Burning buried sunshine
September 27th, 2006 by Jim JustOn geological timescales of millions of years, carbon is recycled through the interaction of such things as plate tectonics, sedimentation (burial) and volcanism. We dig up or drill for the fossil fuels and then burn them for the ancient stored energy they contain. In so doing, humankind has altered the current carbon cycle such that we are moving carbon more rapidly from the lithosphere into the atmosphere than would otherwise occur. Relying totally on biomass for our power—using crop residues and quick-growing forests as fuel sources—would force us to dedicate a huge part of the landscape to growing these fuels. It would have major environmental consequences. We would need to harvest 22 percent of all land plants just to equal the fossil fuel energy used in 1997—about a 50 percent increase over the amount of plants now removed or paved over each year. Human activities are releasing carbon from “recently buried sunshine”—peat—into the atmosphere as well.