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All the gasoline in the ground will eventually be burned by people regardless of price. It's a question of how quickly. If not by first world countries then by

by devoply 10y ago

All the gasoline in the ground will eventually be burned by people regardless of price. It's a question of how quickly. If not by first world countries then by third world countries. As far as I know the CO2 stays there once it is there and accumulates, so does it really matter how fast it's burned?

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
Co2 sinks include: 1.- equilibriation with oceans (10 year timescale increases system capacity by order of magnitude - but harmful to marine life) 2. - hydrocarbon/peat formation (not really a major process in an icehouse climate and quite slow anyway) 3. - marine carbonate formation (100 year timescale, potentially very large sink, can be negatively affected by process 1) 4.- silicate weathering (1000 year timescale infinite capacity). So rate of release is very important. If CO2 release too fast ocean acidification from 1 prevents 3 and 3 and 4 don't have time to act.
- deleted 10y ago
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nhaehnle 10y ago
I think this is a fair question, and deserves an answer instead of being downvoted. 1. There's no gasoline in the ground, but various forms of oil. Sounds like a nitpick, but is actually crucial, because getting usable fuel from tar sands and fracking are dirty and expensive operations -- especially once the externalities of environmental damage is accounted for. With current trends in wind and solar, it is quite likely that at some point, extracting fuel from tar sands and fracking will simply no longer be competitive. (You may argue that things like planes are unlikely to ever go electric; but it's likely we'll at some point have scalable fuel generation from electricity.) 2. CO2 doesn't necessarily stay in the atmosphere. First of all, there are natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in the ground/the oceans. That's how oil and coal formed in the first place. Of course, those natural processes are slower than we'd like. That's why carbon sequestration is a seriously discussed thing, i.e. filter CO2 out of the atmosphere industrially, and/or speed up the natural processes (like growing forests). Creating an economic incentive for this is a big part of the idea of carbon emissions trading. In the end, it's viable to have a neutral economy in terms of CO2. We really need that anyway in the long term because oil is finite. If we get there faster, we'll get there without having gotten all oil out of the ground.
PeterisP 10y ago
Oil is a wonderful product that is a key ingredient to many industries. It is used in manufacturing so many things -plastics, organic chemistry ingredients and even fertilizer; e.g. your shampoo bottle needed oil to make both the shampoo and the bottle itself. At the moment, oil is so extremely cheap that we simply burn most of it. However, once we switch to other means of energy, we'll likely want to use all that oil in different ways with don't involve burning it and the CO2 stays in the products made from that oil (even if it means getting buried in a dump after some time).
pjc50 10y ago
There are balancing processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so if we could stretch out the oil extraction over a couple of centuries we'd be in a much better position.

by devoply 10y ago

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago

Co2 sinks include: 1.- equilibriation with oceans (10 year timescale increases system capacity by order of magnitude - but harmful to marine life) 2. - hydrocarbon/peat formation (not really a major process in an icehouse climate and quite slow anyway) 3. - marine carbonate formation (100 year timescale, potentially very large sink, can be negatively affected by process 1) 4.- silicate weathering (1000 year timescale infinite capacity). So rate of release is very important. If CO2 release too fast ocean acidification from 1 prevents 3 and 3 and 4 don't have time to act.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

nhaehnle 10y ago

I think this is a fair question, and deserves an answer instead of being downvoted. 1. There's no gasoline in the ground, but various forms of oil. Sounds like a nitpick, but is actually crucial, because getting usable fuel from tar sands and fracking are dirty and expensive operations -- especially once the externalities of environmental damage is accounted for. With current trends in wind and solar, it is quite likely that at some point, extracting fuel from tar sands and fracking will simply no longer be competitive. (You may argue that things like planes are unlikely to ever go electric; but it's likely we'll at some point have scalable fuel generation from electricity.) 2. CO2 doesn't necessarily stay in the atmosphere. First of all, there are natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in the ground/the oceans. That's how oil and coal formed in the first place. Of course, those natural processes are slower than we'd like. That's why carbon sequestration is a seriously discussed thing, i.e. filter CO2 out of the atmosphere industrially, and/or speed up the natural processes (like growing forests). Creating an economic incentive for this is a big part of the idea of carbon emissions trading. In the end, it's viable to have a neutral economy in terms of CO2. We really need that anyway in the long term because oil is finite. If we get there faster, we'll get there without having gotten all oil out of the ground.

PeterisP 10y ago

Oil is a wonderful product that is a key ingredient to many industries. It is used in manufacturing so many things -plastics, organic chemistry ingredients and even fertilizer; e.g. your shampoo bottle needed oil to make both the shampoo and the bottle itself. At the moment, oil is so extremely cheap that we simply burn most of it. However, once we switch to other means of energy, we'll likely want to use all that oil in different ways with don't involve burning it and the CO2 stays in the products made from that oil (even if it means getting buried in a dump after some time).

pjc50 10y ago

There are balancing processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so if we could stretch out the oil extraction over a couple of centuries we'd be in a much better position.