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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> It's carbon neutral because when you burn it, all the CO2 released from the combustion reaction originally came from the air.

By that logic, so are gas and oil. Earth itself is carbon-neutral.

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Gas and oil are very slow to be regenerated. wood takes significantly less time. I wasn't clear enough originally; I really meant neutral with a short cycle duration.

But your atmospheric concentration can vary. We could get back to the same atmospheric concentration of CO2 as it was when the oldest oil was laid down, but that doesn't mean we would like it. The earth itself would probably be fine though, and on a long enough timeline it might give a chance to some giant intelligent spiders, or something.

> The earth itself would probably be fine though

I giggle at your ethnocentrism and hubris.

Why, thank you. If I can manage to be ethnocentric and hubristic, while simultaneously putting forward the idea that we are unimportant on a long timescale and that giant intelligent spiders might eventually be the dominant form, then I must be doing especially well, even by the exceptional standards of our particular group of apes.

It was the "probably". :)

I'm not ruling out giant marauding space worms that get attracted to the CO2 enriched atmosphere and end up breaking down the entire crust into sterile lumps no bigger than a tortoise, before then leaving for fresh new planets to scour of all life. Not over that sort of timescale anyway. Over that sort of timescale, 'probably' is all we've really got.

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