Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources

I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.

View on HN

The problem isn't CO2 it's pulling carbon out of geological deposits. Thus the carbon atoms in synthetic fuel can be considered "green" provided an appropriate energy source was used.

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.

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.

Correct, but burying trees today isn't going to turn them into coal.

The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.

Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.

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.

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.

> I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom.

Easy mistake to make, don't beat yourself up over it.

It's not the individual carbon atoms that carry the signature, it's the atoms in bulk that give the story ... eg: 6 x 10^23 carbon atoms

See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7757245/

Its the time shift. Burning a plant releases CO2 and it is still considered to be carbon neutral.

Sorry, that's just verbal sleight of hand. There's no such thing as "green" CO2.

How do you justify exhaling then?

Well, you don't. Everything you do has a carbon footprint, you know, haven't you heard? Everything.

Have you always had difficulty with abstraction?

Yes there is. I used to fall for the same lie, but it's just not true. It's a question of system boundaries.

Green CO2 was recently (in geological terms) captured from the atmosphere into biomass, that's why its release is basically net zero.

Fossil CO2 hasn't been part of the atmosphere in eons (back in e.g. the Crustacean, the CO2 ratio was many times higher), so its release is additive.

So bury the trees. Or run them through the sawmill and build houses.

And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.

Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.

Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.

Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.

From Wikipedia:

The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...

Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.

Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.

Yes, and it doesn’t fit the narrative.

We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.

You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.

> burn petrol.

Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?

Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.

How is that supposed to help?

I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.

Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.

Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.

I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.

With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.

Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.

Natural resources are not required to make a country an economic powerhouse. See Japan, for example. Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea.

What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.

And political will.

The Antipodes have such a problem with successful people we even invented a term for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

On the subject of free markets, Australia excels. We even let foreign entities extract and sell our LNG and pay no royalties and no tax.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/zero-royalties-charge...

Doesn’t get any freer than that!

Spain stripped S. America of its gold and silver, and neither Spain nor S. America benefited from it.

Doesn’t South America collectively produce more gold in one year than the Spanish usurped from them in their entire conquest period?

Gold production by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_mineral_...

In only the first half-century or so of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the continent. - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...

Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.

For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.

Now we just give it away.

Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.

"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."

https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...

Thanks for linking that document, I’ll have a read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com