>If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells or Oil from biowaste.
Yes, we really do. There is vastly more carbon in the atmosphere than a hundred years ago. Where did it come from?
You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle.
The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, and through a convoluted process putting it in the atmosphere and never retrieving it. And then being shocked that atmospheric CO2 levels are returning to what they were millions of years ago, in the period aptly known as the "Carboniferous".
When you think about it, the real problem is the mismatch between how much CO2 is released and how much is absorbed. It took millions of years to absorb the CO2. It will take us 400 to "burn it all". If we had to burn coal within the limits of what the planet can absorb it wouldn't be a very effective power source. It could barely compete with trees.
Yes. The real real problem is energy. We are expending stored energy at a rate much higher than it was stored. Using plants to sequester carbon is a slow and long-winded way of extracting solar energy, although it has a number of advantages too - low-tech, self-sustaining, self-storing, convenient medium for immediate low-tech use i.e. burning.
To sustain our current per-capita energy consumption beyond our accumulated biomass stores, the limiting factor is land area. There's probably not enough space on Earth to devote to growing biomass purely for energy. Solar panels reach 10 times the generated power per unit area, easily, and we can do even better by exploiting energy accumulation that happens without technology, like wind.
"You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle."
Oil comes from plants and animals, crushed under the weight of the earth, it's also a 'natural cycle' - but that doesn't matter at all.
"The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, a"
No, it has nothing to do with that at all.
It doesn't matter where or how the carbon gets into the air.
Anything that is going to be used as a fuel, we tax, relative to the amount of CO2 it emits, and that's that.
If as it turns out it's incredibly more efficient to burn 'biofuel' than it is to extract Oil - fine. But it's probably not the case.
As a sideline on this conversation. I'm VERY interested in dTal's point and if it stands up to scrutiny. To me, it makes sense. The carbon in the air now is from carbon that was sequestered. It was in oil, it was in trees, it was in the rocks. Then we let it go. We drilled oil, cut down the trees and burned them and built them, we made concrete.
So. If you take carbon out of the ground, and expect to see it floating in the air, you should be taxed. That's the idea.
But does this make sense? Just how much of the carbon in oil really is destined for the air? How much of the wood? How much of the stone? Or is there some other chain I'm missing? How much carbon would be sequestered in plants that produce biofuel? How much of a net negative is ethonol production anyway? What about other fuels? This subject seems complex to me.
You seem to think all this is wrong, and it could be! I really would be interested to hear where the logic breaks down.
If you planted a tree purely for the purposes of later burning it, it would 'capture' a bunch of Co2, then when you burnt it, it could release that Co2 creating a net 0 cycle.
It's not efficient as an energy cycle.
Not even considering the fact that wood burns in a very 'dirty' way and would require a lot of energy to 'clean' the emissions.
We probably wouldn't burn wood directly. Ethanol is also biomass. In fact, every single fuel we "burn" is biomass. The hard part is getting hold of carbon that isn't glued to some oxygen already. Once you have it, you can process it into whatever form best suits you.
You have to be careful when you speak of "efficiency". You have to specify, with respect to what expended resource, and what desired goal? If we say the expended resource is "land area" and the desired goal is "powering all of civilization", then indeed the the "efficiency" of growing trees and burning them is not so great, compared to say solar panels. But if the expended resource is "environmental damage" and the desired goal is "heating a cabin in the woods", burning tree wood is extremely efficient.
yes. That's a net zero. That's the point. If the point is carbon, then net zero is net zero. This is what dTal is saying. We shouldn't tax an activity that is net zero.
So it seems the real point is that it's "dirty"? We'd have to clean... what? Particle emissions? Most areas I see woodburning done have high quality air, low particle counts. Because their density is so low.
This keeps happening. The core rebuttable to dTal's argument is being left unstated. You keep saying it's wrong, you keep not saying why.
It depends on what would happen to the biowaste otherwise. Probably if the waste isn't turned into fuel, it will just rot and release the carbon anyways. In that case, it wouldn't make sense to tax the fuel. It only makes sense if the carbon would otherwise be safely stored and kept from going into the atmosphere.
Yes, the argument is 'burn stuff that's going to go into CO2 anyhow' but it just doesn't add up.
There are not that many dead trees, they don't release all of their Co2, you don't get that much energy, and it's a 'dirty emission'. Burning Hydrogen gives you CO2 and H20 - nice and clean. Burning wood gives you a lot of bad things.
So, I think it's worth talking about CO2 and other emissions (particulates, etc) separately. I totally agree that wood isn't great to burn from the standpoint of all the other stuff that goes into the air. And I agree that it's not a very efficient energy source either. It makes sense to use if you're chopping down trees near your rural home and burning them for heat in winter, but not as, say, a source of fuel for a power plant.
But I think that it's accurate to say that when you burn wood, you're emitting CO2 that would have been released as the wood decayed anyway. In that sense, you're not really contributing to climate change. This doesn't count any energy used in harvesting and transporting the wood, which of course could contribute to emissions.
To use another example, if you grow sugar cane, and using green energy sources, turn it into ethanol, and burn that in a car instead of gasoline, that's basically carbon neutral. If you hadn't grown the sugar cane, something else would have grown there, and decayed, and released the carbon into the atmosphere.
It would be valid to argue that if we had let the field turn into a forest, it would trap more carbon than the sugar cane would. And we should let forests regrow, where we can! But it's a one-time thing -- once the forest is grown, it would stay stable in the amount of carbon captured there. To continue to trap carbon, we'd need to keep harvesting the trees and doing something with them to permanently take them out of the carbon cycle, like turning them into buildings or somehow turning the carbon in them into something that doesn't decompose and burying it.
Their point is that nowadays carbon from dead plants and animals generally gets recirculated, but this wasn't always the case. Back before the enzymes to break down lignin and cellulose existed, when trees died the carbon they had extracted from the atmosphere didn't recirculate. And if we hadn't started digging up fossil fuels and burning them, that carbon would have remained buried basically forever. So where the oil comes from does matter.
Yes, we really do. There is vastly more carbon in the atmosphere than a hundred years ago. Where did it come from?
You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle.
The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, and through a convoluted process putting it in the atmosphere and never retrieving it. And then being shocked that atmospheric CO2 levels are returning to what they were millions of years ago, in the period aptly known as the "Carboniferous".