nhavar t1_j1pbmhb wrote
Does anyone ever think "oh so we'll use new plant based petroleum to replace old plant based petroleum..."
Let's also talk about soil erosion and the loss of topsoil and the toxic chemicals we're putting into the waterways as we're farming all of these new miracle crops. What will fundamentally change about our lifestyles that will fix this dumb cycle.
For instance we're sending perfectly good waste material to the dump that could be grade A fertilizer because it's cheaper to throw it away and use natural gas to make fertilizer. We're putting millions of bodies in caskets or incinerating them and keeping the remains in urns as mementos instead of them going back into the earth as nutrients. Same for animals and animal byproducts. Just use a bunch of petroleum energy to burn off the remains instead of figuring out how to turn it back to the soil. It's expedient and cheaper but slowly robs the earth of it's nutrients to just create heat waste.
rlf16 t1_j1ptha3 wrote
> we’ll use new plant based petroleum to replace old plant based petroleum
Well yea, the whole point is the difference in the length of the carbon cycle and the fact that a lot of fossil fuels were created by processes that can’t exist anymore because microorganisms are much better at breaking down dead wood now, so by burning that old stuff we’re essentially releasing CO2 from permanent carbon sinks.
Not saying there aren’t major issues with biofuels, but there are good reasons why “young peutroleum” can be much better than fossil fuels.
nhavar t1_j1qvk9y wrote
I'm not necessarily knocking new biofuels as much as the moniker "plant based". They're both "plant based" just on a different cycle time. The more accurate name would be "farmed biofuel" or "short cycle biofuel". I think people also mistakenly associate "plant based" with healthier for you and that's not exactly the case either. Hence why I pointed out a missing ingredient in the lifecycle of plant based things; Getting nutrients back into the soil we keep robbing. By no means should we let perfect become the enemy of good, but it is something we need to start focusing on quickly otherwise the demand on the earth for food AND fuel AND medicine AND everything else is going to leave it baren and unusable.
rlf16 t1_j1r0lc8 wrote
Oh totally agree about land management, it’s a mess. But if you compare the long term environmental damage of practices like tar sand extraction, fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction, farming practices has a lot of room for improvement, unlike the former. And increasing atmospheric CO2 will accelerate top soil loss by droughts and other extreme weather, so keeping more of it in the ground is still a positive for that issue.
I’m aware that growing conventional plants for biofuel isn’t scalable, but low-land area forms such as algae tanks could be promising for some uses.
Ultimately hydrocarbon use needs to be heavily reduced. But if we can use short-cycle hydrocarbons as a temporary replacement so that we can leave more coal, oil and gas in the ground, that’d be great. Especially coal is never, ever going to be created again in quantities that’ll have a significant impact on reducing atmospheric CO2 ppm. once it is out of the ground and released into the atmosphere, the carbon will have to be sequestered again by other means. And it’s dirty af.
“Plant based” might be a bit of a PR spin, but if it helps people that aren’t very knowledgeable about the issues to see it more positively than “fossil based”, I don’t mind it. It’s not just a different cycle period, it’s about keeping as much CO2 as possible sequestered underground before it’s too late. But yeah biofuels are not some kind of panacea by any means
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