Burning coal is just burning wood that has been stored for a...

Burning coal is just burning wood that has been stored for a bit.

Burning cow dung is burning grass that was stored for a a few hours in a stomach.

In each case carbon, captured by a plant is released back into the atmosphere. In coal's case it has been stored for a while before being released.

The issue is, are we burning coal/wood/grass/oil in such a way that we are releasing more carbon than we are currently capturing by growing replacement trees/grass/dinosaurs++.

If we could grow wood/grass/dinosaurs at a sufficient rate to use up all the carbon we produce by burning oil/trees/dinosaurs then we not be in such trouble. Problem is we can't. We need more energy than we can get by growing replacement trees/grass/dinosaurs to burn.

What we do have is a lot energy from a nearby nuclear reactor that currently mostly just gives British backpackers sunburn on Bondi Beach each christmas (well... OK... it also powers most of life on earth including making wood/grass/dinosaurs but other than that most of its output goes to cooking Poms).

If instead of using it to grow grass/trees/dinosaurs that we burn to get energy to power the internet so we are able to have our god given human right to argue endlessly on HC, we just let the grass/trees/dinosaurs be and powered HC directly by nuclear energy from that nearby reactor, that would be a pretty neat idea.

Except the nuclear reactor currently orbits the earth (yes it does - Copernicus was wrong - which is understandable as he didn't know about nuclear energy back then) and as a result we only get the nuclear power about half a day which simply would not work for HC where we need to spend 24 hours a day exercising our god given human right to argue endlessly on HC. But.. (one should always start at least one sentence with a preposition)... supposing we could bottle that nuclear energy?

We would have lost more grass/trees and dinosaurs, the earth wouldn't become a planetary experiment to see how close we can get to replicating the atmosphere of Venus and we can happily spend our time arguing on HC 24 hours a day. Fewer people would die from smoke related causes and more would die from failing to install the latest upgrade to their car collision avoidance software. Win-win no?


++ yes dinosaurs. I don't care what geologists say, oil is dead dinosaurs. Ask Copernicus.