If I eat plants from my own garden, there’s no methane used in the fertilizer because I don’t use fertilizer. Yet my noxious-ass intestines will produce methane from something that wasn’t methane before.
It’s the whole reason they wanted to tax cow farts here. Your cows could be eating all natural grass that hasn’t been fertilized at all, but they’re turning other carbon compounds into methane.
And methane is an order of magnitude worse than CO2 for global warming long term.
Well that’s overcomplicating it quite a bit. Just look at the carbon-based molecules. Lump CO2 and CH4 together. Their ratio can be approximated as a constant over some time so who cares. Part if is from newly extracted fossil material, part of the lot is recycled. That’s it.
I mean where do you draw the line between this sort of recycling and just a conservation of matter / energy argument in which just about everything is “recycled” instead of produced?
In terms of atmospheric carbon, it’s either newly brought up from underground petroleum, or it’s recycled from what’s already up here. If you care for volcanoes, you can add them as a third source.
You never produced, you can only recycle.
New greenhouse gases are produced where they produce fertilizer for the foods you eat.
Well no, you can produce methane from other hydrocarbons. You eat stuff and fart out methane
I ate ice cream today, it’s gonna become methane tomorrow
Methane becomes CO2 which is absorbed by plants we eat to produce methane again. Recycling.
Well that’s oversimplifying it quite a bit.
If I eat plants from my own garden, there’s no methane used in the fertilizer because I don’t use fertilizer. Yet my noxious-ass intestines will produce methane from something that wasn’t methane before.
It’s the whole reason they wanted to tax cow farts here. Your cows could be eating all natural grass that hasn’t been fertilized at all, but they’re turning other carbon compounds into methane.
And methane is an order of magnitude worse than CO2 for global warming long term.
Well that’s overcomplicating it quite a bit. Just look at the carbon-based molecules. Lump CO2 and CH4 together. Their ratio can be approximated as a constant over some time so who cares. Part if is from newly extracted fossil material, part of the lot is recycled. That’s it.
The people on a burning planet probably?
You don’t need ANY fossils to be dug up to produce methane, or CO2 for that matter. Of course it helps.
I mean where do you draw the line between this sort of recycling and just a conservation of matter / energy argument in which just about everything is “recycled” instead of produced?
In terms of atmospheric carbon, it’s either newly brought up from underground petroleum, or it’s recycled from what’s already up here. If you care for volcanoes, you can add them as a third source.