Hacker News Reader

Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

>The CO2 emitted is not a concern because it's carbon from the current environment.

Nope, it doesn't work like that.

Source: Business very related to this exact activity.

If you grow 2021 grain (taking CO2 into the grain’s carbon), then burn part of that carbon back into CO2 in 2021, how is that not strictly better than taking millions of years old carbon and turning it loose into the atmosphere?

It's definitely better than doing nothing, but an hypothetical company doing business as usual and then buying the necessary carbons offsets from permanent carbon sequestration projects would be better for the atmosphere.

Of course, the ideal scenario would be a company that does both things (reduce + offset).

That’s not at all clear to me. Are you saying that a company which burns 1 ton of carbon from 2021 grain is worse than a company that burns 1 ton of carbon from fossil sources and buys permanent sequestration to offset 1 ton?

That’s breaking my engineer brain.

Yes. Because the net effect of the latter is zero carbon on the atmosphere.

Isn’t the net effect of the first also zero? (No net carbon was added to the atmosphere than was there on Dec 31, 2020.)

Close to zero as growing the grain was not "free" conversion from atmospheric CO2 to glucose or w/e.

There are net emissions from all the equipment and processing involved. But of course, if buying carbon offsets is a valid way to offset burning coal, it is also a valid way to offset all the truck, tractors, etc associated with liquor production. So you are correct.

In what way? Regulations that don't consider the source?

Because the CO2 goes back to the atmosphere.

Didn't the CO2 that went into the tree come from the atmosphere in the first place?

Yes, and life and ecological systems adapted around particular levels of it. Man put too much back in recent years (see [1]) so we'd like to take it off there because the vast majority of current research points to it being a bad thing for the weather dynamics of the planet.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

But if it came from the atmosphere, and goes back into the atmosphere… why isn’t it carbon net zero? Out -1, in +1, net 0. Wasted energy to harvest trees? But you also waste energy extracting fossil fuels, and offsetting carbon.

It is always net zero if you're pedantic and say the earth is a closed system plus conservation of matter.

But the whole premise (i.e. the concern) is that there's too much CO2 as an atmospheric gas and it would be better if some of it were instead somewhere else.

If you take from the atmosphere but then put it back it doesn't really help alleviate the problem.

> But the whole premise (i.e. the concern) is that there's too much CO2 as an atmospheric gas and it would be better if some of it were instead somewhere else.

Yeah, everyone gets that.

Burning wood is net zero. The point is we don't want net zero - we want net negative.

>Burning wood is net zero.

Nope, when you do that, you're moving CO2 into the atmosphere.

I get your point, "but what if you somehow made that wood explicitly to burn it", but the whole idea is to sequester carbon and keep it out, remove it. Fossil fuel's CO2 also came from the atmosphere, no sane person would suggest that burning it is net zero.

Whew, but looks like you have US' EPA on your side: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com