Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6771542" data-attributes="member: 177">That's not really carbon emission, though, as far as the environment is concerned.To be more clear.  The Earth has a normal, natural, "carbon cycle".  Plants take in carbon, and make more plant.  We eat the plants, and eventually exhale the carbon, or the plants die and decay and carbon is released that way, and then plants take it back in to make more plants.  In general, what gets released by biological processes gets taken up by biological processes, and we are balanced and fine.  Anything that works within the natural carbon cycle is okay - if we can find a way to economically grow a plant, ferment that plant into alcohol, and burn that alcohol in car engines, and then grow more plants, for example, we are okay - so long as the carbon we release is from something growing that we regrow, we don't have issues.The problem comes in releasing carbon that was locked away from the cycle long ago.  What we need to do is stop burning fossil fuels.  If you don't burn fossil fuels, everything else is in the carbon cycle, and you're okay.Is it possible to stop burning fossil fuels?  Yes.  There are enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric sources for us to no longer emit carbon in our energy generation.  Now, other forms of energy do have their own drawbacks - the batteries in electric cars, for example, pose a chemical pollution problem.  But *ANYTHING* you do on the scale of the entire human population will have drawbacks.  However, those drawbacks may be more manageable than baking the planet to a crisp.And, ultimately, we will *have* to stop burning fossil fuels anyway.  Even if it didn't cause warming, there's a finite supply - at some point, it would run out.  In theory, one can go one step better, and start removing carbon from the atmosphere, and lock it back into the ground.  This is not easy to do in a way that we are sure that it won't leak out in some way or another, and it isn't cheap - in terms of energy, doing this is on the same order as *unburning* the coal and oil.</blockquote>

Verification