I'm not grasping how burning wood is carbon neutral. Sure, burning wood amounts to the same emissions as letting it rot but if I cut down a tree in the forest it leaves an opening in the canopy that quite a few saplings compete to fill and eventually one or two will, choking out the rest.
Now the world has the carbon emissions from the tree that died prematurely (because I cut and burned it) and whatever took its place plus the ones that died trying .
Wood burning is carbon neutral because trees absorb just as much carbon in life as they release after they die.
On the other hand, if we burn all the known fossil fuel reserves, the planets climate reverts back to an earlier time period and is uninhabitable. Planet earth is a wonderful place for humans precisely because so much carbon was sequestered (locked up) over billions of years. You don't want to undo that in 200 short years. The science on this is solid and, contrary to disinformation campaigns designed to maintain the dollar value of those reserves, even the uncertainties with the current science are miniscule in terms of the bigger picture. Specifically, these reserves took billions of years to sequester so much carbon, whether the climate takes 20 years, 100 years or even 200 years to completely transform, that is irrelevant. It is an unacceptable change for the human species (which is adapted to live in our current climate).
If it is impossible to consume all known petroleum reserves without creating a planet that is uninhabitable by humans, then what is the true economic worth of those reserves? Currently they are being valued at many billions of dollars and, when you buy stock in an oil major, those reserves (and the future income streams from those reserves) are what you are paying for. But if they can't be burned without eliminating most or all humans, than the bulk of those vast reserves are literally worthless and the oil companies annual statements that value those reserves at many billions of dollars are essentially fraudulent. By using disinformation to discredit that global warming is even an issue, the value of those reserves is supported. And oil has created a major part of the wealth that exists today. So, by believing and supporting those disinformation campaigns, and by electing people who say they aren't convinced GW is due to burning of fossil fuels, people are actually supporting the wealthy families who became wealthy through oil and still have major portions of their wealth in oil. To sell it all would trigger huge capital gains liabilities so they must transfer the wealth slowly and sell it off as fast as they are able to create matching tax credits to balance the capital gains. With wealth this large that can take decades. They are hoping that by the time it is widely realized those reserves can't be consumed (which makes the estimated future worth of those reserves fraudulent) they will have unloaded their vast oil empires onto the people via pension funds and the like. As long as they can plausibly claim their is no problem with burning all their known reserves, it is not fraudulent to value them as if they can be used. So, yes, help them sow their doubt and spread their seeds of disinformation and see how that helps you, the common man. They have you fooled that, by being a GW skeptic, you are sticking it to "the man".
Currently, they only have the most gullible 35% supporting them. But that is enough to help them unwind their oil interests in a more profitable manner and avoid a lot of tax that would be due if they unwound their positions at once. It really is all about money yet some can't see it.
