[mynegation]

Don’t know much about oil, but carbon in the coal was sequestered because plants got outside of water and evolved to have lignin about 50 million years before fungi and bacteria learned how to process dead plant mass. During that time (known as Carboniferous Period) burned and dead wood just turned into brown and black coal.

[betwixthewires]

That's interesting. So all that coal was made in 50 million years? Imagine if nothing had evolved to metabolize lignin, how much less biomass there would be by now, how much colder the earth would be. Just a little more dead, in a slow death spiral. Evolution is cool.