Open Thread

If it weren’t for the dead Neanderthals, we’d have no oil now.

Lechecal, I was going to tell you about trees and carbon sequestration, but it seems anti-climatic after today.

I realize that SOME PEOPLE like to make dramatic statements, throwing them like Moltov cocktails over their shoulders, giggling to see what some people might say. Not YOU, of course. 🙂

For non-aesthetic reasons….we need trees. For food, wood, for wood products like paper for everything, cardboard…we need trees for places for animals and birds to live so they can continue to polinate so that crops can grow and for wood so we can build stuff and repair our brownstones and make-non cement houses. To hold soil in place, to prevent erosion and run off into rivers of bad stuff. We need the soil to enable the growth of green stuff which sucks up more CO2 and which produces food. We need soil for growing food. Trees provide cheap Airconditioning. Haitians can’t fish because they have no trees. They chopped them all down and used them up, now they have problems with agriculture and soil erosion and the runoff into dirty polluted rivers so that they can’t eat the fish. Next door in DR, it’s a different story.

There is no place to put the carbon from the trees even if you were going to chop them all down and try to bury them. The earth can hold a lot of carbon but it has its limits.

Net increases in carbon that tip the balance – fossil fuel based emissions from transportation/trains, planes, and automobiles, coal combustion (without scrubbers), increase in livestock vs grains for fuel (pig and cattle farts provide 20% of the GHG)… Carbon can be sequestered in soil and extracted, compressed and stored in caverns, salt and/or exhausted oil wells.

That’s the best I can come up with.

Noki was right about the net carbon balance. We managed with trees for a long time. We need to sequester the output of the

“A plugged nickel for the horse you rhodium.”

Ya zinc?

btw, curium killed the cat.

“…the scientists say they’ve settled the debate over human-Neanderthal sex”

dibs,

Talk about “rough-trade”!