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Why do so many people complain about the emission of carbon dioxide and to a lesser extent methane?
Animal life exists because it can combine oxygen with carbon based substances (carbohydrates etc). The by-products of this process carbon dioxide, urine and faeces are completely recycleable. Vegetation and the energy from the Sun complete the cycle and turn these waste products back into oxygen and carbohydrates. This process has been going on happily for millions of years. In my days of learning it was refered to as the carbon cycle!
If plant life had to rely on animals to provide Carbon dioxide for its growth it would not flourish very well but luckily carbon dioxide can also be produced by burning carbon based material. This provides much needed carbon dioxide for plant growth. Even so it sucks all the carbon dioxide out of the air that it can, keeping the amount of carbon dioxide to an extremely low level in the atmosphere.
Of course we as humans have discovered that burning plant matter can produce heat that can be used as energy and to create energy in other forms. We also have discovered that concentrated carboniferous material (coal etc) has a much higher heat yield when burnt than other common plant based material.
This gets back to the original thread now. Coal has a finite amount and cannot be easily created. Once it is all used we will need another source of heat. Thus we must not waste it unnecessarily till we can discover a new recycleable method of generating the energy we need. Forget about nuclear energy. It has more problems than other means of generating heat. The obvious source is the Sun. We need to use its energy directly without it being converted into combustable materials. I am sure that this will eventually happen.
Barry
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