psychotic carbon cycle

by anderson

It took the earth's ecosystem hundreds of millions of years to sequester
sufficient quantities of carbon from the atmosphere in order that
oxygen breathing life forms could take hold and thrive. Those carbon
sinks are usually buried, once imagined to be safely, thousands of feet
beneath the surface of the planet. Other sinks are active surface carbon
scrubbers, most significantly, oceans and flora. Oil deposits, coal,
oil shale, tar sands, peat-lands, vast carbon sinks either buried or
soon to be, created over eons and spanning the globe, lay testament to
the efficiency of the earth's ecosystem, which itself has created the
climate we enjoy.

We have exploited these dense carbon sinks. We
have gouged the earth hither and yon, extracted the energy by oxidizing
C-H bonds to basically move shit around, and then we have released
the carbon waste back into the atmosphere. Today, we have destroyed, or
are in the process of destroying, some of these surface carbon sink
scrubbers in order to extract the other, commercially viable, C-H bond
lodes, release the carbon that the scrubbers, destroyed, can no longer scrub.

We humans plunge the depths of land and sea, and with the
latest engineering marvels, then suck those sinks dry. We tear off the
tops of mountains to sustain our thirst and hunger for all things
electric, which is rapidly becoming more and more things. We fight and
kill each other for these carbon sinks. Often, we will pretend that that
is not what it is about.

And this is what it is all about:

CH₄ + 2 O₂ ? CO₂ + 2 H₂O

Well,
this and its many hydrocarbon oxidation variations. Oh, and a bunch of
kilojoules get spit out.* Bingo!

That's it. That's what all the
geopoli-posturing and fighting and drilling and war and paving and
moving and mess is all about. Looks pretty simple, right?

Not to
us. 'Cause we even fuck that up, and wind up doing shit like this,

CH₄
+ O₂ ? CO + H₂ + H₂O

and worse.

Of
course, since we're lazy asses, cheap and greedy, we don't usually
attain the pure combustion necessary for the "clean" burn. So we
half-ass it, execute terribly incomplete burns, while also leaving in a
bunch of other nasty shit, other atmospheric poisons long ago scrubbed,
that we should really rather not burn, like sulfur. We know burning sulfur inevitably leads to sulfuric acid rain falling on us.  We know we not
should burn sulfur, but we do.  And by "us" I mean the "small people."

Not only will we go to great lengths and
expenditures to capture the carbon sinks, when we do get them, and
after all that trouble, we poop most of the C-H bond lode right out the
rear end, and poison ourselves and everything else with our own
incomplete combustion and incredibly inefficient mechanicals. We have
been able to do this primarily because, until recently, the carbon sinks
have been fairly cheap, and because the once clean earth could absorb a
lot of shit before things went wrong. Now that those sinks are not so
cheap, abuse of land, sea, air, fish, foul, and flesh in far away
places, and right next door, is rampant. And things are going wrong.

We
break those precious C-H bonds through rapid, explosive, oxidation. We
have harnessed explosive oxidation to move a lot of shit around the
planet. It's what we do. But we have also weaponized explosive
oxidation in order to kill each other in order to secure more C-H bond
oxidation potential, which means securing the carbon sinks. We have
employed weaponized explosive oxidation historically to seize and
control resources long before the carbon sink became the necessary and
sought lode. Those historic squabbles include resource lode fights
over land, water, rubber trees, coltan, palm oil, soybean, on, and on.

We
have exploited the carbon sinks through, mostly, explosive oxidation,
for a long time, at a geometrically progressing rate, and then the
carbon that we have been reintroducing into the atmosphere -- there very
same shit that the beautiful and wondrous flora of planet earth had
sucked out of the fetid atmosphere several hundred million years ago --
is now once again causing a reversion to an earlier, warmer epoch, with a
high carbon atmosphere, and primordial seas.

Hmm, gotta stop
that!

So, whadda we humans come up with, a way to fix it? Why
now we are on the verge of developing technology that will reinsert our industrial carbon waste back into the crust of the earth.

In
other words, we've worked feverishly and violently to extract the
earth's economic carbon sinks -- sinks we know how to use -- burn them
up to move shit around and whack each other for more explosive bond
oxidation so we can move even more shit around, and then grab the carbon
remains, stuff them back into the crust of the earth, pull out a plumb
and say what a good boy am I.