environment? What if the sinking of one gigaton of CO2 as an experiment simply boomerangs on us, maybe getting regurgitated in a tsunami? Even if we assume that the sunken CO2 would stay put, do we have the time to wait a few hundred years to observe its effects on abyssal life and in turn on all life, including humans? So let's just leave ocean beds alone. Let's get serious about renewable energy options and cut back emissions as much as we can instead of looking for new places to hide it.