It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields.
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.
> It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields.
The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment.
It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement.
The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring.
> All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...)
> Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.
It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument.
But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it.
Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining that the fact that electricity can be generated from coal is this major gotcha. It isn't. It's one of many ways to generate it. There are others, and the end result is always better for the environment.
I dont have a dog in the fight. I literally have no idea or opinion if biofuel is better environmentally and to what extent. Just wanted to learn from the points.
It works fine in the lab, but there's a lot of engineering that needs to be done in order to scale it up to industrial levels. Some failures are going to happen along the way, and failures at that scale break companies.
That engineering only gets done is there's money in it - and oil's been cheap bar some temporary upsets. So the pilot plants were shut down or converted to biodiesel, which is much less risky.
Once the economics change again, you'll see movement in that area (assuming EV doesn't completely take over).
"People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields"
This doesn't make any sense to me. With petrol, you are transferring carbon from a store to the atmosphere every time you use it for energy. With a wetland, you only destroy it once (thus releasing carbon from the store) the first time you use it to produce corn. Every time after that you're capturing carbon (in corn) and then releasing it again (when burning the biofuel).
Yes, it's an oversimplified analogy (there are many more subtleties such as the amount of carbon in wetland vs corn, the carbon requirements of the production and retail process of petrol vs biofuel, etc.). But even if we made the model more complex, it's still fundamentally two entirely different scenarios. One is just a continuous release from carbon stores while the other aims to restructure a carbon store so that it can release and capture in a cycle.
I think the idea is that the wetland or forest or whatever is a carbon sink in the sense that they have a net negative effect on carbon in the atmosphere each year. Growing corn and then burning it would at best be net zero if no further atmospheric carbon were produced by the production processes, fertilizers etc., which it is. So the differences between the two scenarios is net negative versus net positive atmospheric carbon each year.
The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion.
Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions.
> When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation occurs. This process eventually leads to the formation of deep peat deposits, which can accumulate for thousands of years.
> Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal
Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon in the charcoal resulting from forest fires isn't sequestered any more than the same carbon in the forest when in its un-burned state. The only difference is that, once you have a forest fire, a lot of the carbon is also just released into the atmosphere as CO2 in smoke.
It does sometimes in forests that burn. And generally, forests keep building up soil, it's disturbances and things like erosion (sometimes worsened by fires) that counter this buildup. But mature forests tend to do a lot better at resisting erosion and catastrophic (erosion-causing) fires.
Forests do not infinitely accumulate soil. When we dig into the ground in a mature forest, the layer with organic remnants is not particularly thick. Dead organic decomposes and returns back above the ground.
Show me the megatons/year of charcoal being produced by the worlds forests eh?
We could process them yes, but we can also just make them into timber - or burn them for energy. Or just bury them somewhere under a bunch of clay. Oh, and now we’re back to this thread.
It's as ridiculous as the comparison of the most recent 12k years of the holocene to the age of plant life on the Earth.
As for using lumber for timber, when eventually disposed it would have to be turned into charcoal rather than burned for energy or let decompose in conditions that don't sequester carbon.
You also missed the point about using charcoal for soil enrichment.
There is zero chance this makes a difference at the scales required. That is my point. Or are you proposing somehow making billions of tons of lumber into charcoal a year, and stopping it from further decay?
The parent comment I'm responding to is literally:
> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
To which I'm stating that forests and wetlands are not carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.
Then you miss the parent comment's context and start in an inflammatory way:
> Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.
And take it somewhere else (move the goalpost) - from whether forests are carbon neutral or not to how effective charcoal creation is at carbon capture, in our human timescale.
Meanwhile the only practical point wrt. charcoal creation from forests was:
> Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Which doesn't propose an effective carbon capture solution. At most it's something like emission reduction - the key phrase is old trees. And soil enrichment.
Recommendation: don't argue against points people didn't make.
Sounds like you might want to actually read the thread? Unless there is a geological process involved (very rare, and obvious when there is), long term forests and wetlands are carbon neutral - or they would be sitting on massive quantities of carbon. The vast majority are clearly not.
Most of the land in question isn't a mature ecosystem in equilibrium, and if it is there are other arguments against turning that into cornfields. But let's say the worst case is that it's carbon neutral.
The point is that biofuel production isn't carbon neutral. Maybe it could be theoretically, but in practice it takes energy inputs in the production process like in the fertilizers, processing of crop into fuel, and transport/distribution, which makes it net positive for atmospheric carbon.
Soil too eventually reaches an equilibrium where carbon injection and carbon oxidation are in balance.
If what you thought was true, imagine a forest sitting there for millions of years. Where would this permanently sequestered carbon be going? Soils do not become unboundedly thick.
This was true in the carboniferous period, when the organisms able to metabolize the lignin in trees haven't evolved yet, so the dead trees ended up as coal.
Except that industrial-scale agriculture in general requires quite a bit of exogenous petrochemical inputs—not just the fuel to power the machines that do the work, but also the fertilizer.
The energy for fertilizer is mostly in the nitrogen fertilizer. The energy input here is to make hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process. This hydrogen can come from renewable sources ("green hydrogen"), and this would be an excellent way to counter long term variability in renewable output.
That the hydrogen currently comes from natural gas is no argument it must come from natural gas, any more than cars currently using petroleum derived fuels would imply they must use petroleum derived fuels.
One of the things that concerns me most after studying agriculture for a couple of years is that people may definitely starve to fill other people’s gas tank. A lack of arable land is imminent and high income people at the gas pump, or eating meat (same economics) may well outspend those who don’t have enough food. Part of food inflation is attributed to biofuels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
the book cited in the article mentioned food riots in several developing countries (Mexico, Pakistan) on p.71 - prices would be affected either by displacing the crop in some of those countries or reducing exports from those that grow them
Yeah the gwangju massacre definitely happened, and he definitely authorized it because the troops who did it were under the command of John Adams Wickham.
The agreed framework would have prevented North Korean nukes, had the US actually honoured it. Instead bush tore it up when he came in to office, and then John Bolton fabricated the aluminium tubes hoax to justify it, which was later wheeled out to justify the Iraq war. Then they put north korea on the axis of evil so as to have a single non-muslim state there. All of that, but mostly the Iraq war is what led north korea to develop nukes.
And yeah, the deal was "no nukes (they shut down their nuclear reactor for 12 years unilaterally as a show of good faith) AND no long or medium range ballistic missiles in exchange for $1Bn and fuel oil for heating." Good luck getting that deal now :)
Most of the other suggestions are banal, and self-evident qualitative improvements (assuming you agree with the authors that homeless are people to be helped, and not a problem to be solved, which I wouldn't take for granted on HN). eg. maybe cops and sanitation workers aren't equipped to help people, so why are we sending them? Maybe housing costs are too high and we should build affordable housing? and other points which ChatGPT could probably summarize.
As you well know, because Musk is a free-speech absolutist/crusader. Actually so much so that he is constantly attacked, and vilified for his courageous position. He is also a bold defender of the light of human consciousness itself. So working backwards from there you can determine that deleting posts is actually a form of constitutionally protected speech which X (the everything app) is doing, as a public service for all of humanity.
There's a great documentary about waco on Netflix and at the end, the guy who is was in command of the troops who massacred 80 women and children concluded (after 30 years of reflection), "you know the real victim was? Me, because the whole fiasco made me look bad."
It's interesting to see how those who appear outwardly evil manage to cling to a self-serving and distorted view of the world in which, if anything, they are the maligned victims.
You can just as easily imagine a SWAT member saying "when we were training to assault civilian homes, it was a wonderful time, everybody was competent and had the right motivations, we were there to protect the good guys and hurt the bad guys - but only as a last resort! Then when we got to the branch davidian compound we applied all of our methods and tactics and it all went downhill from there and, tragically, we ended up in a dark place."
When, from the perspective of even the most casual observer, it was evident from very early on that given the material, resources, methods, tactics, organization, and leadership that was deployed, the outcome that unfolded was actually inevitable.
Getting back on topic, it's not particularly news to anyone to find out that there can be very well run, collegiate, bubbles full of well-meaning individuals doing great work who nevertheless operate within institutions which, on the whole, are a cancer upon society. It's a wonderful privilege and a joy to find yourself inside one of these bubbles compared to all of the worse things that you could be doing to make a living.
An oddly dramatic response to a blog post of someone working on a, what is this flutter, some frontend framework library?
Counterpoint - since I left Google, little birds told me good things happened, for example, cranking down on the travel expenses (that higher-ups used to spent with little to none oversight)
Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron.
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.