[thealienthing]

I never knew/considered this. I wanted to clarify something. What you mean when you say that there is no cycle in the burning of fossil fuels, do you just mean that it is a net positive gain of carbon in the atmosphere because the carbon did not originate from the atmosphere? Plants can still process the carbon put there by the burning of fossil fuels but there is an excess because that carbon does not originate from living things? I guess I’m just trying to clarify that there isn’t something about the carbon from fossil fuels that makes it impossible for plants to consume it.

[Doji]

Yes that's right, plants can't tell the difference between a carbon atom which came from fossil fuels, and a carbon atom which came from an animal. It's all mixed together / fungible. Nevertheless, there's an important distinction here, because emissions from food are fundamentally limited by how much food we can produce, so it's carbon balanced on an extremely short time horizon. Meanwhile fossil fuel emissions are uncoupled from any sort of sequestration, and if it balances on any time horizon at all it will be a very very very long one.