"Steve Spence" wrote in message
...
JoeSixPack wrote:

Local economies are different from global ones. If you live on a street
where they throw away a lot of cardboard boxes, that could be your cheap
fuel, but it won't work for everyone. North America has vast regions of
rapidly-growing aspen poplar that can and are being compressed into fuel
for pellet stoves. Farms produce a lot of excess plant matter that is
either left to rot or is plowed back into the soil. Pellets are the
easiest form of biofuel to produce, but they still load the atmosphere
with carbon.
actually they do not add to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Bio based fuels are carbon neutral, no gain. They remove the same amount
of CO2 during the growing season.


We've had this argument before, and it's a specious one. Switching to
biofuels does not significantly reduce the amount of carbon being loaded
into the atmosphere, nor does it trigger the earth to assimilate carbon
faster. The dramatic rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1800 has been a result
of burning carbon-based fuels faster than the earth can assimilate it. It
makes no difference which carbon-based fuel is being burned, rapid
atmospheric CO2 loading will still occur. The only way to reverse the trend
is to reduce the burning of carbon-based fuels to a point where the
assimilation rate exceeds our emission rate. The bigger the difference, the
faster the CO2 levels in our atmosphere will decline.