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What the world needs now is more fossil fuels, says Trump’s energy secretary (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

Wright, a former fracking executive who was picked by Trump to the crucial cabinet position, also attacked the Joe Biden administration for focusing “myopically on climate change”.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ehhh. I don't know.

So, a lot of fossil fuel built up the Carboniferous Period. Basically, you had woody plants develop. But it took a while for organisms to develop that could break down dead woody plants. So aside from massive fires

which were a thing for a while

there wasn't really a way to eliminate dead wood. A lot of it ultimately became coal.

But today, the world has those organisms. I don't think that it's really possible to reproduce that coal build-up again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

The Carboniferous (/ˌkɑːrbəˈnɪfərəs/ KAR-bə-NIF-ər-əs)[6] is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic era that spans 60 million years, from the end of the Devonian Period 358.86 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Permian Period, 298.9 Ma.

There is ongoing debate as to why this peak in the formation of Earth's coal deposits occurred during the Carboniferous. The first theory, known as the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis, is that a delay between the development of trees with the wood fibre lignin and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading fungi gave a period of time where vast amounts of lignin-based organic material could accumulate. Genetic analysis of basidiomycete fungi, which have enzymes capable of breaking down lignin, supports this theory by suggesting this fungi evolved in the Permian.[26][27] However, significant Mesozoic and Cenozoic coal deposits formed after lignin-digesting fungi had become well established, and fungal degradation of lignin may have already evolved by the end of the Devonian, even if the specific enzymes used by basidiomycetes had not.[25] The second theory is that the geographical setting and climate of the Carboniferous were unique in Earth's history: the co-occurrence of the position of the continents across the humid equatorial zone, high biological productivity, and the low-lying, water-logged and slowly subsiding sedimentary basins that allowed the thick accumulation of peat were sufficient to account for the peak in coal formation.[25]

According to the WP article, there's a competing theory, but even if that's the reason for coal accumulation, it still doesn't really apply to the world today.