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A comment on How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the California desert. Parent comment

Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by OkayPhysicist on Thursday April 20, 2023 @01:52PM (#35643647)
Sure. But the conversation here is about biofuel. Leet's say I want to fly to London because I'm sick of the gorgeous weather in California. In order for aviation to exist, we need energy storage substantially denser than what batteries can currently provide. Our options are A) Biofuel, which captured CO2 in its development, or B) Fossil Fuels, which did not.

A) is objectively the superior option, because buying said biofuel puts an economic incentive on the guy making the biofuel to keep capturing more CO2 to make more biofuel, resulting in ~about carbon neutrality. B) releases a bunch of CO2 that has been sequestered since long before you or I ever existed.

If you want to pay purely to sequester carbon, go for it, buddy. Nobody's stopping you from going to your local tree farm, buying a tree, and burying it. That's your perogative. But your buried tree doesn't get me to my Jack the Ripper street tour or whatever.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by WalterBright on Thursday April 20, 2023 @02:08PM (#35643850)
Burning a log you just cut is no different from burning a log you dug up. You've accomplished nothing whatsoever in reducing CO2 emissions.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by OkayPhysicist on Thursday April 20, 2023 @07:28PM (#35647929)
It literally does reduce emissions if you factor in the fact that I grew the tree, offsetting an equal amount of carbon.

Maybe this will help you think about it:

If I drove over to the supermarket and back, and then planted a tree that would sequester an equal amount of carbon to the amount I released driving to the supermarket, would you agree that I am offsetting/reducing my emissions?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by WalterBright on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:48AM (#35650166)
The CO2 released from burning a new log or an old log makes no difference whatsoever. If you want to plant a tree, it has nothing to do with whether you burned an old or a new log.

Do you know the reason why England set up the Jamestown settlement? Because they wanted to make glass. Why set up a glassmaking operation in America? Because they ran out of trees in England for fuel for the glass furnaces.

A lot of places in the world have been deforested for fuel - and this was before coal. Do you really think biofuels from wood, cow fat, and algae ponds are going to make any difference? It's just a fantasy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the Califor... by OkayPhysicist on Friday April 21, 2023 @07:14PM (#35661510)
You did not answer the question. It's really not complicated: Can I offset my burning of one tree by planting another? Yes or No.
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