General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The U.S. Navy Just Announced The End Of Big Oil And No One Noticed [View all]BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)Of course the acidification of the ocean is a problem. But we were talking about the greenhouse effect, and this cycle is absolutely not "greenhouse neutral".
Carbon left alone in the ocean eventually is consumed by algae and settles to the silt on the ocean floor where it is strongly sequestered. The acidification problem results from our ADDITION of carbon into the atmosphere at a rate much, much higher than the hard sequestration processes. It is a time scale issue.
And likewise, releasing carbon from seawater via synthesized hydrocarbons, might be an equilibrium thing over the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, but in human scale it is definitely not greenhouse neutral. The issue is that burning synthesized hydrocarbons puts the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere immediately and the ocean can't absorb that for hundreds of years.
The answer is to move aggressively to non-polluting, non-carbon energy. That is solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric. There is plenty of energy available just from those 4 sources. Regarding energy distribution, the electric grid is dandy, and H2 will be a good solution for transportation -related applications, but only H2 created in a non-carbon way.