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" If people really need oil, they'll find ways to manufacture it more cheaply from biowaste." What? No. We don't care about the extraction. If oil must be bu

" If people really need oil, they'll find ways to manufacture it more cheaply from biowaste." What? No. We don't care about the extraction. If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells or Oil from biowaste. If it's oil for burning an engine, and we need that engine to operate for some economic reason - then we actually want people to consume the cheapest version. We don't want to make people jump through hurdles to 'run an engine that we need to run' for no reason. We may want to make sure that running that engine is economically essential, in which case keeping prices high, or, by some regulation. The act of 'extraction' is not a problem, there's not much negative from that. Other than geostrategic issues (i.e. Russia) we don't care where it comes from. What we want to do is tax the fuel itself - not emissions. The emissions are a direct function of the fuel. We know X litres of gas will create Y tonnes for Co2 and that's it. So tax the fuel instead of getting people to figure out emissions. Oil that is used for other reasons, we don't really care about. We could put a fuel tax, and a natural gas tax up right now - we already have mechanisms in place for that.

dTal 5y ago
>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".
- jollybean 5y ago
  Oh, no, this is flawed reasoning. Sorry. "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.
  - c1ccccc1 5y ago
    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.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      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.
      - NumberWangMan 5y ago
        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.
- imtringued 5y ago
  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.
  - dTal 5y ago
    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.
nix0n 5y ago
> We don't care about the extraction For carbon-reduction purposes maybe not, but fracking does create its own problems.

dTal 5y ago

>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".

jollybean 5y ago
Oh, no, this is flawed reasoning. Sorry. "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.
- c1ccccc1 5y ago
  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.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    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.
    - NumberWangMan 5y ago
      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.
imtringued 5y ago
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.
- dTal 5y ago
  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.

nix0n 5y ago

> We don't care about the extraction For carbon-reduction purposes maybe not, but fracking does create its own problems.