well, I've been meaning to make this post and it follows from Mike's. As a geologist I have been trained to appreciate deep time. I'm talking about the age of the rocks that are the source of the oil, not when the organic material was cooked in what follows. Some oil is 1 or 2 million years old (slope of Louisiana Gulf of Mexico). California oil is mostly 17 to 6 million years old. I think Persian Gulf oil may be 100 million years old. Most oil is less than 100 million years old. A lot of coal in the USA is between a couple hundred and 100 million years old. So, it took some serious deep time to take this carbon out of the atmosphere and stick it underground. And now, we are taking this out from underground and releasing it into the stmosphere in a couple of hundred years, Let's see, the difference between 100 and 100,000,000 is a million...so a million times faster. Just casually, it does not seem that anything good can come of this. Chris