Quote:
Originally Posted by cgunderm
Well, this sounds more like a "feel bad marketing" rather than a truly scientific argument. Just think logically: if I use waste oil, letting it decompose in a waste dump produces CO2, just as much as burning it in my engine. The plants that produced it produced oxigen in the process, the oxigen I use to burn it. The "dinosaurs" whose CO2 was bound up into petrol in the ground enabled, by the fact that their CO2 was bound up, the kind of atmosphere we have now. Releasing all this CO2 would seem to be quite disastrous, even though in the long run (millions of years), it may be the same cycle. A cycle of 2 years is not the same as one of a million years for the effects on the planet.
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I am not purporting at all to make a scientific argument. However what I am saying is that to make diagram that suggest a quantitative life cycle of a fuel source needs to be backed up by appropriate testing and data, not conjecture.
This report sponsored by the US government is cautiously optimistic and does present a good case for net CO2 reductions. At the same time it recognizes the difficulty in measuring and correlating values in the life cycle. It also recognizes that current oil production methods emit some undesirable chemicals into the atmosphere and there's improvement to be made. Under a peer review conclusions could certainly be had on either side of the argument without additional studies.
I'm not saying that carbon neutrality is a bad argument, but it is not the best argument for why we should be moving to alternative fuel sources (many of the 'other' reasons Shorebilly and others have already listed and relisted).
02-25-2007, 01:48 PM
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