Accusations of 'greenwashing' by big oil companies are well-founded
Say what you want about fossil fuels, but constant fossilization of Carbon from the atmosphere to under the earths surface is not sustainable.<p>Carbon is a building block of life... and for the few billion years life has been around, we&#x27;ve been losing atmospheric carbon to fossilization because it is being trapped as oranic matter under the earths surface. There are no good natural processes to release it back to the atmosphere consistently. The &quot;carbon-cycle&quot; is net negative over longer periods.<p>In the 4 billion years that life has been around, no other species has even come close to doing this very important work of bringing dormant carbon back into circulation... and if history is any indication, if something happens to us, it may be another billions of years before something like this happens... or never.<p>If there is a &quot;Gaia&quot;, humans using as much fossil fuels over a long period is the ONE thing it wants. To ensure long-term sustainabilty of life, we should be building self-assembling and reproducing autonomous robots to dig out carbon as a contingency plan in case humans dissappear or lose this ability... or what is much more likely that we&#x27;re are no longer interested because some other energy sources become cheaper.<p>It is lunacy to keep repeating the CleanTech era marketing material. Corporations and governments which have no future in oil have or have huge investments in alternate energy will try to vilify cabon and shut it down. But it is important for intellectuals to take the longer view and remember how important digging out trapped carbon is for long-term sustainability of life.