Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.