Stoichiometric Machines of the Future

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to watching "The Inconvenient Truth." The next day the Wired magazine showed up with a special on cutting carbon. How could we have been stupid for so long? Well, the following equation is just so damn easy on this planet:

_C_nH_m + _O₂ = _CO₂ + _H₂O + energy.........................(1)

It's the combustion equation. We use it solely to produce the energy (Gibbs free energy) that comes out of the right hand side. You do this when you throw logs on your campfire, when you throw coal in your potbelly stove, and when you put globs of Texas Tea in your Horseless Carriage. It's even what happens in your lungs. All we wanted was the energy but when you examine the other terms you see the problem. The left side wants some hydrocarbon (with various m's and n's that produces dollars and wars in the Middle East) and the right side produces carbon dioxide – that's the gaseous carbon causing all the problems. If you want to get technical, there's a host of other chemical reactions that are also in there. Nothing we can do about the equation. It's not inherently evil. It's just that we've done it 10⁴⁰ times in the last 5000 years.

Therefore, what we need to do is create other machines that perform other chemical conversions to offset the problems this one has caused - and run those machines 24-7 to set things right. One of the more popular ideas is to fuel cells to create energy instead. This is done by:

_H₂ + _O₂ = _H₂O + energy .........................(2)
This is what futurists call the hydrogen economy. But where the heck are we going to get hydrogen in bulk quantities?

In order to do either of these energy producing equations when we want where we want, we should seek to build plants or devices that do the reverse. Unfortunately, doing the reverse will require energy. So these things will have to be solar powered. Somehow, we need to do this: energy + _CO₂ + substrate = _O₂ + carbon filled substrate.........................(3)

It seems a couple people have had similar ideas in recent years. Perhaps the best one is Nobel Prize winner Dr. G.A. Olah and the Methanol Institute approach to make methanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. But still, where do we get the hydrogen? The most tried and true way is simple electrolysis.
energy + 2*H₂O = O₂ + 2*H₂ .........................(4)

That's just zapping water with electricity.

Anyway, my idea is to set up household machines. Machines for every rooftop in the nation (in the world), which just toil away at the latter two equations whenever the sun is shining. The hardest one is the third equation. But perhaps, we could use carbon nanotubes or the like with billions of activation centers to reach out and grab the carbon dioxide and add the carbon to itself. I don't know if it'll work. In the meantime, plant a tree. Plant life does the 3^rd equation one pretty well.