Despite a rapid rise in the price of various agricultural products, proponents of environment protection are keen to promote "biological" fuel. They have, however, two supporting reasons whose contradiction may skip your eyes:
1. Petroleum is not reusable and will certainly be exhausted one day.
2. If we continue to use petroleum but not biological fuel (for example, ethanol from corn), there will be a continual rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration - with all the greenhouse effects and so forth.
Yes, both are true. What you may not appreciate is: they will not happen together. Either the atmospheric carbon dioxide level rises to an intolerable (for human) high because of a good supply of gasoline, or we exhausted all petroleum on earth before the greenhouse gas accumulate to a toxic level.
The question is, therefore, which one would come first ?
I am quite certain it is the second. From what we know, atmospheric carbon dioxide level was probably 100 times the present concentration 4 billion years ago. What brought it down was, of course, photosynthesis. Oxygen was released and carbon was buried as fossil (alas, coal and petroleum). If we forget about the "educated estimation" of petroleum reserve on earth and consider the law of physics, there should be enough fuel behind our feet to push up the level of greenhouse gas by at least 50 times - of course that's not what we want.
PS. You may ask why should there be such a big discrepancy between the current estimation of fuel reserve. Well, that may be the result of the limitation of current technology. On the other hand, there may be perfectly legitimate business reasons which I should not elaborate.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
2 comments:
That's a very interesting perspective...
Where is it documented that the carbon dioxide levels used to be that high?
Wikipedia, and all the books that describe the beginning of the Earth.
Post a Comment