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Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel
Fluffeh alerts us to a report of a fungus that naturally produces diesel fuel, or something very close to it. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth. ... [T]the paper's authors admit that the technique is far from any sort of industrial production. 'This report presents no information on the cost-effectiveness or other details to make G. roseum an alternative fuel source,' they write." NPR has an interview with the fungus's discoverer.
2. put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format
3. profit. MAJOR profit. and just financial profit
a. geopolitical: you don't fund wahabbi islam via saudi arabia, blowhards in venezuela, or neoimperialism in russia.
b. environmental: you don't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, you simply recycle it.
c. economic: a stable agricultral source of fuel is a lot better for a healthy economy than undependable one you need to mine
please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes. and then someone else: make your first trillion, turn this genetically engineered plant into a major company
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This by itself may not be the breakthrough we're looking for. None of the other alternative energy stories on /. in the past few months may be either. But they keep coming, research continues in countless labs and studies across the globe, some things don't work, and others lead to more inquiry, and that's what is really important.
This will not be a puzzle solved by a single genius in a moment of discovery. It will be solved over time, by many talented people with many discoveries. But I think that's why it's safe to say it will be solved.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Mr. Diesel designed his engine so that farmers could make their own fuel back in the day when there weren't filling stations in rural areas. It could still be done from farm crops, garbage, this new fungus, all sorts of things. What we need is government approval of the efficient turbo-diesel engines that they use in Europe, and then plants to make the stuff in numerous ways depending on what is most economical in a given region.
Yeah, because we eat a lot of tree trunks, blades of grass, and stalks. Plus we eat things like scrub weeds that can grow in the harshest of conditions with no irrigation or pesticides.
Or we could convert them into biodiesel.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Anytime someone asks me what the point of protecting biodiversity/the rainforest/the environment I will point to this article. There are many other reasons IMO, but "tree hugger" is a derogatory term these days.
I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.
If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.
If you're going to try to redefine "best" to be "the one that kills the fewest four-toed sloths" or something, dream on. This is the real world.
Except the fungus is getting its carbon from cellulose in the first place. That cellulose was made from a plant that did fix CO2 from the atmosphere. So really, any industrial application of the fungus would be only step 2 in a three step process. 1) grow cellulose 2) use fungus to turn cellulose into fuel 3) burn fuel. While steps 2 and 3 are not carbon neutral, that ignores step 1, which should make up for the deficit.
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.
I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets? In the real world, the most profitable investment may have a huge environmental cost canceling any benefit therefrom. Even restrcting to nominally "eco-friendly" fuels, you have to factor in their *relative*, *total* environmental harm, and weigh it against the utility to users, in order to find which is the best. And since "total life-cycle environmental harm" is not a parameter in the corporate profitability computation, we shouldn't be surprised if they don't factor it in.
Of course, environmental costs do, in a sense, show up in balance sheets ... but not in any efficient, sensible way. They manifest as stuff like:
- Bribe to regulator.
- Lobbyist salaries.
- $Environmenal_harm1 denial campaign.
- Compliance costs of $efficiency_standard1 which barely accomplishes anything.
- Goodwill (modulo the impact of advertising)
Please, please stop assuming "profitability within current system" is the same as "efficiency, discounting for meaningful environmental damage".
No, I'm not a greenie, just upset at how blind people can get to the other side's arguments.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I never said they did. What I said is that the non-balance sheet environmental costs don't make a difference in decisionmaking, because everyone who matters ignores them. Do you really think China's Ministry of Transportation gives a shit about Braziallian rain forests? Or BP's stockholders? They don't, or at least not enough to matter when it comes down to money.
If the options are $X for this solution, and $1.5 * X for the eco-friendly solution, guess which one will be widely implemented, no matter what the Sierra Club has to say?
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case.
A technology might be the most profitable for a company to produce it, but not the one with the lowest cost to society.
Pollution certainly does have some cost to society, and the cost is often not adequately represented in our economy, especially if people who pollute are not charged money for it, or if the wrong number of permits in a cap-and-trade system are released, that could end up costing society later as the environment is destroyed, valuable resources depleted, quality of life damaged for all, perhaps culminating with everyone dying in a catastrophe (worst case, but possible). The cost of pollution needs to be included along with the admittedly important costs of manufacture, distribution and infrastructure upgrades.
So let us hope that we choose the one most profitable to society, and that hidden costs to our society actually come out to real costs.
I guess it is partially stubborness, because we've dropped the many advantages my system has on yours, I guess I've already won ;-P
I am curious as to tissue or temporal specific promoters in plants. I'm guessing you don't know of any either. The lactose promoter would be good if you were going to make diesel from your small intestine, but of course that's not what you were suggesting, so you'd need a specific promoter, which may or may not be known. Like I said: another layer of complexity that's not an issue with microbial based methods.
So when they award the nobel for "Thinking up potential ways to make diesel fuel but not actually doing it" I'll be getting most of it, you'd get maybe an 8th. I WIN!