The case for the SUV

Here's something I'm wondering about. Life on this planet is carbon based. The less carbon there is available in the environment, the less life the world can support. Plants breathe in CO2 (during the day, anyway) and use the sun's energy to convert this CO2 into sugar and Oxygen. This sugar is then converted by the plant and the animals that eat it (here my knowledge gets a little weak) and is somehow fed into general chemistry of the organism. As plants and animals die and decay, some of this carbon is released back into the environment, but much is taken up directly by other living organisms.

Originally, the earth had a lot of carbon in the atmosphere and water. Then, over time, this carbon was taken up by living organisms and only a little was left in the atmosphere. At this point, the earth was pretty much at capacity as far as the amount of life it could support.

However, as we all know, the oil and coal that we now pull from the earth is what's left of the bodies of living organisms that died millions of years ago. Over time, carbon has been removed from the environment and is no longer accessible to living organisms. If this process were to continue undisturbed, one would think that the capacity for life on earth would gradually diminish, leaving the earth a wasteland. I'm stretching a little here, but it could be that the Sahara desert is an early result of this process.

By burning fossil fuels, such as gasoline in our automobiles, we're actually returning some of this carbon to the environment.

If done too much, of course, we could cause a greenhouse effect, and I'm not enough of an expert to say whether what we're burning now is too much or not. Of course, I'm not enough of an expert to have made any of these claims, but that didn't stop me :)

Maybe there's something wrong with this theory. Considering how much the oil companies would like to continue buring oil, one would think that if there were any merit to this theory, they would have been spouting it all over the place. On the other hand, there's just the tiniest possibility that nobody's thought of it yet, in which case the theories mine.

Remember, I'm publishing this theory on July 15th, 2005. If anybody publishes the idea after that, they're too late. I own it! (Actually, I started to write this post yesterday, so I'm not sure what date is going to show up when I post it. It may show up as July 14th.)