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GE Microbes Make Ersatz Crude Oil From Many Sources
polymath69 writes "According to The Times Online, genetically modified microbes have been developed capable of turning surplus material such as wood chips, sugarcane, or others, not into ethanol, but into a substance which could substitute directly for crude oil. They claim it could be sold for about $50/bbl, and the production process would be carbon negative."
If they are right then they are instant Billionaires, if the process really worked they would be commercializing it and completely destabilizing OPEC. I'll believe it when I see it and the world will be rejoicing.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
<science scare story hat>
Two quotes FTA:
E.Coli, usually harmless etc, commonly found in the gut and able to survive brief periods outside it's normal (animal intestine) environment. So if this escaped into the wild, and you accidentally consumed a small amount, would it turn you into crude oil?
</science scare story hat>
No seriously, I can see tabloid newspapers having a field day with this: "Genetic Frankenstein Bugs Ate My Grandmother!"
There was an episode of the Three Stooges that did this very thing. I suspect this is just as legitimate too!
Mo, Larry, the cheese!
That's what I read the first time my eyes glanced at the topic. Microsoft patenting and controlling the answer to the worlds energy problems... very disturbing and scary thought...
PjotrP
Now, if they can manage to beat second- and third generation biofuels to the market, that'd be something.
obviously, solar energy is the ultimate renewable energy source
the ideal though is not to store or transmit that eletrically, but chemically (storage density, thermodynamic efficiency, etc)
i'm looking for the guy who turns poor fishermen in the philippines and indonesia (or anywhere access to shallow seas is easy) into the next sultans of brunei:
1. give them a bunch of specailly shaped clear plastic jugs, mini floating stills
2. they put a little gm algae inside the jugs
3. they throw the jugs in the ocean with anchors
4. they come back a month later, pick up the jugs
5. they are processed dockside directly into octane, in a low-tech facility
the guy, or gal, who figures out how to get algae to directly produce octane saves the world from itself geopolitically, environmentally, developmentally. then we have enough breathing room to master fusion
right now, the world is in an energy crunch. we will have more wars, the environment will suffer, there will be more poverty, until we get our act together on a truly large scale renewable energy source. too much renewable energy sources look at so far have been boutique, things that can never scale up
the cheap dig-it-out-of-the-ground era is over. oh of course, there's still more of it to dig out. its just too damn deep, and getting deeper every day, to call it cheap anymore
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
These hippies are trying to destroy American oil companies!
Think of all those poor oil companies...their employees have children, think of the children!
-I only code in BASIC.-
*Sigh* Another daily miracle oil-solving remedy. How long before this "solution" drifts into the background, never to be heard from again?
Expect this process, if viable, to be bought for billions by major oil companies, and stored away in a back room for the next 50 years.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I don't see anything in TFA about where the difference in input carbon and output carbon goes. I must be missing something. But if it really decreases the amount of carbon we put out, I'm all for it.
There's another problem I see though. More crude. The real problem behind high gas prices isn't a lack of crude, but the lack of refineries. Global production of crude excedes demand by about 2 million barrels per day, but refineries are unable to keep up with demand for gasoline and other by-products. Besides which, we aren't running out of crude anytime soon anyway. By the time we get more refineries online, gas prices will drop, and demand for this kind of alternative "fuel" will drop as well. Until then, they have to figure out a way to refine it using infrastructure that's already maxed out.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Indeed, wouldn't it be terrible if everyone stopped sending their wood chips and grass cuttings to the starving in the third world and started turning them into oil instead.
Personally I love the taste of wood chips, wheat chaff and corn husks but if they can help solve our fuel problem I am willing to tighten my belt and limit my diet to steak, peas and mashed potatoes.
Insightful, huh? TFA, and even TFS, clearly say they won't be using crops, but agricultural waste.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
isn't genetically modified GM rather than GE? i almost thought that General Electric had a breakthrough in the field..
The greens are pretty easy to figure out, really (from a psychological standpoint). The reason they are opposed to things like nuclear energy (and not just fission--they hate fusion too and green propaganda against fusion is part of the reason Canada pulled out of the ITER project) is because it takes resources away from development of their pet projects of solar, wind, tide, and other sources that can never hope to meet rising demand that progress requires (not to mention the tenfold jump in energy use we'll get as developing and third world countries become industrialized). But of course, therein is the true agenda of the greens--they want to hurt progress. At best they are go-back-to-nature Luddites, at worst fanatical misanthropes.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
This technology has been around for awhile although biofuels usually produce ethanol. Just a molecular side chain away from what these guys came up with. They get 1 barrel from 40sq feet of space. At our current rate of 143 million barrels a week it would take 205 sq miles of manufacturing plants to satisfy our current needs. About the size of Chicago. Probably about the same square footage it you total up all the Walmarts. Very doable.
They got us here in spite of all the government roadblocks. IMHO we would have got here a lot sooner if we hadn't laughed Gore off the stage and I suspect progress will increase exponentially when Obama takes over.
-[d]-
Haha, you sounds so surprised it's truly funny.
Well, this is a bit different. As the article says these organisms live in sealed vats, they are not out in the environment like GM crops. There is a chance of them escaping, but that's still different from deliberately releasing billions of GMOs into the wild.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OILIX
Snake? Snake?! SNAAAAAAAAKE?
{...} each time you go to the "throne", you will be literally sitting on a gold mine !
{...} some
{...} you will be the living final proof that a turd, given enough polishing, could indeed be a golden turd !
{...} some people pee on their car to unfreeze the keylock on cold morning, you would do it to fill the tank !
etc, ad nauseam.
-----
Ok. Scatological jokes aside : as E. Coli is a comensal bacteria, our body have evolved and got used to have it inside. We naturally have lots of means to control the important and diverse population of bacteria living in our guts - including having an immune system that keeps the bacteria on the "outside" side of the gut and not entering inside the body itself and including already having an amazing amount of bacteria already living there and leaving less free place for new comers.
The only exception if one of the newcomer specie that comes into the gut is producing some toxin (food poisoning is actually due to the toxin, not the bacteria themselves. Often the bacteria don't survive digestion or are already dead to begin with - that's why charcoal and yeast are more efficient than antibiotics to handle them).
This GE bacteria is simply fermenting garbage into something that looks like oil. You may develop a mild diarrhoea, but there aren't horrible self-digesting-into-a-small-pile-of-gunk short-term risks of having oil in your guts, and the usual defences will take care that it all stays in the gut.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why convert into crude oil substitute, rather than directly converting it into purer components?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
assume a 100 gallon specially designed plastic container filled with high efficiency gm algae (speculative) makes a gallon of oil ever 3 months. obviously there are a million factors here, i'm just pegging a random number
now look at a map of the philippines and indonesia
golly thats a lot of shallow seas
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No it isn't. Especially not if they get spread over a large area.
GM crops were evil in greenhouses, I seem to remember. Which are, obviously, also "sealed vats".
...but when the real thing's $140 and you've all those development costs to recoup, why not charge $120 for the bug-crap variety?
I doubt we'd see this at $50 for a good while, not until it drags the price of real oil down to similar levels anyway.
If some of this bacteria finds its way into the ocean or any other body of water, would we have a perpetually expanding pool of oil that can't be stopped?
I didn't see anything in the article about whether or not this bacteria is capable of reproducing on its own. Hopefully it can be controlled in some way.
It's just so sad that this thing is not a solution at all either. The energy has to come from somewhere.
The second law of thermodynamics precludes this principle from working "sustainably". Oh sure it might increase our supply for a short while (- I doubt it will, but hey it *might*).
Plants are 2-3% efficient solar panels (at best, that is assuming 100% green cover, and every last square millimeter of green leaves perfectly illuminated and tracking the sun). Using their dead residue to power cars is about 10% efficient, which can be raised to about 30% efficiency full cycle. (which is a LOT better than using it to power humans btw, who are at best 3-5% efficient in using plant energy, it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car, not worse)
Knowing that we use about 3x the total energy present in the biosphere yearly, you know that we'd need 200-300% efficient conversion of plant matter to movement energy. We are, at best, at 0.2-0.3%.
Using plant matter to make biofuels can therefore not increase our energy supply (... for long).
The solution ?
-> short term : nuclear power
-> long term : efficient solar power
Although I'll readily admit that this could be useful for the petrochem industry (and by that I mean plastics, and *perhaps* fertilizer, not fuel).
Without an immediate serious increase in nuclear power, we're fucked. Badly fucked. Even the Saudi "allah will replace our oil" nutcases are building nuclear power plants, do you really want to be considered dumber than them ?
If it has the same market as crude oil, it will sell at crude oil price. With them being the sole producers, they will effectively become a de facto OPEC member, and will remain so until patents have expired, by which time the price of crude oil will possibly be far beyond $1000/bbl
Could you turn faeces and household waste products into oil? If so, it would help solve a few problems in one go.
bang goes my karma... again...
Sounds good, but it'll be bought up by a major oil company long before it's turned into a commercially viable business. Then it'll be placed on the shelf until oil production finally drops too low to remain commercially viable. Then, finally, we'll have an explosion of alternative energy spring up from nowhere, owned and operated by the same huge oil companies everyone loves to hate today.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Nuclear power is a long term solution as well, in terms of fusion. Fission will easily last the 20 (according to ITER designers) to 50 (really conservative estimate) it will take for fusion to come in to full force. There is a HUGE amount of deuterium that can be extracted from seawater, and the neutron emission from the reactor creates tritium from that, so you have the two things you need for millennia (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I saw "GE Microsoft" on my first read. That'd be a hell of a huge company.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Thanks for finding another reason to illegally clear the Amazon. (Cash crops already being a major driver.)
you had me at #!
I think they forget to mention a few important aspects:
- The main input for agriculture, apart from sun and water, is fossil fuel in the form of fertilizer and pesticides.
- The waste output of agriculture is currently pretty much used up for other purposes.
While the idea is great, it won't solve any energy problem, it will create a new one.
And apart from that, photovoltaics and CSP have over 5 times the efficiency of photosynthesis and electromotors are at least 2.5 times as efficient as internal combustion engines, so IMNSHO we should phase out oil and biofuels entirely and go electric.
0x or or snor perron?!
we will start to feel the crunch well before we physically run out of oil
The current food crisis is just the start.
And people seem to overlook the military's reliance on oil. Imagine the COLOSSAL expenditure of fossil fuels by the US military... and imagine the stockpiling they have been undertaking over the past century to make damn sure everyone else runs out before they do (except that some traditional adversaries such as Russia inconveniently have their own supplies: Cue Iraq...) Civilians are last on the list, after military (first of course), then big business.
In short: No Oil = No Military. The logic isn't too difficult, is it?
you had me at #!
"it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car"
You do know that you are still alive and burning energy when you go shopping right? I know it feels like you are dead when you see the price of peppers hit 95c at the local Co-op, but it only seems that way.
Does their microbe create a crude oil substitute or does it create gasoline/diesel substitute? Because there's a giant difference. A crude oil substitute would have to have an assay remotely compatible with "real" crude if you're not going to end up synthesizing everything else.
/huge/ amount of energy from one source or another.
Do the bacteria excrete asphalt (although this is less an issue with the heavy crude they're getting now being full of the stuff)? Or the lightweight components of crude? Or kerosene?
Now I'm not saying this wouldn't be an impressive move, and if it can help take up some of the vehicle fuel slack long enough to move to alternatives then great, but we have to be realistic. Take away crude oil and you have to slip another synthesis step in before almost every industrial process to replace the molecules that were nearly ready-made in oil. And since a lot of it will be synthesizing molecules from scratch, it'll suck a
Crude oil often has contaminants like sulphur, which this process can simply leave out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe if they couldnt scale this up- instead we could all have our "Mr Fusion" 'esque machine in our back yards!
N.
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Unfortunately, break-even fusion has been (claimed to be) 50 years from the first commercial plant since I could first read Asimov's science books, back in the late 1960's. Further, extracting deuterium is not easy.
> (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
By that point, they are more likely to figure out how to crack H-H fusion (maybe some variant of the Carbon cycle?), rather than mining comets.
Figure out what will happen in a decade or two as india and china get richer and petroleum reserves get deeper. Meanwhile, you can "distill" the stuff out of ditches full of algae in the desert and plastic jugs in the ocean. Is it enough space?
Well, how much does it cost to dig a ditch? To make a plastic jug? How much space do we have in the deserts and oceans? Let supply and demand meet each other on a convenient price, and let production fill with algae as needed. Duh. Its not rocket science dude
But you knew that already, you're a genius at speculatuve back of napkin math, right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not sure you've really got the green movement's number at all. Very few, if any people concerned about those things are as irrational as you want them to be.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the temperature. Water isn't really very wet at, say, 0 degrees Kelvin.
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There's also these things called buses. They're like a car but with a lot of seats. For perhaps a fourfold increase in engine size you can move ten times the number of people.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
If that upsets you, why don't you yourself solve the problem first and publish the solution in the public domain, so that noone can patent it and it will be free for use?
Or are you just a whiner who likes things for free?
its agriculture. its nowhere near more complicated than that. growing coffee, as a sensitive plant, is orders of magnitude more complicated than jugs or ditches full of algae, and oil prices are certainly up there with coffee. what are the processing and distribution needs for say, palm oil from palm trees? how can separating volatiles from algae and water be more complicated? its about as dumb as doorknobs as you can get. a nuclear reactor, thats complicated. a jug full of ocean water, not so complicated
furthermore, you say the need to ramp up to huge production levels from nothing to satisfy worldwide consumption is daunting. what? who said that one day they are going to turn off the petroleum spigots like a lighswitch, and turn on the algae spigots to replace it all 100% in the span of a day? algae "distilled" octane will simply ramp up. its simple economics: as the price per barrel of crude goes higher and higher, there is more and more incentive to throw algae in jugs in the ocean, or grow algae in ditches full of ocean water in the desert. billions of more dollars orchestrating complicated logistical enterprises have been spent on far riskier ventures... such as digging for crude
meanwhile, we're talking about figuring out a plastic jug design and genetically modifying the algae correctly (granted: speculative there). but once you do that, the level of complexity and investment is well within the grasp of substinence farmers and fishermen
that's the best part of this very simple scheme: the new sources of our oil are the poor and rural of the third world. talk about incentive and reward
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I doubt it. Comet mining is a technological challenge which one can extrapolate from current technology. H-H fusion is not.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
how expensive is tea?
if we use your rationale, it is impossible for people in say, ghana to grow, harvest and distribute peanuts. and yet they do
yet you wish to tell us that algae is plastic jugs is too complicated... plastic jugs, full of ocean water. do you know what commercial fishing operations are like? compare it with that on the order of "its impossible logistically and economically" wtf?
so you are saying plastic jugs in the ocean full of ocean water, compared to say, commercial fishing or peanut farming or tea plantations.... jugs full of algae... is vastly more complicated than those ventures and, furthermore, get this: jugs full of algae will drive oil prices down and put them all out of business
dude. try to study simple economics concepts someday
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does the $50 include the land and equipment to build a commercial facility?
Does the $50 include the amortization of the start-up costs in developing an industrial scale process?
Does the $50 include the cost of gathering and delivering huge quantities of raw materials?
Does the $50 include the cost of environmentally safe disposal of waste materials?
The price of crude oil includes all of these costs.
would find a way for us to suffocate ourselves while keeping gasoline cheap at the pumps!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
There are a number of biomass-to-fuel technologies in the prototype to production stage, many of which have been featured on Slashdot in the past. Here's a sample:
Changing World Technologies (http://www.changingworldtech.com/) -- high-pressure non-catalytic conversion of biomass to Diesel fuel -- prototype online in Missouri
Range Fuels (http://www.rangefuels.com/) -- cellulose -> syngas -> blended alcohol -- proven, 20-million-gallon/year plant under construction in Soperton, GA
AlphaKat (http://www.alphakat.de/) -- biomass/plastics -> Diesel fuel via metal-catalyzed high-temp, high-pressure reaction. Plants under construction across Europe
MagneGas (http://www.magnegas.com/) -- sewage(!) -> natural gas + surplus heat via electrolytic conversion -- you can buy or rent a working production unit from their web site
I note that all of the above use a high-temperature, high-pressure reaction process to produce fuel. The GE process has the advantage over the first three in that it can handle water better than the first three processes above (IIRC, most Fischer-Tropsch type plants have a low tolerance for water in the reaction vessel, which is bad for biomass conversion unless you spend energy to dry it first. E.g. AlphaKat says their process doesn't work with more than 12% water by weight). The other major advantage is that fermentation typically occurs under more gentle and manageable conditions, i.e. near room temperature, near atmospheric pressure and aqueous rather than solvent/metal-catalyst based. However, the down side of their process is that it's not self-contained and not truly carbon-negative unless you use plant biomass as a feedstock, though if you grew algae in an adjacent tank you could probably use that as your feedstock and harvest CO2 from the air. Actually that would be an ideal solution because you could genetically tune your algae to have a specific composition and tune your fermenter bacteria/yeast to efficiently break down your algae. Hopefully that will be in the next phase of this project. Though we'll probably have to make do with catalyst- and pressure-converted biomass until these guys can perfect their process.
take any large city. say new york city or shanghai or new delhi. now, according to your grasp of the laws of supply and demand demonstrated in what you just wrote above, in terms of economic incentive and logistical complexity, throwing in some further wrinkles like food spoilage and variety of food choices... please tell me: how the heck does everyone manage to get fed?
your mind has demonstrated to me, in your comment above, what i will call a low level of understanding about the laws of supply and demand. so now i wish that you see in yourself that your understanding of economics is poor by applying your level of demonstrated understanding above, of economics, to a problem like feeding everyone in a large city, with variety and spoilage thrown in as an even further logistical and economic complication. how does it all work?
the answer is: it doesn't matter how it works. it just works. because its simple economics, simple supply and demand, moving people like an army of ants to do something far more complicated than any single ant can grasp, each ant only motivated by the simplest of motivations, no one orchestrating the movement of the ants from above. its incredibly complicated and beyond the grasp of any single mind. and yet it works far superior to any consciously engineered effort. thats the glory of economics
now: you wish to tell me that those same economic forces will be powerless to wrangle plastic jugs in the ocean?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
WHOOooosSHHH!
It is not in their immediate interest to produce this while there is still oil in the ground. Oil in the ground is finite, therefore it is scarce and the scarcity coupled with high demand drives the price.
If any-odd-company could produce it in a vat, then the scarcity and a large part of the value evaporates. Oil wouldn't be worthless overnight (as you mention it would still be used for plastics and petro-chemicals), but a large part of the market would switch meaning oil would be worth much less.
This sounds great, but a note of caution is needed. If they have developed a microbe that basically can eat through any organic material, what they perhaps have invented is a new pathogenic superbug. Think about it, if this can eat through organic material as such, what would happen if it got loose somehow and got into a field of crops, could this start eating away and destroying crops? Have you engineered a new super agricultural pest? This could happen completely unintentionally, not to mention the potential for intentional weaponisation.
Started turning the starving third world into oil? Are you mad??
... welcome our microbial overlords.
First General Motors (GM) Foods, now General Electric (GE) micobes!
... then the future is indeed bright. It means technological advance will not be abated while we scramble for new energy infrastructure. It means that the Kurzweilian Singularity is indeed near.
I for one am hopeful but skeptical.
[signature]
No it's just that I have no desire to have the world contaminated by tadioactive material for the next 'x' thousand thousand years. (I can't be bothered Googling the various half-lives).
No matter how good the safe guards. There is always human error to watch out for. And human stupidity, and malice. Then there are supposedly failsafe devices that aren't.
As for the waste, well, that hot radioactive rock has to be stored somewhere. American mid-west? Under NY? Outback Australia? Arctic/Antarctic? Even safe transport is massively complex undertaking. Try and predict what might be around in 1,000 years in those areas.
It's polluting, very, very polluting. It's just that it doesn't go up in the sky and turn it browny/orange.
And no, it's not cheap either. Whatever cost advantages per Kw/h, are more than outweighed by the massive storage costs, generally underwritten by the various governments.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
This is what I keep trying to tell people (given that I'm running some commodity trading systems I have a bit of understanding of this issue). The traders ("speculators") have NO pricing power. NONE AT ALL. The day that contract matures they MUST sell it, or as you pointed out even PAY someone to take it off their hands.
The price of oil has ZIPPO GRANDE to do with the futures markets. All the futures people are doing is betting that oil will be higher the day they sell the contract than the day they bought it. The truth is 99.9% of all oil bought and sold is not traded on the futures market. Some relatively minute fraction is traded there and all it provides is a bit of slack in the system so if say you needed oil TODAY you can get some extra beyond what you already had showing up in your own tankers. It just evens out the supply a bit.
Notice it is the oil companies and OPEC that are blaming speculators for current prices. Meanwhile they pocket 100% percent of the excess profits from today's high prices. Blaming it on the futures market is just a smokescreen. The futures market is going up BECAUSE the price is going up, not the other way around.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
because when it comes to understanding economics, you're a dolt
say you have a guy, with just one jug, just one jug, and he can throw it in the ocean, and come back 3 months later and turn that one jug into $1 at a simple low tech processing plant. rinse and repeat. what is that called? its called agriculture. the logic surrounding this simple cash crop agriculture incentive and simple reward i just described predates the written word. and yet you can't seem to grasp it. why?
now, you wish to tell me a large company that can invest a lot more up front can harvest more jugs than a cash crop substinence farmer. ok. you're 100% right. and? why do you think that matters? what is that supposed to mean? right now, there are poor african farmers growing cash crop yams on an acre of soil. right now there is an agribusiness mass harvesting a million yams. the existence of the agribusiness means the poor farmer doesn't ahve any incentive to plant yams? and yet he does, and is doing it right now. so what is your point? why do you think you have a point?
answer: you have no point. you simply have zero understanding of simple economics. your brain isn't wired to understand the idea of incentive, and to think abstractly about that in large groups of motivated individuals to make a buck
here is simple truth, whether you grasp it or not: it doesn't matter if there is incentive for one guy to work with one jug, or a multinational to work with a million jugs. all that matters is that there is economic incentive, and so the need is fulfilled, simply because there is a pricepoint on a curve of supply and demand at which the undertaking is profitable for anyone involved
you seriously don't understand that simple concept
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Global production of crude can't possibly exceed refinery capacity by the 2 million barrel per day. Where would the 2 billion barrels, each day, every day, be going? Or are you arguing that potential production exceeds refinery capacity?
While not many new refineries have been built in recent years, the capacity of existing refineries has been increased quite a bit. Refinery capacity is fine.
What's not fine is oil field capacity. It turns out the Saudis have been lying about how much more oil they can pump. Welcome to your future, Mad Max.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
you understand, in your own words, how a mill yolks a bunch of cash crop poor farmers into an economy that gives them an incentive to farm
but for some reason, you can't or won't apply that simple lesson to algae "distilled" octane, even though all it is is simple low tech aquaculture
so, according to your logic, the billions of cash crop substinence farmers and fishers in the world wouldn't be doing exactly what they are doing right now because... drum roll please... big agribusiness exists, somewhere, like a villain in a movie
my head asplode
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to mean that you are too stubborn to directly and manfully acquiesce on a topic you have been proven wrong about
and yes, my use of the word substinence was wrong in that context
(!?)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You are alive when you go shopping whether you go by car or by foot. By car however, you can shop much faster, meaning a car actually saves co2 used by shopping inside you as well. But not only there :
... except extra weight is *much* more problematic for walking locomotion than for locomotion on wheels.
... and so forth).
:
Your weight + the weight of groceries stays the same
But let's ditch that little detail and act as if it *is* the same.
Let's also ditch the fact that going on wheels is more efficient (perhaps you take the bike). Let's assume a linear relation between weight and energy necessary (this is not true, more weight can be more efficiently transferred per kilogram, this disadvantages the car, not you).
So you go to the supermarket. The weight that you have to move = bike + yourself + groceries =~ 80 + 20 + 10 = 110 kg.
Then take the car. Total weight = car + yourself + groceries = 600 + 80 + 10 kg (assuming you're not using a hummer, but you could make the car 1 ton and it wouldn't change the argument, obviously going by tank would be less efficient, BUT there's a caveat even there) = 690 kg
So the car is about 6-7 times heavier than you, AND it's 6-10 times more efficient. It *will* get you to the store for about the same energy as biking (and for a lot *less* than if you walk).
BUT there's a BIG caveat. The car has 10 or 100 times the carrying capacity of the bike. In other words, with the car you go to the store once per week (or twice). You can get 5x the amount of groceries easy. You'll get 5x the groceries merely for convenience.
So transporting the same amount of groceries, if said amount is 30 or 50 kg in a 600 kg car is 5x more efficient than biking these in. And it's over 15x times more efficient than walking them in. AND as a bonus it takes less time, and it's more convenient.
IF you express it in "joules eaten", therefore you will find the car much more efficient. Right now we get "human joules" from different sources that SEEM (for the moment) more available. Obviously they're not, or due to innovations such as this they're not going to be different for much longer. In both Brazil and Indonesia they're already the same, and the U.S. is maybe 5-10 years removed from having a completely interchangeable power source for humans and cars (from one year to the next it can be used to produce human fuel, and then switch to car fuel, and back, and
So obviously it's not the "oil" used that matters, but joules used. And perhaps that's not entirely true in America YET. But it won't take long.
And if you're a CO2 nut, the same is true. A human will output more or less the same amount of CO2 per joule used than a car.
And then let's see the conspiracy theory : perhaps you don't know this, but the entire climate department at every university knows this. And if Al Gore is 1/10th as informed as he claims to be, then surely he knows too. So what are the environuts doing by advocating "simpler society".
The middle age societies were vastly inferior and less efficient. Per human they produced MORE co2, and 100x as much for the same living standard, there were just many, many less humans. So why advocate going back to a simpler society ?
If you want to save co2, we must go further in mechanizing society. Much further. A human can't be improved in efficiency, but it'd be easy to make an electrical shopping robot/butler 80% efficient in energy usage (getting a control algorithm capable of doing this however isn't easy). That's the way to go if we want to
1) help people live (and have a reasonable living standard)
2) not kill half the world's population (which *will* be the result of using biofuels)
So if you're "truly" green
-> support cars, for everything but the shortest little trips
-> discourage people doing stuff themselves without machines
-> encourage electricity generation in various ways, for electricity generation + usage beats the crap out o
Humans, for the most part, don't run on fossil fuels.
What do you think manure is made from? Thin air?
"wood chips" and "grass cuttings," and plant waste in general go back into the soil's cycle, are processed by billions of organisms, and turned into nutrients for the plants. If we take this "waste" to make oil, what's going to feed the plants? Chemical fertilizers, made from... Oil ?
You -- ALL OF YOU -- have to realize how stupid that "solution" is. Disrupt the soil cycle, starve the plants, and we're all dead. It's actually even more stupid than burning our food to make oil. A food shortage will only kill us. A plant shortage will kill many species.
ok, let's take $10,000 and move to the rural philippines ;-)
;-)
call it the "johnny appleseed project"
or... the "junnie algaeseed project"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ironically this will turn agricultural waste into 'fuel' and thus give it a considerably higher economic value, have they factored this into their costs?
Also, there doesn't appear to be is no mention of exactly how much waste is required to produce 1 barrel of oil equivalent. How much usable agricultural waste is actually produced each year and how many barrels of oil could actually be produced from this waste.
Erm ... holy false dichotomy, once again.
There's no law that says if we start this process, we need to feed 100% of our agricultural waste into it, thereby depriving out soil of nutrients. We can figure out how much we need to feed back into the soil, and how much we can turn into fuel.
but you are assuming that the point of algae-produced octane, on land, on sea, whatever, that the goal is to completely replace current consumption levels
no, that doesn't matter. it doesn't matter if algae-produced octane only dents 1% of of consumption levels
what matters is simply that there is incentive to make it work, that you can make a buck doing it. demonstrate that that is possible, and my bet is that algae-produced octane will ramp up production phenomenally in a decade or two: the simple economic rules of supply and demand: "hey, i'm making $200 a year with these 100 jugs of seawater, and there's no end in sight to demand. so why can't i go the bank to get the tiny bit of seed money i need for 10,000 more jugs and make $20,000 a year?"
multiply that thought by a million strivers and entrepreneurs on coastal communities all over the world, in deserts near the ocean all over the world. you would have an explosion of interest if the process, as simple and low tech as it is, were proven
such that, the simple laws of economics would continually ramp up production every year until you really did satisfy a large amount of consumption levels. there's a lot of shallow seas in the world, there's a lot of substinence fishermen. it doesn't take much to make this scheme work, the motivation is simple. someone just needs the right plastic jug design and the right gm algae
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
my point is, its economically feasible, for a single guy with a jug, all the way up to a multinational with a million jugs
meanwhile, you wish to prove it is only economically feasible for the multinational
so go ahead, prove it. you haven't
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From TFA:
The company claims that this "Oil 2.0" will not only be renewable but also carbon negative - meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
OMG! Isn't anyone thinking about the ramifications? I'm talking about Global Cooling!
Won't someone please think of the children?!?
Seriously, though, I nearly spit out my coffee from reading the phrase "Oil 2.0". What a creative name. *rolls eyes*
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Nuclear waste is a myth spread by a cold-war government wanting to limit access to radioactive materials. Nuclear by-products are only dangerous because they are emitting radiation - energy - which by definition means that they are not waste, since waste is material which is not useful. They can be used in any number of long-life, low-drain applications, powering betavoltaic or radiothermal generators, not to mention their uses in medicine and other disciplines. Or they can be used in breeder reactors as fission fuel.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just because a car can burn fuel more efficiently than you can doesn't mean it's more efficient to drive and get groceries. Just imagine the car using more energy than your own body might.. In fact, much, much more ... Or the energy required to create the aluminum body of the car...
Mister false dichotomy, I salute you.
"The facts that used vegetable oil still goes to dumps, and other rendered fat simply gets disposed of indicate that there is currently some minimum amount of energy that is necessary for gathering it to be worthwhile; I would not be surprised if a similar situation took hold."
i take this to mean you are an insulated rich westerner, ignorant of the wider, poorer world
in china, people, children, whole towns and families break up used computers for tiny bits of metal to be melted down, getting exposed to horrible levels of lead, mercury and cadmium for the sake of pennies. these computers get shipped there from all over the world for "recycling"
in the philippines, there are tens of thousands of people, an entire economy and subculture of people, who live and work in the trash dumps of manila, scavenging and recycling every conceivable type of waste. it's called "smoky mountain"
in india, dead humongous hulking tankers and ocean liners go to die on the beach. they are chopped up by giant armies of men living the most dangerous of lives, armed with the crudest of implements, to recycle iron and steel for the slightest of margins
so would selling a poor fisherman in the third world a plastic jug and a tap of algae for a dime and telling him it will be worth $1 every 3 months really work economically?
absolutely, without the slightest shred of doubt, you would have a riot on your hands of poor villagers seeking to buy these supplies
then you just set up a low tech distiller to harvest. same economic cost and and economic benefit
meanwhile, you have your multinationals with streamlined aquaculture projects doing the same thing on a scale of millions of gallons of octane.
ok... and like i said, because a multinational farms, say, yams, or coffee, or bananas, or palms, or tea, pineapples, or wahtever... that means a poor cash cropper is suddenly unable to make money farming the same thing?
if your mind cannot consider these sentences proof enough of the viability of the poor fisherman turned octane farmer, you have a serious deficiency in abstract thinking abilities
more likely, you are just being stubborn, too proud to admit you are wrong directly, even though privately you already admit it to yourself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they have developed a microbe that basically can eat through any organic material
They've got a microbe that can eat any sugar. It already exists, it's called E. Coli. Your gut is full of it.
They didn't change the input side, they changed the output side, so it produces hydrocarbon fuels instead of fats.
The thing that worries me is... what happens if you get this modified E. Coli in your gut... I suspect you'd get pretty sick, like you'd taken a swig of gasoline.
... How they produce energy. It is a matter of supply and demand and trade. If any fuel is a publicly traded commodity, in today's politics and turmoil, it will become expensive simply because of hedge funds and such.
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What do you think manure is made from? Thin air?
Agricultural "waste" in general go back into the soil's cycle, are processed by billions of organisms, and turned into nutrients for the plants. If we take this "waste" to make oil, what's going to feed the plants? Chemical fertilizers, made from... Oil ?
You -- ALL OF YOU -- have to realize how stupid that "solution" is. Disrupt the soil cycle, starve the plants, and we're all dead. It's actually even more stupid than burning our food to make oil. A food shortage will only kill us. A plant shortage will kill many species.
A bacteria that can turn us into crude oil!!??
oh shit!! oh my god!!!!
cualquier vaina hagase el muerto
Ok, so those of you who drive to work in the morning may like the sound of this, but on a global level, is a cheap source of Oil a good thing?
The lack of oil is forcing innovation in the energy market. We're looking to build cars with NO carbon emissions, fuel cells with years of life, fusion reactors and other Star Trek sounding things.
If we make oil cheap, then we'll continue to wreck the planet.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
It's this idea that you have to "scale up" that might be the problem itself: apply solution X to the same old X shaped hole: any magic solution X to the world's crises requires a commercially backed, large scale, centralised processing and distribution system.
But what if each person could get/produce a handful of bugs and make a bit of their own fuel somehow? A solution that didn't have to scale up BUT required the world to adapt to this energy source, as we did back in the 30s-40s-50s to adapt to petrol in the first place? (Like reducing use) And I wonder if there are already solutions like this around? And because they require adaptation, will they still be popular?
Ale
Look, if you want a cheap(er) source of fuel, you better get off your butt and do it yourself. All these interesting little discoveries aren't going to do anything with the big oil companies still making record profits by raping the world's citizens. Period. End of story. The technology has been there since the 70's to do everythig we see in the news. That's why OPEC suddenly made gas cheap again - we were developing technologies to make their product worthless. If that happens, they disappear into the sands again as no country other than Dubai (look at Dubai from a space viewpoint if you're that out of touch) has anything to offer in trade. Anyone up for a tourism industry in Iran? LMFAO. Buy a dielsel and convert it to a grease car for $500. That's as close as you're going to get unless you invest a technology yourself and refuse to sell it to the oil companies who will bury it until the oil runs out.
That only applies when the OP is a joke. Calling something a joke only applies when it's funny. Therefore, you fail, sir.
Or at, say, 272 Kelvin (-1 deg Celsius).
PS. You don't say "0 degrees Kelvin", it's just "0 Kelvin".
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it is easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
a plastic jug costs $50?
(scratches head)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So are these microbes genetically stable? They're not going to mutate in a few years into something dangerous? Can they properly contain said microbes, and have their finger on a sure-fire "killswitch" to annihilate the entire population of them if something goes wrong? Extremist questions I'm sure, but if you're in engineering and don't believe in Murphy, then you're a fool.
GE. We bring good things to life!
[and a note to the humor impaired, yes I know that's not the GE the article refers to.]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Thermal depolymerization
It's currently getting a $1/gallon subsidy, which works out to $42/barrel, 500 barrels a day oil production. $7.7 million a year.
In '06, that allowed them $4 profit per barrel. In '06 oil hadn't broken $70/barrel yet. Reportably they sell their oil for somewhat under market(probably a penalty for the type of oil or the fact that it's a small source). Regardless, they should be able to sell their oil for almost double now - $60/barrel more.
So, as long as the price of turkey guts and such doesn't go up again($20-30/ton), they should be able to make a profit even without subsidies.
Note-I'm mostly libertarian and therefor against subsidies, but I don't mind subsidizing test plants a bit. I say this because advancing technology is a very good thing. Right now I wouldn't be subsidizing traditional corn type ethanol plants, but I'd consider subsidizing a cellulostic plant, or one looking to commercialize this one.
I don't read AC A human right
Good news: All of our oil problems are solved! We can use this great bacteria to make any biomass into oil.
Bad New: We all need to move to Mars becasue we've accidentally converted the entire biosphere into oil.
if you think what you wrote above is a valid comment on the economics of algae-harvested oil, then frankly, you're retarded. i'm wasting my time talking to you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
OK. It's another biomass to hydrocarbon conversion by fermentation with genetically engineered bacteria system. The company web site is all hype; it just mentions a "proprietary microbe", the only new part of the process. It's a lot like "cellulostic ethanol".
Vinod Khosla, a well-known venture capitalist, has been funding multiple startups in this space in hopes that someone will make a breakthrough.
There are many known ways to convert biomass to fuel, and most of them are expensive. You can't predict costs from lab-scale work. Until the process is working at pilot plant scale, cost predictions are hype.
In the lab, tests are typically run in batches, in glass containers, starting with fresh input materials. For commercialization of a low-cost product, the process has to work with a continuous flow. Continuous flow fermentation is hard to do; by-products may build up in the system, or contamination in the feedstock may mess up the process. They haven't dealt with those problems yet.
If the process has to be run in batches, like a brewery, with flushing and cleaning at the end of each cycle, the process is more tolerant of difficulties, but the operating cost goes up. It's possible to get the cost of a batch process down; beer production in bulk runs about $65/bbl. But beer is around 95% water, and for fuel applications, you don't get to count water as product.
Khosla has the right approach. He's placing little bets, in the tens of millions of dollars range, on many technologies. His experts check on how they're doing. The ones making progress get another round of funding, and the others don't. One or more of them will be a big win.
I'm not sure what "theory" you're referring to. Is that the one that says the price of oil is directly proportional to the production costs?
Regardless, you're still assuming they use oil to extract the oil and pay their employees nothing.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
as opposed to all the bacteria that are likely to break out of control atm?
Then again, worldwide population reduction will oppose global warming.
Then again, shouldn't we try, in contained vats (bring in regulation if needs be), to at the very LEAST keep our population stable and C02 neutral (environmentaly neutral is another dilemma enitrely)?
Autoclave it.
I have worked with eColi phages and while they can be pretty hardy, you could get essentially all of them if you cook the biomass first.
Plus as we have mentioned many times, eColi don't do very well outside of the gut therefore you are going to have (relatively) little external eColi contamination.
As I recall, while phages kill off eColi, there is a percentage that become "immune" to the phage.
This will only be a real issue if you decide to reuse your cultures. If instead you do one-use cultures, you will avoid contaminating your pure culture. Since this mutation is unfavorable, the eColi would likely evolve away from it spontaneously unless you did this anyway.
More than phages, there is the question of general contamination. eColi is unlikely to be the strongest competitor in the vat unless you kill everything else off first.
Autoclaving here we come!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_2 Makes me wonder how many other things Kojima came up with YEARS ago turn out to be real. If a giant ray-shaped submersible crashes into New York next year, then I guess we'll know...
that MADE GE GE, they now can resume the old commercial from the 80's:
GEE- EEE, WEE BRING good things to LIVING, we BRING good theengs toooo LYFFFEE!"
I suppose they'll have to pay big-time to redo those commercials...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Or 374 Kelvin. (~101 deg Celsius)
My blog
Isn't that what we do now?
Why bother with Nuclear in the short term when we can go Geothermal? That way we skip all the nasty fission byproducts and a proven track record of cost over-runs.
Indeed, sorry for being less than clear, that's what I meant.
Either way, this would be pretty unpleasant.
Another thing I thought of, though: if the bacteria is generating hydrocarbons instead of fats that it's using for energy reserves, then it's inherently not competitive with wild strains and thus unlikely to establish itself, but I'd love to see an explicit reference to that.
What we really have is a storage and distribution problem. Electric would be fantanstic, if batteries didn't suck. When driving to another city, stopping to recharge for 4 hours is, well, problematic. Flywheels likely would be nice if they could store enough energy.
Hydrogen is simply a distribution and storage solution, and somewhat energy intensive to boot.
Put in a solar farm in Nevada - sure you could power the entire US, it's just the transmission losses would be brutal, and unworkable. I see people all happy happy about the effeciencies of PV's, however they have their load of issues as well, and don't forget it.
See track number 7.
I thought Gore was something tangible,...
if we are a Gore Gnostic, then we know Gore as a belief system. But, if we have seen him on TV, then that definitely puts one in the Theist camp.
You must be a Gore Agnostic -- because you aren't sure if he is real or not, hence the reference to some unseen, all-powerful being. I don't think that is what the poster meant,... it was more along the lines of; "Hey, if we didn't give Gore a hard time and embraced his energy alternatives -- we'd be putting government money behind good research." I know that is a stretch, because we cannot know what the Gore is thinking.
To be honest, in my own church we recognize that Obama represents "the son" and of course, Kucinich would be the "holy spirit" -- but I don't want to get into a theological debate.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Bug poop.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
While their production process may be carbon negative, I wonder how the numbers come out if you account for the CO2 released as the crude is refined into gas/diesel etc. and as the fuel is consumed. The production cost sounds nice, but this sounds like a net contributor to global warming.
Odds are, it's probably more enviro-friendly to do solar/wind->electric grid->battery vehicle, than solar->plant matter->bio-crude->refinery->gas/diesel vehicle.
We are the 198 proof..
that's not ramping up, it's getting back to where they were. Saudi Arabia has no capability to significantly increase production capacity.
I hope they hurry up. Bush is running out of time to invade !
A modest proposal.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Everyone gets damn excited about algae, because the "potential" is enormous. HOWEVER, the REALITY is, 20+ years of development by the US DoE, starting in the 1970s, still didn't even result in oil-producing algae that could STAY ALIVE in small quantities, let alone staying alive in industrial production conditions, let alone producing a profitable product, let alone in quantities that could have the slightest dent in the world supply of oil.
Try to stay a little closer down to earth when you hear about algae vaporware...
In reality: Algae can produce huge amounts of bio-oil. That oil, however, immediately pollutes the water-based environment of the algae, and quickly kills the algae off. The huge potential of algae appears to be self-limited by an inherently self-contradictory system.
In truth, we don't NEED oil. We can use ANYTHING that will burn, that we can produce in large quantities (see: vegetable oil vehicles). If we could produce enough cheap flour, you'd see flour-burning engines in no time. If you can just keep the algae ALIVE and reproducing at speed, it's damn easy to scrape a few of them off every day, and squeeze them into some form of combustible liquid. It's not worth the effort to turn it into "oil". If ANYONE can come up with ANYTHING flammable that we can produce in large enough quantities to supply the energy needs of the cars across this country, the oil problem will be solved, instantly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
1. Yes it does state that. However what's stopping them from doing exactly that further down the track when they find agricultural waste, like waste fat from restaurants, doesn't scale well?
2. What we call agricultural waste isn't always wasted - it decomposes back into the ground providing an important part of the nutrient cycle. Okay, so maybe not all of the waste generated is essential for that, but farmers aren't exactly known for turning down the opportunity to bollocks up the future for short term benefits.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Oh please. A simple Google search of 'clean nuclear energy' gives an enormous number of sites contradicting everything you wrote.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
> Is Piers Anthony in the middle of anything at the moment?
A party with Michael Jackson & R. Kelly?
What has always struck me about the search for alternate fuel sources - biodiesel, ethanol, propane, hydrogen, what have you - is that even if we do find a new way to fuel our cars and trucks, we'd still need a large supply of petroleum for plastics which are used everywhere these days. If this microbe actually produces the equivalent of crude oil, it could be used to make polymers and other petroleum byproducts as well. It sounds too good to be true.
#include <disclaimer.h>
Very probably cancer (if there are aromatic groups). Or cardiovascular problem (small neutral chains). Or hepatic problem (small neutral chains that are easily destroyed). Or renal problems (small neutral chains that can't get destroyed and pile up).
*BUT* as I said before : no huge risk to get instantly dissolve into a small pile of oil-based goo (as the original poster was afraid of)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Cheaper Lego!
to any $deity that's out there, if they are out there. that these people are doing this in BSL4 facility.
i do not want to die in a world devoid of plants because guy's like this wanted to make a quick buck, don't laugh though, by the time they would realize it got out it would have spread beyond control.
Ignoring the author's obvious ignorance (you can't power a vehicle on crude oil), there already exist microbes which are unpatented, which will do the job. An algae by the name of Botryococcus braunii (see the wikipedia article) can produce enormous quantities of an oil which can be transformed ('cracked', just like crude oil) into the fuels we're all used to, such as kerosene, octane (gasoline/petrol), diesel, etc.
The real problem is the gold-rush mentality of the genetic engineers to provide the single,patented organism which will fix all of our problems forever, making them the richest people of all time. It's not going to happen folks. The technology is incrementally complex - meaning there is no 'Eureka' moment - and that moderate amounts of money can be made by those who are willing and able to invest in incremental advancements in efficiency.
I am considering leaving my lifetime vocation of computers and electronics for a career in microbiologic fuel sources. Who cares to join me?
Humans tend to consume energy faster than it can be produced. Technology increases with global population. Technology and population size are linked together. This is a good thing. The problem is in our ability to transport information economically in a sustainable and safe way. The solution maybe way out of reach for the types of governments that are in place at this time. The magic in solving this problem starts by analyzing the safety issues. The altruistic approach is to put safety first at any cost. The solution is to mix Technology together with an infrastructure designed to eliminate HUMAN ERROR in our transportation system. The magical part to this type of system is in the amount of weight that would be reduced from our vehicles and at the same doubling the speed of the vehicle. The finished product would be a skinny but longer vehicle that would ride on a rail or in a groove driven by a computer system. The infrastructure would made out out current utility systems (gas lines, sewer, water, electrical, ect) for two reasons. The main reason is that utilities go everywhere that vehicles go. The second reason is that the utility lines decay and need to be replaced with the current system so why not design a system that incorporates all these into a transportation type conduit. The beauty of this altruistic approach is that it will pay for itself in less than ten years, save thousands of pounds from being transported from every vehicle, the vehicles would never have to stop for another vehicle, This system would reduce the energy needed to transport information 10 fold. But unfortunately even this type of system might not be enough to reach sustainability. Eventually every local area will have to produce its own energy in order to evolve. I do not blame the governments of this world for the problems that we face, I actually think that they are all doing a good job. But in order to keep the huge global population healthy, so it can produce the technology that is important for our evolution, some things may need to change. They may just magically Change by themselves without any problems, Kinda like a phase change. I personally don't care what type of government it becomes, as long as our health improves and our ability to transport our information is not reduced.
Yeah they run on biofuels, and as we all know ... that *sooooo* much better.
... just put it next to the other inconvenient truths ...
Oh wait ? It's actually worse you say
Oh and btw ... actually today's humans run on about 60% fossil fuels.
...
You might want to check out what fertilizer is made of and what powers tractors
(modern agri = using petrol to grow more biomass)
Buses are organized by the government in just about any country. They *CAN* transport on average more than 1 person (obviously not counting the driver).
... they in reality don't actually transport > 2 person on average (numbers in Belgium, from "De Lijn"). And they use 4x what an average car does.
But thanks to the govt. organising buses
That aside buses do beat humans walking in efficiency, but not cars.
Just one question that I might be interested in knowing your answer to ...
...
Do nuclear reactors increase or decrease the radiation in the mined ore
Just a tiny little detail that you might want to consider. Oh and most uranium mines aren't 1/100th as secure as the average storage facility of the nuclear industry.
And now for the reality of the situation : yes nuclear waste is danguerous. It is however, less dangerous than the mine that the nuclear reactor starts with, and much *much* more secure.
"and it's now happening to the world as a whole."
I'd like to see your sources for this claim, there are a lot of scientists who would be interested in what you seem to think is conclusive proof of something they're still in the process of researching.
So do you have a reputable source, or are you another "I heard it from my friends" scaremonger who will disappear when challenged to back up their assertions?
PS mods, unsourced assertions should be challenged, not modded up "informative" because you like the sentiment
One of these days those things start eating away at our houses and furniture, and getting yeast and radon-emissions won't matter much any longer. The ethanol-making kind could certainly raise the roof though...
What's that? No attempt to back up your craven strawman?. Didn't think you would. You lying piece of shit.
water doesn't EXIST at 0 degrees kelvin...