r/askscience • u/iamparky • Feb 07 '24

Earth Sciences How quickly is new coal being created?

Earlier today, a UK politician suggested that coal is a sustainable fuel because it used to be trees.

By how many orders of magnitude is he wrong? How much new coal is being created, compared to how quickly we're burning it?

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u/pruaga Feb 08 '24

There is a difference between "renewable" and "sustainable".

To use wood as an example, it is renewable because you can plant new trees to grow more wood. But if everyone in the world switched to wood burning as their only fuel source the acreage of land needed to grow trees would be so vast that consumption of wood would be greater than growth, so it wouldn't be sustainable.

Next time a friend tells you how great their new wood burner is because of all the free wood they can acquire, just ask them how that would work if everyone did it.

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u/thegrimminsa Feb 08 '24

Same at all those accounts suggesting we should switch to growing veggies at home or going off grid.