• merari42@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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
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      3 months ago

      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      edit: Seems I was working off outdated knowledge.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
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        3 months ago

        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

        • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
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      3 months 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

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

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