Tucking Carbon Into the Ground

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/business/energy-environment/31CARBON.html?_r=1&ref=businessspecial2

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:53 PM
Subject: re: Tucking Carbon Into the Ground
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

  The world in which humans evolved was made possible by the sequestration of gigatons of carbon during the carbonaceous era. Until then, the abundance of atmospheric carbon dioxide sustained a climate more friendly to giant insects than to what we call higher life.  We, and all the life-forms around us evolved because that carbon was stably buried as fossil fuels. We may hasten our own extinction by  undoing that sequestration. Coal is the time-tested stable and nearly ideal form in which to sequester carbon. To dig it up and burn it while promising to then re-sequester the carbon is folly.

Barry Haskell Levine