In the list of things you should maybe stop dating, here comes Part 2!
After our « In a Relationship with Plastic » where we compared plastic to your ex, here comes our « In a Relationship with Carbon ». This time we won’t compare carbon to your ex, but we will do something worse, compare it to your brother or sister!
Carbon is like your youngest brother… sometimes it drives you crazy but you have to live with it. Sit down and breath in, breath out… No! Because even when you breath out, you exhale carbon dioxide! So the next time you think your sibling is worthless, think she/he might think the same of you. After all, you do have many things in common… you are carbon too! More precisely, you are also MADE of carbon.
According to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, based in Washington, about 18% of our bodies are made of carbon. There are millions of carbon atoms in every one of your cells! This means you are also part of the carbon cycle on this planet… or as a huge talking lion in a famous movie would say « The Great Circle » !
What about plants? Plants absorb CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and give us oxygen. When they die and start to decompose, some of the carbon goes into the ground. The same thing happens with animals… and dead dinosaurs! Now let’s get to the problem, it’s not about dying and « polluting » the ground! That’s natural and you are not polluting anything! It’s about extracting the carbon that is in the ground at a rhythm that is way too fast for our planet!
Our society unfortunately needs fossil fuels to keep functioning and in the past it has allowed us to innovate in many ways! It has helped our ways to move around the world, our economies, and even our health, with many scientific tools made out of plastic! However, we are reaching a danger crossroad and we need to rethink our dependance on fossil fuels.
Burning fossil fuels means extracting carbon from underground and burning it, which leads to liberating it in our atmosphere. So if you have seen the movie Jurassic Park, you will know that liberating dinosaurs is not a good idea! Well, turns out that liberating dead dinosaurs into the atmosphere is not a good idea either!
Carbon is however important for our planet! Without it you wouldn’t be here! If planet Earth did not have a CO2 layer trapping the heat of the sun, we would have a frozen planet with frozen oceans. Since 1960 we have been doing a lot of Let it Go! Let it Go! of fossil fuels into the atmosphere and humankind has been burning a lot more fossil fuels than planting trees, which absorb our emissions. And if you wanted to add a bit more drama to this already quite dramatic scenario, we could also talk about deforestation… but we’ll leave that for another day!
As our oceans are getting warmer, their waters release CO2 into our atmosphere making things worse. And let’s not even mention cows and their methane flatulences! Or burps… because according to NASA (and this is a real fact!), cow belching is worse than cow farts!
Carbon is therefore good up to a certain point. We cannot live without it but we definitely need to find ways to reduce our emissions as much as possible! Scientists are trying to imagine many ways of removing CO2 from our atmosphere and agriculture has a key role to play. Life on our planet would have not been possible without the presence of carbon, but we are going down a road where life will not be as funny if we continue extracting so much carbon from the ground. You can see it as the end of the world, we see it as a challenge and an opportunity to innovate. Let's do it!
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