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Biology Could Be Used To Turn Sugar Into Diesel
ABCTech has an interesting article about an Emeryville-based tech startup, Amyris Biotechnologies, that is planning to use microbes to turn sugar into diesel. Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline. The company was initially given a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attempt to research the applications of Synthetic Biology for making a cost-effective malaria drug. Jack Newman, the Vice-President of Amyris said, "Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel? We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel. And if you wanted to design, you name it, a jet fuel? We can make that too."
I'm sure this will be on the market just in time for me to fill up my flying car.
Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline.
They should add suger to beans. They're great for making gas.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
By the time this is a viable way to get your gasoline, I'd really hope we'd be onto higher technologies then this. You know, like that Eleck Trick stuff, Or that Hydro Jen whatchamacallits.
-E
We're still dying from Malaria, but thanks for the cheap fuel.
If you're making it from sugar, it's going to suck from an energy-balance point of view no matter what. The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
Biology already have the means to make long chain parafins in the form of triglyerides.
Gasoline will be a bit harder as you don't want long chain parafins, you want branch chained C7 / C8s (seven and eight carbon hydrocarbons) as a straight chain C8 hase an octane number of zero (by definition) while the fully branched C7 has an octance number of 100 (again by definition). Getting octane numbers >90 is difficult without using aromatic compounds (benzene & toluene which have octane numbers in the 120 to 150s).
The original source for the octane 100 reference was from the cones of a particular pine tree.
So in theory there is a biological precendence but it could take 10 years to get there, once we do then the scale up will be very quick.
ZombieEngineer
People don't like to talk about peak oil as something that could really rock the way we live, but it's got that potential. Modern economies are based on growth, which means that more and more energy must be consumed. Eventually, however, we're going to have to figure out a new way to satisfy that growing demand, because oil isn't going to cut it.
Most alternatives require drastic infrastructure changes—converting hundreds of millions of cars to hydrogen or batteries isn't going to be easy or cheap. Adding ethanol to the mix could help, but the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) isn't all that great, and it will force food prices up as well. This company seems to have something rather novel up its sleeve—it'll be interesting to see how effecient their process is. If it's good, it'll be much more than a $10 billion company before too long.
Am I mistaken, or did this company start with a $43 million gimme with the explicit goal of saving people from malaria?
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
This will not work. Sure, you can make almost anything but as anyone who's worked with bioreactors or bacterial colonies will know they do not scale well. Also comparared to good-old sythetic chemistry, bio-processes are inherently inefficient energywise. If you want to take energy from the sun don't mess around with stupid stuff like this. Instead improve upon the COTS solutions available and help them grow in scale for mass-market. Most energy production should be local and thermal (solar-thermal, geo-thermal etc.) with the main net running on nuclear power. Vehicles should be plug-in EV. The reason for this is that we're gonna need our ever diminishing arable land for food production to feed the almost 10 billion people we'll soon have here...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I'm going to go pour sugar into my gas tank! Wait here!
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
The trees. Man, the trees hate us too.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Um.. because biodiesel is carbon neutral. If your solution to "CO2 is causing climate change" is, "Shut down industry and transportation," you can just leave the conversation right now. No one wants to hear about how great it will be when there's 5.8 billion fewer people in the world and everyone that's left lives like the Pennsylvania dutch.
The rest of us will get on with finding usable solutions to the problems we face. Gasoline happens to be a quite ideal energy storage mechanism for applications where weight, size, stability and reliability are important.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Actually it would be. Due to the fact that you, or more precisely the sugarcane plants have to pull carbon out of the air for them to make this you end up with a close to net 0 impact.
The reason Oil is so bad is because instead of pulling the excess carbon out of the air we are pulling it out of the ground and pumping it into the air. net impact is closer to 100%
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The problem is taking carbon based oil out of the ground and then putting it in the air. Instead, with this approach, the CO2 is taken out of the air to form carbohydrates and/or deasil fuel. This is burned, but the CO2 simply recycles back. IOW, this is more of a close loop system. It will be environmental friendly. In fact, it is more likely, that they will use algae and have that clean up waste water. Make more sense than doing corn, switch grass, or stalks => ethanol.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think this would suffer from the same problem other biodiesel projects suffer from, which is that they require such vast amounts of land to produce, that the entire process becomes inefficient, expensive and not that environmentally friendly anymore.
/.. I hope it is still intelligible.)
(That has to be the longest sentence I've written on
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
-1 Troll
+2 Concept for next Mel Gibson Movie
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+1 Net points
Please mod accordingly.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Also, even current/production-ish processes for "making" biodiesel require a lot less energy than ethanol, as well as being simpler. The main problem with diesel is the higher particulate emissions (among a few others) as a result of the high compression used in the engines. These (non-CO2) emissions is why the US uses gasoline. The Europeans -- unlike the US -- were willing to compromise (as well as weigh CO2 as an emission) and invested a lot in diesel engines and high-purity diesel fuel, which have about 20%-30% better mileage and better torque than gasoline...in use all over Europe, today.
As an aside:
I think this mentality is also what allowed much of Europe to convert to fission power. One of the problems -- in my humble opinion -- is that the factions in the US that wrangle over environmental policy (unfettered business freedom, ecological scaremongers and nuts) don't leave any room for incremental improvement. Everyone is looking for the silver bullet instead of going with what we have to try and make that 1%, 5%, 10%, or even 20% difference in the meantime, thinking (I think maliciously) that an incremental solution is going to somehow fundamentally prevent us from finding or using that silver bullet should we find one.
The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
That's easy: Add xylene. (Either in a batch, or by incubating it with the sort of bacteria that hang out in the guts of termites.)
This cracks the cellulose back into starch.
Cracking starch to sugar is similarly trival. (Either add acid or feed it to certain microbes.)
Once you've got sugar, getting to ethanol is a previously-solved problem (as is getting it to "something more like gasoline or diesel fuel" if the other bioprocesses work out on an industrial scale.)
Of course if you are willing to go with METHanol, just heat the cellulose, in a centuries-old industrial process. (That's why they call it "wood alcohol", after all.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Which means instead of dino juice fueling air travel, we may have snakes on a plane. I'm not sure of the source now but something I saw recently makes me think this may not be such a great idea, to have snakes on a plane. (Maybe it's just me, as I don't trust reptiles in any form, since that one pretty good book, anyway.)
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Ah, the sweet smell of diesel!
Or is that now on the back burner?
Jack Newman, PhD, Amyris Biotechnologies VP: "This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."
So they decided to aim for a more lucrative market as well -- bio-fuels -- a clean alternative to petroleum products.
Within months they had $20 million dollars in venture capital funding and a new CEO.
Well, well, well, isn't that nice...
So, whadup with that malaria thing?
Man...Damn chumps make less than a dollar a DAY! How we gonna make a livin' on that?
Oh yeah, right.
An now we need to clear cut a billion acres for our sugar plantation. Gonna get us some giant ants to run the place.
Cowabunga.
What?
While an ICE may not be the best way to extract work from an energy source, gasoline/diesel fuel still has a much higher energy density then alternatives. Batteries simply aren't there yet, and you're going to burn a ton of energy dragging low energy density fuels with you (be it in a plane or a car).
Isn't that a song from Aerosmith?
As other /.ers hve pointed, this *will* be an environment saver, because it is *renewable* energy. (But there's a *BUT...*)
Any renewable energy, by being *renewable* must therefore be part of a cycle.
Not a resource that just must be mined for (like coal. There is a net positive release of CO2 and other pollution into the atmosphere), but a resource that is progressively rebuilt as part of the cycle :
Where at one end of the cycle, people are burning bio-diesel into CO2, at the other end, algae/corn/other plants are converting CO2 and light back into sugar which will be fed back to the diesel-producing bacteria (basically : they produce fat*).
Same with wood : if your burning down great tropical forest there's a net negtive bilan. But if you use wood from specially grown tree for that purpose, the net bilan is neutral : you destroy as much as you grow new tree whitch will fix back that CO2. (And therefore, heating with wood pellets happen to be more ecological)
In fact, if some scientist discovered a way to produce renewable gasoline (I mean, a faster way than the natural "just stand around a few million years and all that coal will finaly turn into oil"), it will be much more environment friendly because at one end of the process you'll be fixing back most of the pollution that was released on the other end.
BUT...
Although the problem of CO2 is corrected with renewable energy sources, there's still other pollution that is produced by burning diesel, whose problem isn't it's increase, but it's mere presence.
Namely : the finer particles that are emitted by burning diesel. All this micro-dust, at the moment of release, is bad for your health (even if in the long term, it's going to be degraded and then assimiled back into the diesel).
But that is a separate problem that is currently already being tackled in current diesel/bio-diesel engines.
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* : Given the fact that bio-diesel is just refined fat, another solution beside the bio-diesel producing bacterias, would be adding bio-diesel facilities next to liposuction clinics. It is renewable (CO2 fixed back into fat through the food chain). Given the fact that the societies burning the most gaz are also the fattest (due to the lack of exercising related to the car usage), this could (...almost...) makes sense.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Malthusians have been wrong for several hundred years now on the relationship between arable land, population, and well-fed people. The key conceit is that food production is directly proportional to arable land and that arable land increases linearly while population increases geometrically. There are a couple of problems here, and the most salient one is that food production also increases with technological and social progress.
Our food production on a *per acre* basis beats the hell out of any reasonable expectation of human population growth. Human population going to be 100 billion by 2100? Thats a big *yawn* from the perspective of our untapped agricultural capacity -- yields per acre in the US from 1900 to 2000 increased by over a factor of about 6 to 8 (depends on crop), due to improved agricultural practices, improved agricultural business models (sorry, family farm, agribusiness grinds you into dust on the efficiency scale), the Green revolution, etc etc. The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt. Take modern technology plus modern societal organization, mix in some cruddy desert land that had been impoverished for millenia, and you get Israel (which is an agricultural powerhouse, especially compared to anybody in the neighborhood).
Over the same 1900 to 2000 time period, Japan had an even better relative increase in productivity, mostly because (like much of present-day Africa) they were starting from pretty darn close to the bottom of the curve.
Even assuming that technological progress in agriculture stops today (unlikely -- we're just getting the party started when it comes to GMO crops, and "640k should be enough for everybody"-type "All progress has already been accomplished" thinking is always a loser), all we'd have to do to feed 10, 15, 20 billion people is take the technological and organizational know-how of the leading edge of First World farmers and get that know-how to land which is already used for agricultural purposes. Sure, we could claim extra land too, but its hardly necessary.
So why, with this abundance of technology, do people still starve? Bad government, in every single case in the modern world. Governments practically evolved to combat famine and some countries in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands) haven't seen a non-war one in a couple hundred years. Many nations in Africa, North Korea, the Ukraine under the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have a government which either uses famine as a weapon to commit democide against their opponents (Sudan), or is just maliciously incompetent (North Korea, "Hey I've got an idea lets take all the land from the white farmers and give it to our black powerbase who have no experience managing farms, no possible downside there" in Africa).
Give your stock poor African nation 20 years of stable economic growth (i.e. capitalism and democracy, pretty much) and I'll guarantee you their main food-related health problem will be obesity, like it is for "poor" people in the United States. (Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)
Now, as it regards bio-anything for a power source, I'm skeptical that we can increase agricultural efficiency faster than our energy needs, so I agree with you. Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes. (Solar, geothermal, and hydropower are all heavily dependent on you living somewhere they actually work, but you can split the atom pretty much anywhere.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Biodiesel will not add CO2 in the atmosphere because the process of making sugar involces photosynthesis in plants i.e converting C02 and H2O into carbohyderate. Plants do not convert 100% of Co2 into sugar, there are other carbohyderates. Hence total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will decrease if sugar is used to produce the biodiesel.
I am not counting if the land would have been used for planting some other kind of plants, that absorbe more CO2 than the plants that produce sugar.
Burning fossil fuel adds the pollution because it converts the trapped carbohyderate into CO2 into atmosphere, bio diesel process will first absorbe the CO2 from atmosphere. So no global warming.
Well, if you put motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plan you get a much higher amount of motherfucking emissions. While motherfucking is not as bad, greenhouse-wise, as CO2, it's still pretty motherfucking bad.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
``Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel?''
Ethanol is actually an excellent fuel. I'd say it's actually _better_ than gasoline. While the mileage you get from either is about the same (provided you tune the engine for the fuel), ethanol burns cleaner, which is better for the environment and for the engine.
So, as far as I am concerned, the question is why we are _not_ making ethanol. And I think the answer to that is that some powerful entities don't want us to. For example, governments don't want you to produce ethanol - which is, after all, alcohol, and bad for your health, etc. Besides, many governments get a cut from all alcohol sales. And of gasoline sales, too. Which are also the lifeline of the powerful oil industry. I am not saying there is a conspiracy here, but it's undeniable that there are powerful parties who have much to lose from cars switching to gasoline for fuel.
By the way, all the above applies to gasoline engines. Diesel engines are a different story. They don't run on gasoline, and they don't run on ethanol (or at least, not well). However, they do run on biodiesel, and even straight vegetable oil (will need pre-heating in cold weather, though). Vegetable oil is much less problematic, and, if I ever get a car, I will make sure it's a diesel, fit it with the necessary fuel heating system, and run it on sunflower oil (or whatever vegetable oil is cheapest).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel?
My car runs with ethanol (it runs with gasoline too). Isn't it a fuel? (According to the dictionary, yes, it is.) More than that, my car does 11.8 kilometers per liter (27.75 miles per gallon for americans, 8.478 liters per 100 km for europeans) with ethanol and it costs only 65% of the price of gasoline.
It would have to run 18.15 km per liter with gasoline (42.69 mpg, 5.51 l/100km) to have the same cost per kilometer, but it doesn't go further than 15 km/l.
Gasoline? Not for me, thanks!
So say we all
It can. The only thing is, the Devil (to whom all heat belongs, obviously) has negotiated a deal which entitles him to "rake off" a little bit of heat for himself, everytime any energy changes from one state to another. Over time, the transactions -- and thus the rake-off -- build up rapidly. What the Devil doesn't realise is that this heat is slowly escaping from his grasp. Heat can only be changed into some other type of energy where there are things at different temperatures, but releasing heat tends to bring things towards the same temperature. Once all the matter in the universe is at the same temperature, that heat is effectively worthless.
However, you can beat the system a little by specifying, instead of a simple heating boiler, a water-cooled engine (which must run on the same fuel as your heating) and produces as much waste heat as you would require of a boiler; plumbing in the cooling system to your central heating; and attaching an alternator to the spindle. The engine costs a bit more to run than a simple heating boiler would, but you're getting electricity for no more than the difference. If you put in 4 units of fuel to get 3 units of heat and 1 unit of electricity (not an unreasonable expectation), you're effectively getting 1 unit of electricity for the price of 1 unit of heating fuel. Electricity is usually more expensive than oil or gas, so it's a win all around. If you can't use it all on-site, you can sell any surplus back to the electric company at the going rate. If you can run your equipment on a fuel costing less than one-quarter of the price of electricity, then your heating costs actually go negative!
You may even be able to get a tax break! Sell all your heating and generating equipment to a specially-formed spin-off company. Continue buying fuel in the name of your own company. Declare it to be waste, so you can write it off against tax, and pay your heating company to "recycle" it for you (by heating your buildings, flogging the excess juice and claiming a subsidy for proper disposal of the hazardous waste).
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Judge: So even though you admit to pouring sugar in your ex's gas tank you are claiming to be innocent of damaging her car?
Defendant: Yes your Honor. I mistook it for a diesel.
Or even Defendant: It won't do anything to harm the engine. I call up on my expert witnesses Savage and Hyneman.
It doesn't really matter all that much what the end product is... ethanol is perfectly fine. The point is one ton of dry woody biomass is about the same as 2 barrels of oil and this if you can convert for free.
Starches are fine to start with, but only a small amount of the plant ends up as starch. An even smaller amount ends up as oils. Celulose, pentosans and lignins compose the majority of plant tissues. There are many fungi which digest these and some can be harnessed to produce alcohols. The issue is we are still stuck with one ton of dry plant matter equals about 2 barrels of oil.
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. From a plant source this is 40 million tonnes per day.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. Note that Alberta Tar Sands operations are essentually bitumin->liquids. Bitumin is a little closer chemically to what we need than coal is... IE both are hydrogen poor in that liquid fuels in the Alkane series (most of what we use) have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon.
Coal depending on the type is about 0.6:1 and bitumin is closer to 1:1.
Methane is 4:1. This means that methane is a good chemical feedstock from which to obtain the hydrogen needed.
This also means it is stupid to be burning methane... it is far more valuable as a chemical feedstock than a fuel.
Plant matter does fit into the equation, it is not as hydrogen poor. Plant matter is basically (CH2O)n and from this we can see that it is a partially oxidized hydrocarbon. This means that plant matter is hydrogen poor unless we can break the H2O bonds and this is the same problem we face with coal and bitumin. Ie... in the case of coal and bitumin, we can break H2O bonds in river water or lake water or ocean water to obtain our hydrogen.
Note that alcohols are also partially oxidized hydrocarbons. Ethanol for instance is C2H5OH. This means it is easier to obtain ethanol from sugar because both the sugar and the ethanol contains Oxygen. The flip side of this is that since the molecule is already partially oxidized, it doesn't contain as much energy as an un-oxydized Alkane such as the ethane (C2H6) parent molecule. Also note that ethane for instance has an atomic weight of 30 while ethanol has an atomic weight of 46. So you have less energy with about 1.5 times the weight.
(BTW - this is the short of why the oil industry is building LNG tankers. Methanol (CH3OH) is safer and easier to transport than CH4 (liquid), but 1/2 the weight of methanol is oxygen).
All this means is there isn't a free lunch. Production of any fuel from a sugar polymer source (dry plant matter) is going to require energy and the only biological source of this energy comes from oxidizing carbon to obtain the energy required to salvage the hydrogen. This results in massive releases of CO2 (of course - its the raw material plants use to create dry matter - hense it is not polution and is in fact fertilizer). Next you lose a significant amount of the total mass of the dry matter we start with. We eventually are left with one ton of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil - if we can convert it for free.
We are back to needing 40 tonnes of dry plant matter per day and massive factories which don't exist.
Fuel? Hell man, I hear they got a car that runs on water.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
But we can also make some plastics from soy right now. I don't know how many kinds or whether this is currently feasible on a large scale. Nor am I suggesting it would summarily replace all petroleum-based plastics. Anyone know more about soy plastics?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Why should we make something that looks a lot like diesel when we can make ethanol? Ethanol is close to the energy content of gasoline. It burns much more cleanly in fuelcells than does gasoline. Diesel doesn't burn in fuelcells - it needs more complex, pressurized, much less efficient mechanical parts. Ethanol is much less toxic and more easily handled than gasoline or diesel.
Sure, gasoline goes right into existing cars. But so does high-concentration ethanol/gasoline mixtures. By the time gasoline is too scarce to add, even if in a decade or two, we can have upgraded engines to fuelcells to use ethanol. And the greenhouse gas pollution we'll pump into the atmosphere will be much less: solving our two biggest "carbon economy" problems at once, instead of perpetuating one while taking pressure off by solving the other.
If anything, we should be looking at lower-energy/impact production techniques for methanol, which has 1/2 the carbon of every ethanol molecule to pump into the atmosphere as pollution.
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make install -not war
What, you mean like a boat?
Redundancy is good And also good.
GP is right. This doesn't save the environment. It merely maintains it. Which is to say, while if the US switches completely over to ethanol or other biofuels (and there's as much a chance of this really happening as there is of the US switching over to metric completely as it is already), all it will do is slow down the increase in carbon gasses--significantly, mind you, but there's still an increase coming from other countries like *ahem* China *ahem*.
A negative return would be needed to actually save the our ecology from eventual collapse. And that means that alternative fuels should be either an intermediate solution--some kind of stepping stone, or it should be skipped over completely as we move to clean forms of energy production. While I think alternative fuels is good if we could use it to produce the devices for clean energy production (those solar panels require power to make, and it would be much more environmentally friendly if it were made with ethanol than petrol), I also think it's dangerous if we paused there, as people will stop seeing the massive environmental changes and think everything's ok again (and consequently forget about the second step of moving to clean energy sources) when in fact we've only slowed the acceleration.
On the other hand, shooting straight for 99% clean energy production would eliminate this possibility, even if in the short run, things won't seem to be getting any better and will actually get worse. That's the route that I'd prefer, as it seems like there's a huge ethanol backing in DC, largely because we grow so much corn a part of it has to be destroyed anyway or the already-low prices would plummet. Which means we'll almost definitely be stuck at that waypoint. Which also means we'd be prolonging (but lessening) our suffering towards eventual demise instead of outright healing the cause of our ailment.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
In other Bay Area biofuels news, Berkeley (along with U of I) just got a $500 million grant to set up a major center for biofuels and clean-energy research. So I suspect there will be a lot more startups and collaborative realtionships in this space very soon....
Remember the old horror stories of people finding a mouse skeleton in a bottle?
Yeah I heard that urban legend too. Luckily not everybody bases their decisions on urban legends, and many countries recycle bottles very efficiently, without problems.
It depends on where you are. Supposedly the theory has popularity in former Soviet states according to this nice Wikipedia article on the subject.
I think it's probably just so much bunk, but that's a product of my education under the conventional theory. It may also be wishful thinking that has kept me from ever forming an interest into looking into the theory. I can think of few ideas more horrific for the future survival of humanity than that it may continue to be cheap to burn off hydrocarbons for centuries to come.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There are organic methods to combat erosion, but you can bet that a company like Monsanto isn't going to employ them on their 10,000,000 acre corn-for-diesel fields.
I think you're confusing your evil agricultural giants. You're thinking of Archer Daniels Midland. Monsanto is the company that makes the seeds that can't be replanted and the crops that can withstand having gobs and gobs of pesticide dumped on them.
ADM is the company that owns the soul of the Midwest.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
By reducing our carbon output, even if it doesn't directly fix the problem, it does give natural carbon buffers (like dead phytoplankton sinking to the ocean floor) a chance to catch up (or at least not fall as far behind).
Carbon neutral is a huge improvement over the current carbon positive situation we're in right now.
*sigh* back to work...