Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant

This does make sense, but it is odd that the existing gas market is not sufficient.

Protecting the environment is not the point of this stunt, is it?

Just a random reader here, but no one is saying this. Either you're willfully ignoring the point, or you missed it. It has nothing to do with "a different kind of carbon" or "the political affiliation of the cause."

Here is another explanation. I hope you find it not idiotic, and you'll find a citation for everything I say (including quotes from the source to back up my specific comments):

Hydrocarbons in the form of fossil fuels have been stored for millions of years. They reflect carbons that have not been extant in the atmosphere for so long that they have been irrelevant to the climate. These fuels also developed over geological time, so the creation of /new/ fossil fuel (i.e., carbon) stores is also irrelevant to our climate in human-scale years.

On the contrary, carbons in the form of trees, bushes, and grasses have been pulled from the atmosphere within the past years or decades (plant mass comes from atmospheric carbon, not the ground) as the plants and trees grew.

When grasses and trees burn, yes - that carbon gets released into the atmosphere. But it then gets photosynthesized back into grasses and trees over the next years and decades, recapturing that carbon in a time period that is relevant to human lifespans.

However when fossil fuels burn, they release net-new (from an atmospheric perspective) carbon with no recapture mechanism available for perhaps millions of years.

Of course there are exceptions. Old growth forests have an outsized impact on atmospheric carbon vs. grasslands. Additionally, the climate change-driven increase in forest fire frequency, combined with our already-high carbon levels, mean the short-term increase in carbon may have an outsized influence on drought and other negative climate changes before it can be recaptured.

So yes, recent environmental research is looking far more carefully at forest fires' impact on carbon load and climate impact. But no, this has nothing to do with "trimming" or "raking" our forests. Nor does it have to do with the "politics" of fossil fuel vs. forestry, nor is it "different carbon."

I hope this helps answer your questions.

Reference: https://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/wildfires-gr...

> In Australia wildfires may well be GHG emission neutral over time. A recent report released by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources concluded that based on existing evidence, “… bushfires release significant amounts of carbon dioxide, but generally recover over time, generating a significant carbon sink in the years following the fire.”

> For millennia fire has been a feature of the natural environment. An equilibrium existed whereby the quantity of CO2 released into the atmosphere by burning and the quantity stored in plant material by photosynthesis remained neutral.

> This view, while appropriately conservative in the context of the Kyoto protocols in 1997, now still understates the importance of wildfire related GHG emission in two ways. Firstly, CO2 released into the atmosphere by wildfires can remain there for a period of approximately seven months before it is re-captured by photosynthesis. During this time it will contribute to the warming of the planet. Secondly, and most importantly, there is compelling evidence from a number of sources that the incidence and intensity of wildfires is increasing.

And contemporary off-the-shelf components that perform the Sabatier process aren't probably meant to operate outside the Earth.