I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from the air and converting it t

I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from the air and converting it to CO2 via the 'fuel'. You can extend this to an idea of there being a little parallel capacitor with the living biomass cycle on it, but it's okay to ignore for discussion. We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us. This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing. It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us. Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose). Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it. But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism. We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.