Letter to the editor
Viv Forbes | August 9, 2012Why Bury the Essentials of Life
in Carbon Cemeteries?
To the Editor
Climate Conversation
3rd August 2012
We are told that carbon dioxide is such a dangerous gas that we must capture and “bury it deep down below”.
Carbon is the building block for every bit of organic matter on earth – bread, butter and bitumen; coal, cauliflowers and cows; men, microbes and mulberries.
When oxidised by combustion in fires and engines, or digested in stomachs, or decayed in soil or compost, every bit of organic matter is recycled into the harmless natural atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide. Plants extract this plant food from the atmosphere, reuse the carbon, and recycle the oxygen for use by all forms of animal life.
Every tonne of coal burnt produces about three tonnes of carbon dioxide containing over two tonnes of oxygen and under one tonne of carbon. Thus with every tonne of carbon buried, more than twice as much life-sustaining oxygen must also be sacrificed.
To achieve these mass burials, more coal has to be mined and burnt to produce the energy for gas collection, compression, pumping, drilling disposal holes, and to manufacture the materials for storage tanks, pumps and pipes. To wilfully waste so much energy entombing the two most valuable life-supporting elements in the biosphere is financially and biologically suicidal.
These costs are real, unavoidable and undeniable. There are ZERO proven benefits.
Why do it?
Viv Forbes
Rosewood,
Queensland,
Australia.
forbes [at] carbon-sense [dot] com
Robert Zubrin’s book, Merchants of Despair, might offer some thoughts as to why.