Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella

speaker

1,490 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 27 Jun

Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #827 - May 15 2021 podcast

The problem with vegetation is that it decomposes and puts the carbon back, right? matched

It's only a temporary store of the carbon. matched

It's still good. matched

That's why the whole growing trees thing is not a permanent sequestering. matched

It's not sequestering carbon. matched

It's just temporarily taking that out of circulation. matched

The more vegetation we have at any given moment, the more carbon will be bound up in that form. matched

Yeah, so what you're really asking is can we use plants to capture carbon and then do something to put that carbon into a permanent form, sequester it? matched

So that's what we're talking about here. matched

Kind of similar. matched

Yeah, I was being— Generous, thank you. matched

Yeah, generous. matched

There are various researchers, companies looking for ways to take plants and treat them and to turn them into carbon that is either just can be buried or might even be useful. matched

And not useful as a fuel because that's just another way of burning the carbon and putting it back into the atmosphere. matched

So biofuels are fine because they aren't releasing new carbon there. matched

But again, it's only that temporary store of carbon. matched

So there was a recent study looking at a particular method where they try to bind it with silicon to make silicon carbide, also known as carborundum. matched

And this is an industrially useful, very hard material. matched

It's used in ceramics, sandpaper, semiconductors, and LEDs, for example. matched

So they're saying, hey, if we could just make a ton of the silicon carbide with carbon from the atmosphere, that would be a way of long term sequestering that carbon and we get a useful compound out of it to boot. matched

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