In this setup, or dumb idea if you prefer, we are taking carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere, and then putting it back. We wouldn’t be adding CO2 to the atmosphere, because we would be taking it out in the first place. It is a balanced system.

This is basically what we are doing with oil, except that with burning oil, the CO2 was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.

During photosynthesis, plants turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen (Using the Sun’s energy). Fossil fuels can be traced back to this process. So can burning wood or any bio-waste for energy. At least with my proposal, we are not putting extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, like with burning substances where the CO2 is already trapped. (Although you could argue that with decaying wood and other bio-waste, the CO2 will eventually be released into the atmosphere, so we might as well get some energy from it).

So all the CO2 we are putting back in the atmosphere by burning Oil, wood, or bio-waste originally came from the atmosphere. Some of it was trapped by plants (as sugars) long ago and some not. The thing is, we don’t want to increase the percentage of CO2 in the air, so it is important to keep a certain percentage of CO2 trapped so that we maintain a balance. By burning carbon we get from CO2 in the atmosphere, we keep this balance.

But it would probably be more energy efficient to burn hydrogen that comes from water. Water takes less energy to split than CO2.

Speaking of water, whenever we burn something, we are also creating water as well as CO’2. Like CO2, this is water that was trapped as sugars. So by burning fossil fuels, we have not only been adding CO2 to the environment, we have been adding water. And from the way they are talking, the simplest source of hydrogen for our hydrogen burning cars is oil. But using oil will only add more water to the environment. I think we should pull it from existing water, creating a balance. Surly the energy required to split water is far less than the energy used to find, get, transport and refine oil.