Guest Post by Mara Zebest
Whether he realizes it or not, Daan Roosegaarde espouses conservative capitalist ideas. Just watch Daan Roosegaarde explain his philosophy to a Seoul Digital Forum crowd which gives a glimpse into why human capital and new ideas should never be shackled by regulations. Liberals always believe in regulating under the guise of keeping us safe—but it is free enterprise—the free market—free ideas that are free to explore without the shackles of regulation that can actually save by inventing products to solve problems. So if carbon smog can be converted into diamonds, why do we need a carbon tax? Especially when the smog itself could generate wealth. Wouldn’t such an idea put a slight crinkle in Liberal plans to use fake global warming “science” to justify their plans to get-rich-quick via taxation?
Daan Roosegaarde explains that after observing the pollution and smog problem in Beijing, he wanted to explore an idea to vacuum in the smog particles to help clean up the air. After inventing his smog vacuum cleaner prototype, he pondered the next problem: What to do with the smog particle waste? He suddenly realized, that smog is made up of carbon, and if you compress carbon under high pressure, you ultimately get diamonds. So far, Daan hasn’t quite figured out the correct compression technology to produce diamonds—at least not yet—but he has managed to turn carbon into jewelry, and the profits from selling the jewelry are funneled back into the cost of his experimentation. That whole “pursuit of happiness” concept in realizing his G-d given creative potential.
Do not miss watching Daan Roosegaarde give a fascinating forum description here of his road to success. A more brief news clip of the smog-to-diamond idea below:
Euronews reports the following:
Imagine a huge electronic vacuum cleaner that would simply suck in smog, cleaning up polluted city air.
It’s still a small scale model for now, but Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde says he has reached an agreement with Beijing’s leaders to test his prototype in a city park next year.
The park would have a vacuum tower in the centre, fitted with ionic filters that charge and remove smog particles, blowing fresh air out of the tower’s side vents. Copper coils buried underground would generate an electromagnetic field that attracts the smog particles.
“By creating a field of ions, all the particles on the nano scale get positively charged, therefore when the ground is negatively charged, you can drag them to the ground, and purify the air – 75 percent, 80 percent more clean. The great thing about the technology is that is safe. It’s already being used in hospitals and it’s very energy-friendly, so to have 30,000 cubic metres of clean air purified, it only uses like 30 Watts, which is like a light bulb,” says Daan Roosegarde.
And there are few cities in the world in need of cleaner air than Beijing. Decades of unrestrained growth have produced an air pollution crisis that city leaders have struggled to address. […]
And the artist wants to take his plan one step further. Rather than waste all that smog, he wants to turn it into jewellery.
“We started to look at the smog particles and realised that most of it exists out of carbon. And what happens when you put carbon under a lot of pressure for two or three weeks, you get… diamonds. We are taking a thousand cubic metres of smog air and compressing this in a sort of smog ring, and there will be different versions, so if we compress it really, really a lot, you get like a real diamond-diamond. The largest series will be that we compress it a little bit less so it gets crystallised, so you still see it’s smog, but it’s beautiful and by sharing or selling a diamond ring like that, a smog ring, you donate a thousand cubic meters of clean air to the city of Beijing.” […]
Daan Roosegaarde is not new to weird ideas: he has already worked on several projects to recycle energy in unusual ways, for example this plan for a road that charges electric cars as they drive or a floor that would generate electricity when danced on.
Whether we will truly manage to make diamonds out of smog remains to be seen. In any case, for Roosegaarde, this project is a powerful symbol, an example, he says, of how one person’s trash can be another person’s treasure.
