"Bottom of the energy hill" is a useful term in a lab. However the earth is not a chemistry lab. We cannot ignore photosynthesis outside of a lab as it is a factor that exists.
> We cannot ignore photosynthesis outside of a lab as it is a factor that exists.
I apologize if this wasn't clear. It's an expression about energy potentials, and as such it's not just useful in a lab, it's an essential piece of information about the substance.
For example in the original context of this comment thread, a person asked whether there was a danger of people exhausting our atmospheric CO2 because they got too greedy with this technology - a question that can in fact not be answered meaningfully without talking about energy deltas. The fact that CO2 cannot be practically processed in a way that releases energy is the only pertinent information when talking about this.
