Our Entire Society is Built on a Geological Fluke 

Singular ONCEAGAn

I had to ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5hfYJsQAhl0.html

One of your worse videos, dump rose lol

So if it is uncommon for easy to exploit energy stores like carbon and oil to firm, then this could explain why we don't see any signs of intelligent life (even if it may be common, it just have not had an industrial and technological revolution yet). 🤔

then earthquakes aren't just caused by high-pressure, they are caused in both fracking (proven) and theoretically sequestration via dissolving rocks as well. sequestration is an addicts idea, it's like someone on meth drinking their own pee to get the most out of it; i.e. not sustainable, diminishing returns, just literally absolutely sickening.

+1

Until the peat is burned

Yes! I'd love to see a video of peatlands restoration efforts!

@@valiroime Or the area is drained and used for construction or agriculture

A decrease or increase of peatlands is actually *NOT* that important. I'm an environmentalist and nature lover, but the reality is that peat moss is like a sponge in an overflowing bathtub with the faucet still on. If you don't turn off the faucet, all the sponges in the world won't stop your tub from overflowing. Creating more peatlands does *NOTHING AT ALL* to end the burning of fossil fuels.

Meh, geothermal plants already do that 😆

@@GreatBigBore That doesn't make it less metal! :P

My luck, I'm going to come back as a dog that's allergic to pet hair with God asking if I'm ready to listen now.

Oh My Dog! Ben, I was thinking the very same thing!

Alternatively, Carbon Dioxide is an ancient evil that the trees of old managed to seal away by sacrificing themselves, and now mankind has accidentally released this ancient evil to wreak havoc on this world...

are you high?

@@benthomason3307 not that day, no. Just pleasantly sober and goofy.

I hadn't heard of that hypothesis, so much as ones suggesting glacial cycles reduced rainfall, helped create the African savanna, and triggered the rest of human evolution that you mentioned.

Yip quickly turned into a CO2 propaganda piece...

@@MinusMedley ?

@@MinusMedley Ah yes, Big pharma and their huge carbon dioxide industrial complex

@@TitaniusAnglesmith Taking carbon out of the atmosphere is not a real solution, its a bandaide being pushed by the worst offenders, so they can keep burning carbon.

Monsters inc

But it's "put that thing back where it came from or so help me"

If you walked 21 miles a day which is maybe possible and took breaks on weekends it would take you 7 years 3&1/2 months to walk the distance. I reckon that if you dedicated a decade of your life to doing it you could. To me that makes the world feel tiny

Tom Turich and his dog walked around the planet in about seven years. He’s the 10th person to compete this feat. You could be the 11th 🤘🏻 🌎🚶‍♂️

That's not even close to what gaslight means

Huh?

@@woodfur00 Yes it is what are you talking about?

youtuber Simon Clark (atmospheric physics researcher) did one about it recently as well (same conclusion)

This

@@joansparky4439 Thanks for the recommendation!

Because clearly developing a technology to mitigate a serious problem means we can't also work on other technologies to replace the ones that caused said problem in the first place. /s

@@angeldude101 No carbon capture project has ever succeeded in any meaningful level of offset for any extended period. The concept of clean coal has comprehensively failed to produce actual results. Among the most successful attempts at the process, which only exists to justify delaying the already possible replacement of coal plants, was an installation that was online a small fraction of the time, didn't achieve anywhere near what was promised, was only attached to one of the powerplant's many stacks, had to be powered with a natural gas powerplant that served no other purpose than running the carbon capture for the coal plant, and was permanently disabled a few years later because the company didn't want to pay to run it anymore, even with the construction costs of the installation itself having been virtually 100% government funded.

Oh gosh yes so much this, as a production house they are so very consistent in being accessible in this manner.

@@Omniverse0 *_"Honestly?"_* Are you normally *not* honest? Anyway, thanks for the heads up that you're not lying.

@@Omniverse0 From a disabillity perspective, I'm all for captioning, because it benefits who are deaf or Hard of Hearing. But I believe enunciating is important too because it not only helps people who are blind or with Low Vision, but those who also use English as a Second Language. There are plenty of media out there that's literally just people talking, "the natural way" - following your argument, but enunciating suits better in Edutainment channels like SciShow.

How many slowed their reading down for the word enunciates? 😉

I really like Rose... but I was actually scrolling down to see if anyone else was complaining about the American? pronunciation of en masse... is it elitist to pronounce words the way they are spoken in the origin language... maybe... I'll leave it at that. :)

Exacty my thoughts, thanks for phrasing them so well. When she called pumping CO2 into rocks "costly" I thought "energy intense?". So we can do it, but produce more CO2 in the process that we stow away?

@@HalfInt Not a climate expert, but removing carbon from the carbon cycle by using electricity (if it is electricity from carbon already in the cycle) removes more carbon overall.

@@cyalknight Well yes, if that electricity was already produced and is excess. I don't think there is any significant excess so far, though. Otherwise, why would we still produce more electricity from fossil fuels.

I agree. Storing carbon can also be done in our infrastructure btw. Use wood instead of concrete (where possible), dry walls, all sorts of decoration,... So basically use more wood. Maybe it's an idea to have an industrial process to mimic the coal forming without losing carbon in the process (deoxidised environments and pressure?). And maybe develop new technological materials with high carbon content. But the basics to me still seems to get carbon out of the air the easy way and that is growing trees (in bogs). We need a massive area for that though, or restore the Amazon forest of course.

@@countk1 big wooden domes filled with plastic covered firewood bricks, when the domes are full cover the roofs with layers of wood and plastics thousands of feet thick... plastic and wooden mountains built in old open pit mines?

+

@@nahadoth2087 Certainly so. Tipping points can occur blindly fast (from a geological timescale), but their effects typically last 10's or 100's of millions of years; the formation of coal deposits being a perfect example.

I mean, I heard that there's a type of bacteria that seems to have evolved the ability to start breaking down a certain kind of plastic (can't remember which one though) that they found in the lake that the plastic factory dumped all its wastewater into, so definitely a good comparison there... the bacteria are learning quicker it seems, over decades instead of millennia (and I for one am looking forward to see how this goes on in the future... go you funky little bacteria😂)

@@Manj_J People are so confused when science gets hijacked by politics. We're supposed to be terrified of a climate emergency, so much so that we're willing to pump CO2 at planetary scale into the earth's crust. But we're already doing carbon sequestration whenever we build things out of wood or plastic. But that's bad, for some reason, so now we need a bacteria to turn plastic into CO2...

I did always find it strange how people who very vocally oppose fracking for legitimate reasons suddenly support it in the name of stopping climate change.

@@twerkingfish4029 I find it strange people cannot see the obvious differences. Well, not really. Most people aren't detail oriented and think that all of one thing is either good or bad, like frakking or nuclear energy. There are indeed good uses for frakking, kiddos.

Depends at what stage you are looking at. The laying down of coal led to a huge drop in CO2 and an equal rise in O2 in the atmosphere, but occurring over the length of a geologic era, not over a couple of centuries.

Thats not true, actually. Giant insects lasted until the Permo-Traissic boundary, when oxygen levels were comparable to how they are now. The pop culture darling, Meganeura (the giant dragonfly* you mentioned) was not even the largest flying insect to live. That honour belongs to Meganeuropsis, a gryphonfly that lived up until the Great Dying killed over 90% of all species. The honda sized bug you mentioned (Arthropleura, which was not an insect, but a millipede) also lived to the middle Permian when oxygen levels were also comparable to now. The notion that arthropods could not actively respire is also outdated and incorrect. Modern day dragonflies and beetles (among many different groups) are capable of using spiracular muscles to pump air in and out of their trachea, the insect equivilent of a lung. Studies have shown that these mechanisms are no less efficient than the breathing of mammals. The real reason why giant arthropods went extinct was because of competition from tetrapods. Arthropods are less efficient than tetrapods are larger sizes because of their possession of exoskeleton instead of endoskeleton. This makes them suffer far more stress while moving. Giant bugs would be able to evolve in today's environments if not for the menagerie of tetrapods that already exist *: It was not actually a dragonfly, but a gryphonfly, an extinct relative of dragonflies

​@@boningguan156you're stating this as if it's a fact. Is it not controversial among scientists? There are competing theories and we don't really know.

⁠@@boningguan156 Thank you for your analysis, isn’t gaining more knowledge great!??!?! I have a thought that maybe your have some knowledge about. Seems to me that any flying insect or mammal that lived it that time, wouldn’t be able to fly now, due to the lower density of the atmosphere. Do you know of any science that supports my theory? For sure, earth was a lot different then than now and since there is no way to accurately measure what the environment was like then, we have to use our best guess. But we can know the amount of lift that is needed to make those animals airborne. And, of course, efficiently. Seems to me, a massive amount of energy, or a much denser atmosphere would be needed. Looking forward to hearing from you.

@@ITeachRick The atmospheric composition was not meaningfully different in the Carboniferous and Mesozoic as it is now, and certainly would not have caused different biomechanics to affect flying animals. There is no significant difference in the density of air back then and now. Any pterosaur flying in the Maastrichtian would be perfectly content in the skies of the Holocene.

Until we will have enough energy from carbon-free sources (and I do not mean only electricity), it will be better to burn those things for energy instead of fossil fuels. Not to mention that rugs can be used for paper production, sludge can be treated and used as fertilizer and so can be agricultural scraps. This will as well store portion of the carbon and at the same time improve quality of the soil.

How many tons of coal must you burn to get the energy needed for the process?

yes. every time.

Too bad this is the only place where life exists.

It could be, and not even plants necessarily, just any (bunch of) organisms that predate intelligent life and leaves enough carbon to become coal

Usually a resource has to exist before a niche evolves to exploit it, so most likely yes.

If the dominant hypothesis is correct, that the life that could decompose it hadn't evolved yet, then yes it seems like the likely result. If the hypothesis referred to in this video is correct, that tectonic movement is the greater factor, then it may be a much less common way to go.

Well, of course it loses stability when you make lots of holes in it.

Better than pumping CO2 into the ground, just bury biomass under impermeable layers in old pit mines. Compressed hay pellets and such.

Using biochar as a soil amendment for agriculture has some promise. It not only improves yields and soil longevity, but it appears to take a couple of thousand years to decompose on average. Every other CCS scheme I've heard of just doesn't work. Either it doesn't sequester the carbon, or, more often, it is just too energy and cost intensive to be a net sink. When we have way more clean energy than we need, then maybe... Now, not really.

Yeah, exactly! I thought this was an odd argument to use. In the UK, old coal mines have tons of minor seismic activity associated with them (due to collapses/groundwater infiltration after they were closed) so are actually some of the less stable places here, at least in present day... guessing it was being used as a catch-all to mean e.g. 'away from big complex prexisting faults'.

Human caused earthquakes are a real thing. At the top of the *list of threats to humanity* are things like climate change, astroid impact, next pandemic, and dictators. The threat of human caused earthquakes is on the list in place 938,432.

Petrified wood is a type of fossil - all the carbon has been leached out and replaced with other minerals.

@@LimeyLassen Especially. Petrified Wood is a Mineral Model of the Wood.

Look up where the warm swamps were out pacing the fungi and bacteria that break down cellulose. Continental drift changes land forms.

Petrified wood is associated with silica. Usually if not always there is lots of volcanic ash/glass dust intimately associated with the petrified material. The multicolored material is associated with red and green soils. Such souls are usually restricted to variable depositional conditions…reflecting climate fluctuation a d changes in water levels.oxygenated and not oxygenated such as stagnant water saturated areas. Most petrified wood is a dark uninteresting material having been petrified in say, water saturated conditions.

Love Rose Bears Don't Walk.

It looks like you pressed Start on a random word generator.@@dianewallace6064

Wouldn’t a society still be able to form around pure mechanical energy from water movement? I mean agriculture and transportation via waterways were a lot more fundamental to early society than coal. If anything I think it would just lead to concentration of civilization around rivers and lakes.

My thoughts exactly. Who knows how many intelligent races might be out there stuck forever in a pre-industrial state? You can't transition past medieval-level technology without coal, oil or gas.

@@datboigroovin8200 sure but they would be extremely hard to find, the fermi paradox is about not meeting aliens. If they exist but they're all stuck in the bronze age, that is a possible answer

@@datboigroovin8200 That’s perfectly fine for a pre-industrial society. That’s not going to help produce massive amounts of steel, airplanes, rockets, etc. Almost all of our modern society was created through fossil fuels because of the dense energy they provide and the fact that they can be moved wherever they’re needed. Without fossil fuels, human society would still very much resemble what it was shortly after the American Revolution.

@@vcuheel1464 ... I think much earlier than that.

Theoretically it is very easy to find alternatives to coal for cheap energy, some of which competed with coal during early industrialization. The very, very important thing here is rather the abundance of mineral deposits in general - many things are only possible because we have easy access to iron & copper etc.

@@Argacyan Many of the trains and steamships burned wood because, locally, it was cheaper than coal. However, that equation changes rapidly when there is more than a few furnaces to feed and wood can't be cut or grow back fast enough. Wood and peat work as an alternative to coal in low demand or supplementary situations, but not at the intensity we are accustomed to.

I don't hear Ringworld references very often, great read!

@@Argacyan maybe it’s a soft filter, and species take a thousand years instead of a hundred to fully industrialize. That may mean many species never struggle with global warming, though they may struggle with other kinds of environmental depletion

I have heard some other theory, we are here just too early.

I havent heard about that until now and I googled it and it is super interesting. I hope Sci-show will make video about it. Thanks for the info.

I guess (not a biologist) it depends on efficiency?

If it's over 9000, the Saiyans get scared.

Everything comes down to chemical bonds in the end, I think in this case "powerful" describes it's ability to break apart polymers. A hammer breaks rocks but a knife cuts rubber, powerful is pretty conditional here and kind of seems like a poor choice of words honestly.

Its not that deep, just some lyrical hogwash to convey importance and intrigue without having to sacrifice time to explain, its the most basic of short form science communication tricks

What? 9000?

At this point, most of the consequences are separating investors from dollars. IMO the only meaningful carbon capture tech is building topsoil, which isn’t going to make anyone the killing they’re expecting.

We already use a lot of energy turning petroleum products into plastic, turning trees into wood and paper, etc. So just bury those cabon-based trash items. We already do carbon sequestration in this way. The idea of pumping CO2 into the ground is... nuts to me. It's used by trees, plants and plankton and we need those things to eat, so if we're really successful at carbon sequestration we all die.

which is something we do for storage of excess energy

@@namenloss730 The pumped storage facilities use the principle that nuclear power runs more efficiently at a constant level. When demand is low (such as weekends or nights), the excess power is used to pump the water up to a holding pond. When demand is higher than the reactor is dialed in for, they release the water back down through the turbines and generate power. It can also be used with solar or wind generation where the generation changes between weather patterns. In the same way that nuclear isn't well suited for instant demand changes, neither is solar or wind. The pumped storage helps smooth out the demand curves. Of course it isn't 100% efficient, but it is much more efficient than constantly adjusting control rods to account for fluctuations in demand or waiting for the weather to change.

@@chadportenga7858 yes, thanks for detailing it

@@namenloss730 Sure, but (1) that subtracts a lot from the energy we wanted to get from the fuel (2) we can only make use of that stored energy by releasing the CO2. Which we were trying to avoid. BTW, even if you released it, the total energy you would get (burning the fuel, then later releasing the CO2) would be less than you'd get the old-fashioned way. You lose both ways.

Agreed. I love this video about it: Honest Government Ad - Carbon Capture & Storage

No, they are not. Saying so is flat out silly.

Thank goodness for photosynthesis and the carbon capture micro devices in plant cells.

@@filonin2 I'll believe it when they start working at their promised efficiency and fossil fuel companies stop lying about CCS as a greenwashing tactic.

@@cindypuckett2782 - The only problem is the natural system is 1000's of times too slow to help us over the next few centuries. We are in for a long, tough fight to keep parts of earth livable, most likely scenario is that 1/2 or more of the earth's population of humans will not survive the next 200 years.

not sure if i can build it before taking 2 breaths and dying of oxygen toxicity

@@viktorm3840 going to have to exhale eventually

But living organisms need long time periods to adapt to the changes of climate. Yes, there were periods of warm climate, but the ecosystems were adapted to that. The climate is now changing much much faster than it was ever in the past (maybe with the exception of the event that killed the dinosaurs, that was even more abrupt change. But it started one of the mass extinctions - not a great example of climate change being ok). The nature is not able to adapt to changes so fast. Another mass extinction may be just beginning to happen right now. After the clima stabilizes, in million or tens of millions of years, new ecosystems will form and new life form will thrive. And it is quite possible that this future forms of life will indeed be very happy with the abundance of CO2. We can't destroy the life itself. But we are capable of destroying the ecosystems we rely on now, and with these ecosystems, our civilisation will colapse.

Radiology states it will oxidise given enough time

Yes, and also it makes the mine sites of tomorrow

@@off-labelbotanist5355 Is that good or bad?

@@MatthewMakesAU I want to be the best environmentalist I can, and I know it sounds horrible, but isn't burying old plastic make sense? More than using still more energy to try to inject into rocks or recycle it?

@@1chumley1 Yes, putting plastic in landfill is the best thing to do with it. We should make more use of landfills for material that can in theory be recycled but current technology doesn't allow it without using excessive resources. That's what I mean by the landfill of today is the mine site of tomorrow

Agreed but we passed the exit where the Earth could heal about 7,999,000,000 people ago.

YESSS!!!!! ive been "yay, rose!" from teh first time she came on :) i definitely become happier when i see her in a video haha. Not to say anything bad about the other hosts of course, theyre all great :)

She is definitely the worst host

@@dillonyang6869 dang, how does it feel to be so confidently wrong?

Exactly! That's what humans have been doing since agriculture. It looks like most of the "solutions" to a fossil fuel economy will produce more pollutants than the current economy when you examine them in detail and the period of transition will produce massive amounts of CO2 and toxic waste. There's a good chance that we'll fry and poison ourselves in the race to stop global warming.

All the luck to you, Zane.

technically yes though you need the right conditions for peat to be able to get converted into coal. During the Late Devonian and Carboniferous what would become the coal belt was a number of mature volcanic arc complexes near the equator and the Earth was actually in the late Paleozoic ice age where the minor supercontinent Gondwana sat at the south pole buried beneath kilometers of ice which waxed and waned in extent. Effectively the Milankovitch cycles created the conditions by lowering sea levels allowing coal swamp rainforests to expand and then get inundated during the subsequent interglacial where shallow tropical waters allowed the accumulation of overlying salts which prevented hydrocarbons from easily escaping and then the arc basins got smashed between the continents Laurentia Baltica and Siberia as they met with Gondwana in the southern hemisphere to form Pangaea. In essence coal is peat that has been altered by metamorphosis in this case driven by the formation of towering mountains as the continents squished the arcs into belts which thanks to the basins and accretionary process were buried deep enough that they got not only preserved but metamorphized.

Some of the deeper and deposits of peat are on their way to being coal. Those deposits more closely resemble bituminous (soft) coal than the compressed plant matter that one would expect peat to be. Though, keep in mind that these are the oldest deposits known and we were already burning them in the middle ages.

In many ways using liquid CO2 is a superior medium for fracking than water and solvents. Liquid CO2 injection can also be used to rinse out depleted oil fields and extend the service life of existing wells so that less new environmental cost is incurred for getting more oil which we still need now and will continue to need some of in the future. All while the majority of the injected CO2 remains liquid in the ground where the petroleum it displaced was. And yes, in some circumstances it may eventually come back to the surface, but even then it will buy time by being out of circulation for possibly thousands of years and probably longer. The CO2 can be gathered at the "smokestack" of many types of industrial facility, from fertiliser plants, to electricity generator stations, to centralised municipal heating furnaces (where steam is a utility), liquefied and piped back as a commodity for various applications including the aforementioned extraction and sequestration. This can usually be done at much less cost than atmospheric collection, but only if the collection pipelines are in place. If the emissions of biomass and garbage burning electricity generating stations are captured for sequestration then they could be carbon negative.

Perhaps they get different flukes to us. Maybe we missed out on certain compounds they get, and we're looking for chemical signals different to what they emit.

Here is some information for you to get your head around. There is no climate crisis, you can ignore the data all you like and abuse the meaning of English words all you like but at the end of the day there is no crisis, natural or human induced. Look at the Keeling Curve dataset, notice how there is no "signal" detectable from the covid slowdown of the economy? That means that you don't even have direct proof that humans are the major contributor to the rate of CO2 rise in the Earth's atmosphere. I kid you not, go and look up the data yourself.

Actually, I find Rose the worst presenter in SciShow lineup. So bad I can't even finish her videos despite how much I like this channel.

@@Muaddibize They all seem the same to me? Like even down to the intonation and hand gestures

@Peter Lorimer This is my 1st time seeing Rose. Seems quite good. I like her big earrings today.

Looks like the recovery's going well. My aunt had a stroke that made her talk in a very arythmic rate and completely monotone, and now a year later she sounds like her old self. You'll get there, my dude. Keep it up!

Glad she's around to write youtube comments for you instead of being in control of her own life 🤷‍♂️

@@Ducky69247 do you think being in control of your own life means you should stop caring for people close to you?

@@nuklearboysymbiote sure, if that's what you read, then it must be what I said.

@@Ducky69247 troll

"life, uhh... finds a way"

The industrial revolution would not have happened without coal, but scientific and technical progress would still have continued. Humans would harness electricity from other sources even if it took a couple hundred years longer to develop. On a galactic timescale, that's like a single grain of sand on a beach.

There's only two things that can get a rocket into space. 1) Lots of fossil fuels. 2) Lots of nuclear explosions. So a civilization in lack of one would be forced to use the other. Possibly to their own ruin.

@@Yonkage-ik5qb Hydrogen. Which can, and is though expensively, gotten from water and electricity.

I agree with Dem Pilafian. Energy density is often a bottleneck on technology. The 2nd Industrialization Revolution in particular was predicated (among other things) on the widespread adoption of the combustion engine, which depended on coal and metallurgy. But it's possible to advance science without industrialization. Scientific advancement is more a matter of social institutions.

That was my understanding, too, that the reason Earth won’t create any more coal is that since the end of the Carboniferous, fungi evolved the ability to break down lignins. Biology moving faster than geology

I’m pretty sure they were saying the inability for fungi to break down lignin was the original sole theory for the existence of the Carboniferous layer, but now they believe it might be more so because of geological activity (tectonics) that created lots of environments where the carbon could be trapped (isolated and low oxygen, even underwater). Of course it could be both which they haven’t discounted yet, but they probably lean more towards the geologic activity as the main culprit. That’s what I got from the video at any rate.

Its more complicated than this and frankly Sci Show didn't do their homework here very well if at all. Namely they somehow missed that we know from evidence such as glacial drop stones temperature proxy data and the relative apparent timing between transitions in environments from swamp jungles to shallow seas appear to follow Milankovitch cycles. During this period of time known as the late Paleozoic ice age which lasted from 360 to 255 million years ago saw the polar continent of Gondwana. The majority of our coal comes from this time and is at least in part due to the inundation of continental shelves during interglacials. However more broadly for context most of the land which formed coal existed in the form of numerous large mature volcanic arc complexes which had been active since the Neoproterozoic. These mature volcanic arcs had been around for hundreds of millions of years and likely had reached the stage where they had become anchored to the tropics as subducted crust piled up to sink into the lower mantle. These arcs were covered in thick jungles which are responsible for most of the coal. In this sense they were as a general role largely analogous to the Sunda shelf of Indonesia and Sahul the greater Australia including accreted arcs onto the Australian continental shelf to the south. Around this time however Laurentia Baltica and Siberia were in the process of plowing into these archipelagos and ultimately these arcs were smashed up between these continents and Gondwana around the south pole as they met in the southern mid latitudes to form Pangaea. It is these accreted arcs which became compressed into our worlds modern coal belts a history which is even given away in part by their name as these belts were formed from accreted terrain that got squished together during the collisions. So while the volcanic arcs played the role of sequestering and concentrating the coal long term it was actually the glacial interglacial sea level changes which caused the anaerobic inundation of these coal swamps a process which can be observed from excavations around modern continental shelves today showing us that there are buried forests and even archeological artifacts beneath the sediment.

Rose Bear Don’t Walk

Late but I’m guessing you missed both the credits at the end and the description because they both say that the host for this episode is Rose Bear Don’t Walk and it was either that or you didn’t realize Bear Don’t Walk is a Native American name.

I tend to think that an extraterrestrial collision initiated a lot of the motion.

Pangea was forming during the Carboniferous, not breaking apart.

Sounds a lot like Noah’s flood

Well there is another similar method called Enhanced Rock weathering. The rocks/minerals containing Calcium that soak up carbon dioxide is used to amend soil for balancing ph instead of liming which releases carbondioxide

@@aleenaprasannan2146 oh yeah i think i head thunderfoot talking about that in one of his videos awhile back

... and when growing other plants for crops, biochar the parts not used for food. Charring straw from wheat and plowing it back in is both good for the soil locks up the carbon, as you suggest.

Why can't we build houses with it? Like, is the goal for all these solutions the most humans to die?

lawns are terrible for the environment

Would take millions of years and would take more energy to artificially create the environment needed for coal to form than the energy we'll get from ot

Chemistry is magic. You can do all of this. Except, in every carbon storage project, the actual amount of carbon emitted through their processes is always larger than the amount of captured carbon. Also, all this captured carbon could leak back into the atmosphere, lakes, rivers or geound water. These problems occur to 90% of carbon capture projects.

storing carbon is fine, but requires energy.. we don't even manage to source all our energy carbon neutral right now, so there is no way carbon storage as you envision it will be a carbon sink

Justayoutuber1986 creating compost from them helps as some carbon remains as humus, and high-humus soils become better at sequestering more cabon as humus

It looks like a hat

Pretty much. Conditions to form coal are extremely rare today, whereas they were quite common during the carboniferous.

It's incredibly unlikely that they're some element we haven't discovered yet. The science says that almost every element we haven't discovered is highly energetic and has a half life measured in milliseconds.

What Nate said, but also this actually has been proposed a number of times and scientists have considered it. I suggest looking up the wikipedia article "Hypothetical types of biochemistry". It lists a number of them, including silicon based (which seems to be the most likely, given it's properties are very similar to carbon).

With our current understanding of atoms, we probably have discovered most if not all (proton, neutron and electron) natural elements. I think it is carbon based life forms because carbon combines and interacts in many chemicals useful to life, while Helium is a noble gas and barely interacts chemically. Though, it is possible that aliens use another substance that doesn't react with our normal matter. Dark matter creatures???

@@cyalknight Oooh, that would be really cool. NGL I'd watch a show about that.

Not necessarily a positive difference though. In a lot of environments, planting trees is a net carbon source for at least a few decades. They can have a big effect on the soil and plants already there... And not in a good way carbon storage wise.

As soon as we have good carbon storage, the price to store it must be included in your fossil fuel price. Also remove subsidies on fossil fuel and put that money to better use. That said, I agree with your statement. It seems more like a distraction at this point in time when we're still actively releasing greenhouse gasses en masse.

That's not a nuclear power plant - it's the Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England, which originally was coal-fired, and has now largely converted to biomass. Not all cooling towers belong to nuke plants (and some nuke plants don't have cooling towers).

Those are infact coal cooling towers, note the large feild of coal to the front. That style of tower is used for many cooling applications, from nuclear to chemical processing.

Look up "the Dunning-Kruger effect"

The Rankine cycle (no matter how the steam is being generated, others have already set you straight on that one anyway) is more efficient if you can keep the hot and the cool phase apart as far as possible. Cooling with water in cooling towers helps to increase the efficiency, that's why coal fired power stations have them (the steam / water within the plant is NOT getting out, it's kept within the cycle).