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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't all steel before the 1800's or so made with wood?

Prior to the invention of the Bessemer Process, it was mostly made with charcoal, so yes. Of course it was also very expensive and made in small batches.

there are new exploited deposits of hydrogen, formed at great depths under high pressure and temperatures. https://hydroma.ca/en/ is one I do not know if there are more and their production volume?

It's still a fossil fuel though. Not emitting climate affecting gasses one but still.

Turns out releasing hydrogen in the atmosphere has some greenhouse effects: http://www.ghgonline.org/otherhydrogen.htm

No, It is a reaction between buried iron oxide and water. This is very high temperature high pressure reaction. The iron oxide changes oxidation state, releasing hydrogen. Here is one, there are others, like the one I cited. https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202010.0589/v1/download

It was made with charcoal which is made from wood, yes. But charcoal is man-made coal which is still bad from an emissions perspective. This process, on the other hand, does not use coal at all.

Charcoal is nearly carbon-neutral, with the carbon coming from the air via trees or other biomass. It's bad for deforestation reasons, but it's not carbon-intensive.

charcoal can be good or bad from a forestation perspective. Good is a healthy cycle and removal of trees as a contributor to that process.

Forests should not envelope all of the world, as that would kill of a number of other ecosystems.

The idea that forest should dominate everywhere is actually anti-ecological, in that it disrupts that natural balance.

We have in many cases, localized growth of forest, and regional deforestation [1]. Because the trees making up these ecological systems are local/regional also, we should seek to undo that damage where possible.

[1] https://blog.tentree.com/fact-check-are-there-really-more-tr...

> The idea that forest should dominate everywhere is actually anti-ecological

How do you define "ecological"? I would define it as nature without human intervention. Besides, there is no reason to believe that forest would "envelop all of the world" in such a way that is unsustainable because nature has its own check and balance for that.

So I don't buy the argument that some of the activities that we do are beneficial to nature. You can of course argue that they are sustainable and not destructive in long term.

Living in California, I can tell you that yes, nature has checks and balances for that. The main check is fire, and we have suppressed it for decades. The forest density in managed national forests here vs unmanaged wilderness areas is something like 10 to 1 I’d say. And now the fire is coming anyway.

It does temporarily release CO2 into the atmosphere until new trees have absorbed it.

So it will temporarily not be carbon-neutral, but be neutral over time if the average amount of coal stored in trees doesn’t get affected by the new use of trees.

Could be seem as cannon negative, since the carbon is permanently captured in the steel.

> But charcoal is man-made coal

It was fossil-fuel-free, though. Which makes the headline wrong.

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