The smokestacks of factories billow pollution into the ethereal, magnificently rendered atmosphere – Seurat seems to paint every molecule of oxygen and smoke – but here on the riverside is a moment of timeless summer peace.
Transport patterns can be followed, infrastructure monitored, the planting of fields, plumes from smokestacks and ships in ports can all be observed.
But the fight has another prong: stripping carbon dioxide out of the smokestacks of power plants and other factories and storing it safely underground.
But coal-fired stations, with their belching smokestacks, are notorious polluters, and face tough new air-quality standards that will render many older ones uneconomic.
The Microsoft campus, for instance, sprouts no smokestacks, has no pipelines dumping toxic waste into streams, and sucks up only as much energy as fluorescent light bulbs and PCs consume.
The sources of this problem range from smokestacks through Amazonian deforestation to pig effluent; from Mexico to Mauritania.
It is called carbon capture and storage (CCS), or carbon sequestration, and entails hoovering up carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and other big industrial facilities and storing it safely underground, where it will have no effect on the atmosphere.
Inventors and venture capitalists, in the meantime, are striving to create all manner of new technologies bugs for biofuels, revolutionary solar panels, smart-grid applications but it is hard to find anyone working on CCS in their garage (although some scientists are toying with pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air instead of from smokestacks: see Technology Quarterly in this issue).
The winds that rush northwards carry pollutants, including soot from European and Asian smokestacks, which has a powerful warming effect over snow.
That is a bureaucratic way of admitting that the technology needed to limit emissions, by extracting carbon dioxide from power plants' smokestacks and storing it underground, is not yet commercially viable.The problem is that carbon capture and storage (CCS), as the technology is known, is not likely to be commercially viable in ten years' time either.
The owners of the factory and the customers for its goods do not have to bear the full costs of the pollution that comes out of its smokestacks.
