>They didn't say reducing carbon meant killing people maliciously
Yes, yes they did but you missed it..
"Shine on you crazy diamond: why humans are carbon-based lifeforms"
11-11-2012
"Everything on earth is made up of combinations of different elements - all of which can be found on the periodic table. Considering that the periodic table contains 118 elements it seems a pity that organic life tends to feature only five or six of those elements in any vast quantities. The main one being carbon.
It would be impossible for life on earth to exist without carbon. Carbon is the main component of sugars, proteins, fats, DNA, muscle tissue, pretty much everything in your body. The reason carbon is so special is down to the electron configuration of the individual atoms. Electrons exist in concentric 'shells' around the central nucleus and carbon has four electrons in its outermost shell. As the most stable thing for an atom to have is eight electrons, this means that each carbon can form four bonds with surrounding atoms.
Each bond in the above molecule is formed by the sharing of two electrons; one from the carbon and one from the hydrogen. The ability to form four bonds isn't restricted to carbon though, it's a property of every atom with four outer electrons, including silicon, tin and lead. What's special about carbon, and the reason that silicon-based lifeforms are restricted to science fiction (and lead-based lifeforms are hardly ever mentioned) is that it can form double-bonds which share more than one electron with another atom, as shown below:
Why is carbon able to do this while silicon can't? Although the bonds are all drawn as straight lines in the diagram above, in real life not all bonds are equal. The double bond consists of two different types of bond. Each bond is made up of two electron orbitals (one from each atom) which have overlapped. The easiest way to think of an orbital without getting into some serious physics is as a blurry sort of zone in which a fast-moving electron is most likely to be whizzing about. When two orbitals overlap, you have double the space which two electrons can whiz around in.
The single bond is formed by two circular orbitals overlapping and surrounding both atoms:
The second bond is formed slightly differently. The electrons that form these bonds are not in a spherical orbital around the nucleus, they are in oval-shaped orbitals that protrude above and below the nucleus. When they overlap the bond forms above and below the first bond, as shown in the diagram:"
sauce/more: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/lab-rat/shine-on-you-crazy-diamond-why-humans-are-carbon-based-lifeforms/