this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Today I Learned

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[–] merari42@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

If you make it from coal it is vegan because coal is just plants. If it's made from petroleum it is not vegan because it is made from dinosaurs.

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

made from dinosaurs

False, it's from trees that grew, died, and fell down into piles and got buried, for millions upon millions of years, before anything on the planet evolved to eat their corpses.

edit: Seems I was working off outdated knowledge. Apparently scientists currently believe that almost all of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life such as algae and plankton. It still ain't dinosaur juice though!

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That’s coal. Petroleum is from a variety of things that died in certain conditions where the carbon in their bodies was unable to escape into the short carbon cycle. It’s less dinosaurs and more Paleozoic though. That’s why you have stuff like the Permian basin

Interesting. I knew how coal was formed but also thought a lot of our oil came from Carboniferous forests. After reading your comment I had to go read a few papers and articles! Apparently the consensus these days is that most of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life (diatoms, plankton, algae) that died and was buried in de-oxygenated water. The sheer amount of them that had to live and die to create these vast reservoirs of oil is mind blowing.

[–] snooggums@midwest.social 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Petroleum is also from plants/algea/bacteria/etc. All fossil fuels come non-animal living things things.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

In general my understanding is coal was trees, oil was mostly algae and plankton, and mostly started forming well before the first true dinosaurs.

Technically some of that plankton would be considered animals, though probably not something you'd easily recognize as being an animal (side-note: I'd be curious to hear some vegetarians/vegans weigh in on the theoretical ethics of eating zooplankton)

I'm sure there's some edge cases, traces of more complex animals and such getting mixed in with dead plankton, and at the end of the day carbon is carbon regardless of where it comes from

[–] tpihkal@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does that make China the most vegan energy producer in the world?

[–] QuantumSparkles@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

China makes their fake cooking oil out of sewage

[–] tpihkal@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Technically they are collecting discarded cooking oil from gutters. Potato/potato.