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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Carbon neutrality means "no net increase" not a net decrease.

I do know what the words mean.

Throwing the log in a landfill (or building a house with it) would accomplish the same thing, and is a heluva lot cheaper.

The difference is that no one is paying me to bury a bunch of logs.

The fact is, there is ample demand for high density energy storage. People want to go places, people want stuff brought to them. Until battery technology makes a massive leap into the realm of eating roses and shitting rainbows, combustible fuels are the only economically feasible option.

In that realm, our options are A) keep digging up fossil fuels, then burning producing a bunch of C02, or B) capturing a bunch of C02, turning it into biofuel, then burning it to release the same amount of C02.

Put in simple math terms:

   Fossil fuels: net CO2 = CO2 from energy to extract + CO2 from burning
   Biofuels: net C02 = CO2 from energy to extract + (CO2 from burning - CO2 from growing) 
                     = CO2 from energy to extract

Your equation overlooks simply growing trees. Build houses with the lumber instead of burning them.

Have you run the numbers on that? It takes 10 years to grow a tree. How many trees does it take to sequester gigatonnes of CO2? Some trees are useful, that many trees aren't.

> How many trees does it take to sequester gigatonnes of CO2?

Are you saying biofuels are not only ineffective at reducing CO2 emissions, but impractical as well?

Except it'll probably still decay into co2 in the landfill while the coal underground is stable

Block off the oxygen supply (like how coal became coal) and they won't decay into CO2.

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