Comment by WalterBright
14 hours ago
I understand that, but it's a fallacious argument. It's still emitting the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.
14 hours ago
I understand that, but it's a fallacious argument. It's still emitting the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.
You misunderstand the problem. The act of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is not a problem.
Significantly increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem. This happens when geological sources are used.
Unfortunately, burying dead trees in a landfill doesn't solve the problem because they decompose to methane which escapes. But you're right that geological CO2 production could be balanced by geologic CO2 sequestration, done properly.
The point is that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere was never the problem. Adding geological carbon back into the carbon cycle is the root cause of the entire thing.
You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?
> I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture.
Coal mines are sequestered trees.
But if the CO2 recently came from the atmosphere it's still a net zero impact though.
Like, take 5 units of carbon out of the atmosphere to create the fuel. Burn it and release 5 units of carbon to the atmosphere. What's the net increase again? (-5) + 5 = ?
FWIW I'm not saying these processes actually achieve this in reality. Just pointing out that it could be carbon neutral in the end.