[ComradePhil]

Say what you want about fossil fuels, but constant fossilization of Carbon from the atmosphere to under the earths surface is not sustainable.

Carbon is a building block of life... and for the few billion years life has been around, we've been losing atmospheric carbon to fossilization because it is being trapped as oranic matter under the earths surface. There are no good natural processes to release it back to the atmosphere consistently. The "carbon-cycle" is net negative over longer periods.

In the 4 billion years that life has been around, no other species has even come close to doing this very important work of bringing dormant carbon back into circulation... and if history is any indication, if something happens to us, it may be another billions of years before something like this happens... or never.

If there is a "Gaia", humans using as much fossil fuels over a long period is the ONE thing it wants. To ensure long-term sustainabilty of life, we should be building self-assembling and reproducing autonomous robots to dig out carbon as a contingency plan in case humans dissappear or lose this ability... or what is much more likely that we're are no longer interested because some other energy sources become cheaper.

It is lunacy to keep repeating the CleanTech era marketing material. Corporations and governments which have no future in oil have or have huge investments in alternate energy will try to vilify cabon and shut it down. But it is important for intellectuals to take the longer view and remember how important digging out trapped carbon is for long-term sustainability of life.

[ramblenode]

The problem with this take is that what is alive today is not adapted to the atmospheric carbon levels of the Cretaceous. Biodiversity is a better measure of planet-wide health than the amount of free carbon, and we are about to witness mass extinction on a scale not seen since the dinosaurs disappeared. There will be a lot more carbon and a lot less of it in unique living things.

Besides, carbon is not the limiting factor for organic growth in most places (nitrogen and iron tend to be more scarce).

[ComradePhil]

I am not talking about problems in a couple of hundred years. I'm talking in 100s of millions to billions of years. It could be that no other animal is smart or organized enough to recycle carbon... and it may be trapped forever, trapping every potential life with it... and life may disappear never to be seen again.

Lack of biodiversity in the short term is a much smaller problem in comparision... specially considering that divergent evolution is a thing. Biodiversity is just a function of life, biomass and time. Hence, in the longer term, if nothing is done about this, biodiversity is going to be lost... because biomass will be lost... because of fossilization of carbon.

Useful nitrogen is not scarce compared to useful carbon. Remember that carbon has to be suspended in the air as CO2 for plants to capture it, trap solar energy and make it usable for the rest of the living beings. Carbon just happening to be on earth in other forms is not enough. So, we have 0.05% CO2 and 75% nitrogen in the atmosphere. We are definitely not running out of nitrogen. Similarly, earth is made up of 80% iron. We're not running out of it either. It's the CO2 that in danger of being lost because of fossilization.

[ramblenode]

> I am not talking about problems in a couple of hundred years. I'm talking in 100s of millions to billions of years.

Within 300 million years life may not even be able to exist on land, and by 1 billion years the oceans will be evaporating [0]. So the timeline you have given for depletion of bioavailable carbon is already muted by unavoidable solar expansion. Do you have a source for a shorter timeline?

> Lack of biodiversity in the short term is a much smaller problem in comparision

Where do you think coal comes from? That carbon was sequestered during the "Carboniferous" period---a time when the trophic web lacked the diversity of organisms capable of recycling carbon in the form of cellulose. Biodiversity is the reason carbon can be reprocessed and keep circulating. A major simplification in the trophic web is precisely what allows carbon to stop cycling and become trapped in sinks. The fewer organisms in a trophic web, the more likely dead organisms will sink into anaerobic reservoirs before being recycled.

Similarly, Snowball Earth: a case of high biomass and low biodiversity. Nearly all life on earth went extinct because of a lack of organisms capable of offsetting the byproducts of other organisms.

> Useful nitrogen is not scarce compared to useful carbon.

The opposite is true, which is why you will see nitrogen fertilizer and not carbon fertilizer. Inorganic nitrogen is common but is energetically expensive to fix into organic compounds. Nitrogen fixing organisms are at the base of the trophic web and they limit the biological productivity of ecosystems.

> Similarly, earth is made up of 80% iron. We're not running out of it either.

It is not evenly distributed. There are vast areas of ocean whose productivity is limited by the scarcity of iron available [1]. This is seen in ocean blooms caused by iron oxide transported from the Sahara by wind. This in turn causes atmospheric carbon to circulate into the ocean through the formation of diatomaceous matter.

[0] https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q79.html

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4899-0762-...

[Rexxar]

Even is this argument is true for life on earth in 2 billions years it's not a valid excuse to release everything now in a 100 years timespan and completely destroy current climate.

[ComradePhil]

"The rise in CO2 will destroy everything" is an unfounded assumption, remnant of the CleanTech PR "science", which unfortunately a lot of scientists are still hostage to. Unfortunately, we'll need to wait until that generation dies out and the new shale funded scientists replace them... but these short term things will continue to happen. We still need to think in much longer terms if we are to think about protecting life on earth. Increased CO2 will mean plants will grow bigger and faster, this growth in biomass will increase biomass of all other creatures. Humans will not only survive in it, but will thrive... and so will many others. Yes, some will go extinct but that's a given. Protecting unviable species just for the sake of it is not a good use of resources, specially considering that the other option will inevitably lead to extinction of all life in the distant future... much earlier than it should.