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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.)

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.

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

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