"Coal in a Nice Shade of Green," 3/25/05

Illo number two in the Tim Lane triad accompanies the most enterprising article in Friday's energy futures roundtable, explaining and promoting gasification technology, whereby plants capture energy from fossil fuel burning but store the CO2 byproducts underground and away from the atmosphere. Lane's small illo borrows conventions of technical drawing, with its pipes and mystery boxes, but disrupts the diagram with extra loops and that black oil-spill-shaped cutaway framing everything. Is he telegraphing obscurity, contamination, or just the complexity of any proposition to curb environmental despoilment while we continue to consume at full tilt? It's beyond me.