The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

I find it hard to believe anything can top the non-stop burning of natural gas the past two decades from the Bakken fracking fields in North Dakota

Think about how much fuel they waste, tons of CO2 and heating the atmosphere just to get to the oil

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...

> Today, 29 percent of the natural gas extracted in North Dakota is just burned away. This wasted amount represents enough gas to heat half a million homes

Combining the data in the article that was posted (741 ± 61 teragram of carbon annually) with a single Google search about the Bakken fields (4 tons of carbon daily), yields a result that this contribution from the Amazon is 507,534 times larger than the contribution from the Bakken fields.

I knew someone would inevitably try to find a way to refocus the blame on America. Thanks for illustrating just how ridiculously wrong it was in this instance.

That last sentence should give you an immediate idea of the scale, and that it’s not going to be near the top. Half a million homes is tiny when we’re talking about the entire globe. Thats like one medium-sized city, and just the heating, not any other energy use. It would be nice to capture that energy instead of wasting it, but there are far bigger fish to fry.

The misconception here is that the carbon in the Bakken is locked up geologically and essentially removed the biosphere’s carbon cycle but the Amazon is not. Even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn it wouldn’t change that. The problem with fossil fuels is that we are added sequestered to our biosphere at rates it cannot adapt to.

So while absolute terms are less it isn’t the same and we should be worried about what OP is discussing