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Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet?
Andy_Spoo writes "Something that I've been trying to get an answer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but another is CO2. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction. So how much is the manufacture and consumption of alcohol contributing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
"There" ?
Over THERE wherever the poster is from, THEIR education system is so bad that THEY'RE making repeated mistakes over and over. THERE needs to be an improvement in THEIR attitude towards THEIR literacy. As long as THERE exists a culture of flippancy towards being properly literate, THEIR children will always respond to people correcting THEIR use of language with indignant responses scoffing at the need to be accurate in the use of language. THEY'RE constantly talking about things like "evolution of language" and that THERE have been many changes in the use of words over history, but THEIR mistake stems from the fact that THEY'RE completely disregarding the difference between language evolving to meet different circumstances, and language devolving due to the apathy and ignorance of those who speak it.
I hate printers.
But more importantly, why you going after beer man? Not cool.
As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years)...
Or you're good at selectively quoting the evidence.
It's never been funny. Just stop.
I wouldn't fart that much.
Yea, we gotta stop.
Stop worrying, I mean.
The actual brewing process is carbon neutral, provided you include the growing of the plants in the calculations.
Lrn 2 math n00b!
Alcohol - The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
Carbon from biomass is just cycling in and out of the atmosphere, no big deal.
The problem is digging up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and releasing it (either directly into the atnosphere or into a place where it is likely to get released).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Slow News day? Correlation is not Causation? This thread is useless without pics? Whatever it takes; NO!
For the love of all that's sacred... the answer is NO NO NO! Please dear God.. NO! Because without Alcohol .. does a world even exist?
There is no evidence that CO2 is warming the planet.
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?1ad63198-0a1f-4b5b-8fb8-96df07d70d41
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
is aliens probing us rectally?
is beer causing global warming farts?
how is babby formed?
issues are the complicated. i try to thinks hard abouts them when i'm on the toilets. and i push reals hard and out come deep thoughts like: pubs cause global warming
i am the smarts type person with the deeply thinking type stuff
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually shouldn't have TOO much effect. I can't comment on the cylinders of CO2 used in pumping or carbonation, but the CO2 that the yeast releases is balanced by the CO2 which the plant absorb in order to produce the sugar that is fermented.
As to how many petrochemicals/fossil fuels are used in the production/creation of those plants and that sugar, that's a different story, but that is less related to alcohol specifically and more to how our agricultural/transportation system function generally.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
I'm pretty sure it's the apocolypse on December 21, 2012 that will kill our planet.
threatening my beer and whiskey. Just for that I'm gonna crack open a cold one and go fire up the grill, for no reason other than making mass quantities of CO2!
Ethenol is fermented from plant products, no net change in CO2. The CO2 in the keg system is taken from the air, no net change.
First they came for my beer, and I said nothing.
Alcohol is made from breaking down grains or other starches. Those plants gather CO2 from the air. So the consumption of alcohol doesn't really add to the problem. That is, at least only to the extent that agriculture does. If you're really worried about CO2 related to your food/beverage intake, you should cut back on meat, which has 8x-10x as much of a carbon footprint per calorie than grains. I guess alcohol would be somewhere in between.
We all know that the posting of really silly, unscientific stories on Slashdot increases the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere due to the tremendous amount of electricity exhausted in the transfer, dowmloading, and display of those stories, not to mention the CO2 output of the readers, who, at least most of them, exhale carbon dioxide! Something must be done!
Bruce Perens.
I haven't done any research on this, but if I had to make an educated guess, I highly doubt it does, especially when placed in comparison to emissions from environmentally-unfriendly automobiles, CFCs from spray products and other ozone-depleting contributors. Additionally, correct me if I'm wrong, but I highly doubt that manufacturing beer emits tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
If it does, then pop beverage would probably be just as big, if not a bigger, contributor to the greenhouse effect, which I highly doubt to be true.
Good question.
The planet? No.
Me? Yes.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No; No it's not.
"What are YOU doing to help global warming?" I'm drinking all the beers!
...because the carbon produced by yeast comes from sugar, which comes from plants, which comes from the atmosphere. Remember, it's only new carbon that causes a problem. Recycling atmospheric carbon is fine.
Bottled carbon dioxide is likely to be new carbon, as one of the major production techniques involves decomposition of limestone with acid.
And, of course, any energy used in the beer production is likely to come from fossil fuels, which will release fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
Only massive metabolizing can save us now. Pass it on.
...front page of slashdot?
Wouldn't you be more worried about the methane produced by cows and those who drink beer and eat buffalo wings?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
But thats titles a lie your honor! Cant read the rest of the statement its to blurry to see!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
C02 gets pulled out of the air to make the plants you ferment to make booze, and the fermenting process lets some of this go, when you digest it the carbon becomes part of you or respirated out. Eventually all of the carbon goes back, its a cycle.
your going to blow a vein!
Brain cells? Yes.
you'll have to replace it with marijuana!
it that emits CO2 as well, you might as well legalize LSD!
fuck Al Gore!
This is the lamest April Fools' I've seen all day.
"As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction." "We" all know this? You and the mouse in your pocket?
Dihydrogen Monoxide levels are associated with 100% of the yeast fermentation on the planet.
Yeast cannot exist without Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known greenhouse gas.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in all cancer cells.
Dihydrogen Monoxide can be found in some levels in corpses 100% of the time.
Comparing Cattle production (more CO2 equiv emissions than transport) and the alcohol industry? WTF?
Cattle production is a significant cause of soil compaction, topsoil degradation, coral reef degeneration, methane emissions, acid rain, water contamination (with cow shit / hormones / antibiotics).... I could go on & on.
One of the easiest things you can do to help the environment is consume less beef & dairy products.
No 'more' than cattle. Yeesh!
My pics.
Does anyone know?
I've just done some research, by downing a large portion of assorted booze, and I'd like to tell you this: I don't care. Bwahahahaha.
OK the moronic question posed, the inbred spelling of "THEIR" and the scientifically retarded summation are sure enough to attract Al Gore and other pseudo scientific eco-cunts. The OP and whoever allowed that crap to get posted on Slashdot should be drowned in a large vat of warm whale spunk!
I am in the process of making about 3 gallons of homemade strawberry wine. It has only been fermenting for about a week and a half. I am sure the mash could kill small animals. That poor little mouse must have been kicking around in there for days:). The way it bubbles and moves I am wondering if it is sentient and I keep getting this strange feeling I am being watched...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Bitter and proud of it.
Especially before you were born.
Seriously, did you do any research at all before posting this? It's not even worth posting a link to "Let me google that for you".com
I'd have to say alcohol is the solution to saving our planet. As a very short friend of mine once said, all you have to do is:
1. Drink excessive amounts of liqueur
2. ???
3. ???
Help fight spam
"And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to there pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
Where do you suppose bottled CO2 comes from? The same place to which it returns. The air. This looks like an April Fool's post (but you never know). It's really stupid but it's not that funny or clever.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It is true that there are issues of burning fossil fuels in the production of the alcohol, but that is the same as everything else. If I did not go out for drinking, I would go out for dinner, or go out for to a movie. I cannot imagine that producing, distributing, and consuming a bottle of Perrier or soft drink consumes any more resources than average alcohol.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What I see is conflicts between Petroleum companies and environmentalists about CO2 emitions.
Alcohol prodution for cars for example will not add more CO2 in the air because plats will gather CO2.
Alcohol problem is with US tax payers who will contribute with fat midwest farmers.
Alcohol is the only thing that keeps me sane enough to keep from coming up with evil ways to destroy this fu*cked up planet we live on!!!
Can't wait until the global warming idiots move on to a new sky is falling fear of the day. They use global warming for an excuse to do away with or regulate anything they don't like. Is that not obvious to everyone by now?
According to http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0360544204004888, fossil fuel CO2 emissions during the 1990s was 23.5 petagrams of CO2 per year. Ethanol consumption per capita in 2005 for the United States was 2.2 gallons (http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resource/GraphicsGallery/Epidemiology/consfigs1.htm), or 6.6 kg per person. Assuming that's roughly representative of the world as a whole (a generous estimate), the world drinks 44 teragrams of ethanol per year. Roughly, human ethanol consumption emits 0.2% of the CO2 that fossil fuel consumption does.
The mass of CO2 used to pressurize kegs is certainly trivial, since it occupies roughly the same volume as the ethanol with much lower density. Also, the CO2 used to pressurize them was produced as the byproduct of other industrial processes, so it shouldn't be counted twice.
Besides which, all of the carbon in ethanol came from the atmosphere anyway, so the net change is 0.
Yes, alcohol is killing our planet. Alcohol makes dumb people more likely to breed with each other, pushing us closer and closer to the inevitable Idiocracy future.
How do you mod an article as -1: Troll or -1:Flamebait?
Way more CO2 is produced by transporting the beverages and by growing the inputs to distilled beverages.
"As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet"
Instead, most of us have been "conditioned to know that CO2 is destroying the planet". Big difference.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Assumning this isn't just an April Fools joke, might I suggest for the submitter membership in the No Cussing Club?
It isn't the ONLY way to make it!
The industrial way is hydration of ethene...
If we put on the scales the cars, the coal power stations - it's nothing. Better take one chilling drink, than think on the doom that planet is undergoing just because of few people will and understanding. Any energy harness should be harmonic to the nature. It's never based on the business we know today. We achieve the speed of developing in promises that this will always be in the word of progress. That newer become true. All over unit power we get, we always spend at the start for our personal needs, so we lay ourselves that we will be honest and we never are so. That would be just nature will to place us back into stone age if we are not capable of keeping promises or we don't want to harness energy harmonically to the nature. It's less we have, but its forever we could want it.
Alcohol for beverages is a net CO2producer because of the fermentation that needs energy + if you would evaluate it with the same criteria as bio-ethanolfuels, you could take in account the amount of land wasted, in favour of food production... I once tried to compare the amount of pure ethanol produced for alcoholic beverages with the amount bioethanolfuel and I came to a proportion of 1000/6.
here, have a drink.
IANAS(cientist), but couldn't the demand for oxygen-producing crops that go into beer creation offset the co2 produced by beer fermentation?
Just grow barley next to the beer plant:
1. Plants absorb CO2
2. Less transportation
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
The CO2 used in the cylinders in bars for dispensing drinks is taken from the atmosphere, so when it is released back into the air, the net carbon gain is zero.
Many breweries capture the gases (such as methane--a potent greenhouse gas) given off during the brewing process and burn it to produce power.
http://polizeros.com/2009/01/24/brewery-recycles-waste-methane-into-electricity/
I'm helping to kill the planet, one fine single-malt Scotch at a time.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The amount of co2 released when making beer is very marginal. As another poster pointed out, brewers yeast is designed to create more alcohol byproduct than co2. True that co2 *does* gets released into the air when making beer, but the release of co2 happens for three - four days of the brewing process. During this time it may peak for about 24 hours releasing one nickle sized bubble of co2 every 2-3 seconds. After that you can expect activity to decline very rapidly that by the third or fourth day you'll see fewer than a dozen of those nickle sized bubbles.
With home brewing this is the point where you either bottle it up, or move it into "secondary" for further conditioning. I go for the later, where it sits in another "carboy" (5 gal glass jug) for as much as 4 months. During this time I'd be shocked if there is enough co2 released to fill a medium sized balloon. The reason is at this point the yeast has already consumed nearly all the fermentable sugars and has gone dormant. They lay dormant at the bottom of my carboy until one day when I am ready to keg, then the beer and yeast mixture is revived with a little "priming" sugar, which causes the yeast to go active. Except this time it's contained in a keg. With no where to go the co2 builds, creates pressure, and with the help of cold conditioning some of it dissolves into the liquid giving the beer that carbonated quality. What does not help with carbonation helps to push the beer out of the keg. On a few occasions I have had to use a co2 tank to help push it out. Though I suspect you may be misinformed about how much co2 is actually used to push liquid out of a keg. Generally 5-10lbs of co2 will do it. Any more and your beer will be uber foamy.
A few minutes of searching on CO2 manufacturing.
http://www.uigi.com/carbondioxide.html
[quote]
The most common operations from which commercially-produced carbon dioxide is recovered are industrial plants which produce hydrogen or ammonia from natural gas, coal, or other hydrocarbon feedstock, and large-volume fermentation operations in which plant products are made into ethanol for human consumption, automotive fuel or industrial use. Breweries producing beer from various grain products are a traditional source. Corn-to-ethanol plants have been the most rapidly growing source of feed gas for CO2 recovery.
[/quote]
CO2 produced at the breweries may very well be the source of CO2 for the beer taps. I think it is safe to say the there is no net gain in CO2 (carbon) in the system.
The CO2 produced from natural gas, coal and other hydrocarbons are another matter.
Also, I don't believe that cow farts increase the net CO2 (carbon) in the system.
The cause of, and solution to all of life's problems.
-Homer (Simpson)
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
It has to be. Posting for the April Fool's achievement... :D
"As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction." I have not seen sufficient proof of this. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), a rise in global temperature precedes the rise in CO2 not the other way around.
Surely the best way for me to reduce the number of cattle is for me to eat more of them?
Steak anyone?
sounds like a life not worth living. fuck the environment.
-Oz
Just what we need, a 'green' angle for them to chew on.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not likely, you blithering idiot troll.
This is not a self-referential sig.
Somethig that I've been tryig to get an aswer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? *hic* Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but aother is CO2. As we all know (especially my wife), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, seding us into destruction ahead of the 2012 deadline. *burp* So how much is the ..., the maufacture and cosumption of alcohol contributesing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget... pubs and bars... *snore*
Drink Guinness, it's pushed with nitrogen. Global Crisis...OVER!
Every time you open your soda it release bubles with Earth killing gas...
Freaking April 1st.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The hotter it gets, the more you crave a cold one at the end of the day. The more cold ones you drink, the more beer mfrs make, pumping out yet more CO2, making the world hotter! Auughghgh!
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Yeah we (I) know that! But... Oh c'mom slashdot!!!!!!!!!! Everybody that has more than 10 brain cells knows that this global warning CO2 taxation agenda is a hoax! Yeah! Make your home work if you don't believe me. Check temperature variation against solar spots. We have more than 400 years of secure data to analise, so DO IT! This is a hoax to tax mankind over one of the most abundant things in this planet. Almost EVERYTHING here is carbon based. So cut the crap and don't post these globalization agenda topics no more... This website use to be good. Sad is bowing to larger and darker forces. If WE THE PEOPLE don't stop this hoax in time what's gonna be? This is what is gonna be: - You smoke? CO2, Tax it! - You breath? CO2, Tax it! - Own a car? CO2, Tax it! - Have animals? CO2, Tax it! - Own plants? CO2, Tax it! - Are you a farmer? CO2, Tax it! Don't you people understand? EVERYTHING is tied to CO2, and if this NONSENSE goes on EVERYTHING is gonna have a CO2 Tax associated to it. WAKE UP OR BE A SLAVE!
If you truely believe in Global Warming, you have a duty to the planet to stop breathing now!
The planet is not alive. So alcohol will not kill it.
We might do something that will kill all humans. Or maybe even all mammals. But we won't kill all the life on the planet. I don't think we could if we tried.
The Earth shall be scorched and barren when they pry the beer mug from my dessicated fingers.
Look no further than this for proof of the severe damage alcohol has done to the brains of Chris Tarrent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If climate change were all about a few extra breaths of CO2 and beer, we would hardly have a problem with CO2. It's difficult to really believe that man could actually have an impact on the planet. It is. The atmosphere is enormous, but then, so too are all the industries that provide us energy.
The United States mines and burns, each year, about the same mass of coal as roughly 200 Great Pyramids. That which took nearly the entire ancient Egyptian economy, with all of their wealth, decades to produce, the USA does 200 times over, every year, and then burns it. You could almost say that the USA burns a great pyramid sized mountain of coal just shy of every two days the year. Nearly all the weight of that goes straight up into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. The carbon from the coal combines with oxygen, and there you go, you got 200 great pyramids floating around.
If you doubt this, go take a drive to your local power plant. Chances are, its a coal fired unit. You should see rail lines coming to it, and, what looks like one or more big black hills sitting next to it. Those hills are piles of coal and they will be burnt in about 30 days. The trains that ship the coal are easily a mile long. Sure, you could drive past it in a minute, but take the time actually to imagine that the whole thing probably weighs about 3000 tons.
By mass, that's enough coal to double the atmospheric concentration of CO2 over a fairly significant. Do the math. Take 3000 tons of carbon, and knowing that earth's atmospheric pressure is 15psi, of which a 300ppm is carbon dioxide, and see just how many square inches that trainload of carbon touches. It's a big number, and thousands of these trains cross America every year, each carrying mile long trains of coal from places like Wyoming all across the country.
I did a back of the envelop calculation that shows that replacing all of this coal fired generation with windmills. If you use the windmills site being installed off of Delaware as a benchmark, you can calculate that it would take about 300,000 windmills to replace all of our coal.
It is for this reason that energy businesspeople scoff at the green lobby. For the most part, environmentalists really do not understand the scale of what they propose. America's energy industry is just physically enormous. Conversely, you can't seriously take an energy man's claim that fossil burning can't effect the planet. Unlike other industries, energy executives usually have degrees in engineering and they can do or should do the calculations needed to see that the scale of their activities is in fact planet altering.
Of course, I have not even touched on the natural gas and petroleum we consume. But, I can tell you this much. If you use 15 gallons of gas per week, you are putting about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide, straight into the air. How many square inches does it take to spread that out, just so that it doubles the amount of CO2 in the air?
I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination, as I've written plenty about enviro's being commies out to crush the USA... but it is pretty indisputable that our activities are planet consuming and that, as goofy and perhaps as evil as enviro's are, they are right on one fundamental point. We do have to manage the atmosphere. We do have to manage our ecosystem. We do have to view the earth as a closed system and we do have to understand the effects of our actions upon its chemistry and consequently our environment. There are just too many people with too many powerful tools consuming too much energy to do otherwise.
This is my sig.
outside of this being based on an unproven assumption (there is still MUCH debate regarding the effect of CO2 emissions). the amount of CO2 produced is minuscule compared to industry or even other carbonated beverages, soda consumption in the us for example (~150 quarts per year per capita vs 85 for beer) as others noted most beer is artificially carbonated just as soda, if you've ever had cask ale your familiar with how much carbonation the brewing process creates, which isn't much. or course you could also look a step down the road and realize that CO2 emissions are a boon to lush plant growth which removes CO2 and emits oxygen, could it be, that the earth's biosphere is self regulating? no, can't be
First they take our SUV's and now they take our beer? That's just cruel.
Yeast converts sugars to carbon dioxide and alcohol.
One more time. Yeast converts sugars to carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Sugars come from starches such as grain flours and the like. The plants that produce the sugars/starches fix the carbon from the atmosphere using a magical process called photosynthesis. During this magical process the carbon dioxide in the air is converted to sugary molecules via the Calvin Cycle.
Obviously the process is complicated and takes a great deal of time, but the process itself is carbon neutral because all the carbon dioxide emitted was first fixed through a photosynthetic process.
This says nothing, however, about the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the fossil fuels used to heat the fires involved in the brewing process or the transportation of alcohol to the masses; not to mention the carbon dioxide emitted as the merry masses imbibe :-)
God forbid that we should stop drinking alcohol during troubled times!!!
Clearly we should also all stop exhaling because it is causing the planet to burn up. Maybe we can ban exercise and heavy breathing or kill a few million people.
I seem to recall seeing/reading/hearing that refining aluminum produced considerable quantities of the gas. Anyone have any guesses as to how much CO2 is being produced from that process?
I would be interested to know how smoking cannabis damages the environment, in comparison.
or I hope so...
Use beer to sequester CO2 emissions from power plants?
Think about it for a moment:
Who knew the solution to global warming resided pint of lager?!
Beer: is there anything it can't do?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The OP is further proof that an infinite number of monkeys will not necessarily come up with anything that resembles intelligent output.
I'm doing my part by eating cows, pigs, and chickens while I drink all that beer I've been brewing.
I mean, just like yeast, those guys are nothing more than methane-fuming CO2 producing beasts slowly deteriorating the planet.
They must be destroyed! Mostly in a saucepan on my zero-carbon footprint inductive stovetop!
Also, all that tasty meat and alcohol should help end my life early, thus saving the planet that much more.
Clearly, nothing destroys the earth faster than a vegetarian.
Especially one with a yeast infection.
Carbon MONOXIDE(CO) is the greenhouse gas, not Carbon DIOXIDE(CO2). sheesh people...
The brewery by my house, recycles the CO2 produced during the brewing process and uses it to bottle the beer.
'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Remember the yeast is making carbon dioxide from the vegetable matter it is eating, which was removed from the atmosphere months or years ago. Nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change that is all about releasing gases that have been locked out of the atmosphere for thousands or millions of years.
This is NOT a signature.
Go on now...hush.
Dear Al Gore,
Fuck You.
Regards,
Binary Laurence
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Wow. Freedom fries.
Serious silliness I miss not living in the US.
Might explain some of the questions I have gotten from English students on the subject.
(Wonder what could be done so that trying to link to the Japanese article doesn't send wikipedia to ampersand.)
(See, honey, reading /. is educational.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I can't decide if the person who modded you insightful is doing some subtle trolling or simply doesn't get the joke....
My pics.
With regards to CO2 tanks, multiple people have already pointed out that this is CO2 that was already in the atmosphere, captured, and bottled.
But if you're really curious about how much CO2 I go through for kegs, I have a 5 pound tank of CO2. That lasts me about 5 homebrewer kegs (at 5 gallons apiece). That gets me both the initial carbonation and all of the pouring. In comparison, burning one gallon of gasoline gets you about 19 pounds of CO2 released into the atmosphere.
I've never put the fermenter on the scale before and after fermentation - I imagine that would be the best way to track CO2 emissions, as the only thing that should leave the fermenter in this time is CO2. However, let's assume the volume of the beer doesn't change that much during fermentation. I start with 5 gallons at a specific gravity (density of the beer / density of water) of 1.06. That's 42.4 pounds. I end up with about 5 gallons at a specific gravity of 1.01. That's 40.4 pounds. So assuming the volume of the beer doesn't increase, that's 2 pounds lost. In reality, since alcohol is less dense than water, there should be a larger volume in the end, and so the final weight is probably above 40.4 pounds.
So in the worst case scenario, there's 3 pounds of CO2 involved in the fermentation and serving of 5 gallons of beer. I bet that having my stove on full blast for 2 hours to boil the water emits much more CO2 than that. Heck, me driving to the homebrew store 6 miles away definitely emits more than that.
So in conclusion - I think it makes much more sense to focus on the costs involved with distributing the beer and heating the water that makes the beer, and much less on the fermentation and kegging systems.
Yes CO2 is produced but the carbon in the (let's say) corn came from the atmosphere. So when it is decomposed or fermented the carbon is put back where it came from.
The burnning of fossil fuels releases carbon back into the air also. This carbon was taken out of the air also but the problem is the time periods. The cabon in oil is the result of millions of years of plant growth and then it is all burned at once in a couple centuries.
Alcohol production is closer to steady state. Same with burning trees and dry grass.
Timothy Wrote: And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?" -- As the CO2 in the compressed cylinders was taken out of the air in the first place, there is zero difference when it is put back into the air when it released from turning on the taps.
There is absolutely no evidence that extra CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming what so ever. While there is a correlation between past temperatures of the Earth and CO2, old data points dug up from Antarctica show that CO2 tended to rise 200-300 years after temperature rose.
In other words, with increased temperature came increased carbon in the atmosphere - NOT the other way around, and I challenge anybody to link me to a single scientific study saying otherwise.
Yeast actually saves the planet from CO2! Not kills ! People are not capable of collecting 100% of grown yeast. So actually less amount of captured CO2 are consumed. What else should we add ? 1st april jokers day will not save author from the public. It's not true to hide terrorist who are threatening the nations bear and whiskey...
Alcohol fermentation from yeast and plant matter is a carbon neutral cycle. I'd be more concerned with the direct warming effect from the hot air produced by intoxicated humans.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Yeast fermentation of sugars absence of oxygen will create carbon dioxide and alcohol. Hence the "fizzy" in beer but in wine the CO2 is allowed expire out.
Yeast fermentation of sugars with oxygen will create carbon dioxide and water.
Animals on earth have been creating CO2 as part of living for millions of years and the plants on earth have converted that CO2 back to O2 for millions of years and cycle goes on.
But no, we need to have plants and to absorb the CO2 and chopping down forest for timber and development is killing our planet. In short, we have tipped the normal balance of plants and animals so this, as best we know now, is killing the planet.
When you mak love, you release more CO2.
You are guilty to send us into hell!
I can't think of a better way to give Mother Earth a send off! This might brighten your April Fools Day. http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/6d6ad04ce4/eco-commando-episode-2
This alcohol I'm drinking makes the Bush environmental plan sound very reasonable.
Think about it. Not everybody drinks alcohol, but nearly everyone alive, even the elders of Patagonia, and the babies in Vanuatu, breathes, and that releases C02 into the atmosphere too.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
between Guinness and the planet. Figure out another solution. Without Guinness, what good is a planet anyway?
Mars: No Guinness, no people. Co-incidence? I think not.
For every 20L of beer I make (around 5% alcohol), 320L of CO2 comes out at standard conditions. Mead comes out at 14% and makes about 3 times as much (25L nets me 1200L of CO2 release). Mind you when it comes to bars and Sam Adams, the excess CO2 produced at the brewery gets compressed and shipped off as Bulk CO2 (extra profit venue), which then gets sold back to the breweries to pressurize their kegs.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
This post must be an April Fools joke.
One of the easiest things you can do to help the environment is consume less beef & dairy products.
Surely the best way for me to reduce the number of cattle is for me to eat more of them?
Steak anyone?
Or maybe one of you with Fava Beans....
Get up!
You shouldn't have to worry because our planet is NOT warming, and even if it was, Man, and Carbon emissions have nothing to do with it.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html
Fat free dairy is much better for you than said cows are bad for everyone.
Today, in response to the recent discovery that alcohol production creates CO2, the Obama administration placed all alcoholic beverages under the Cap and Trade program, causing them to be heavily taxed.
In related news, public support for Global Warming Prevention programs fell by 98%. One local citizen even stated that he was feeling a bit chilly.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to all of life's problems," -Homer Simpson
Umm... isn't fossil fuel "sequestered carbon"?
BTW: I'm a winemaker - it takes 3-6 days to turn the sugar to wine or beer (even faster sometimes).
Humans produce CO2 24/7.
The quantity of CO2 is surprisingly not that much - 1 Litre of alcohol made ~ 700g of CO2 (or 0.7g/L).
a bottle of wine (750ml) 0.75L @ 13% alc = 0.05L alc / bottle
Ozzie "stubbie" of beer = 0.375 @ 4.6% alc = 0.075L alc/bottle
Humans: 500-900g/day (According to http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/math-how-much-co2-is-emitted-by-human-on-earth-annually/)
stop breathing, and drink more wine!
isn't that latest bogeyman of the right?
boo! i'm a SOCIALIST. a EUROPEAN STYLE SOCIALIST
i will give 8 WEEKS VACATION AND FREE HEALTHCARE
BWAHAHAHAHAHA its the evil socialist! out to destroy america!
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Slashdot it killing our planet.
Doesn't seem to me like alcohol is killing our planet. Seems more like it's the carbon dioxide that's doing it.
CO2 is killing our planet. Beer is a fortunate side-effect of that.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Sounds like it, but just to set the record straight: the fermented sugars come from plants who made them in part from atmospheric CO_2, and hence, the production of ethanol from sugars is CO_2 neutral, at least regarding the fermentation process.
The trouble with increased CO_2 levels comes from burning "fossilized fuels", being the product of photosynthesis ages ago, thus removing it then, and reintroducing it now in vast amounts...
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
It doesn't really matter how much CO2 it emits. You grow something, then eat it, and then reemit it. The carbon then goes back to being absorbed by something growing - it's a closed system powered by the sun.
The increase in atmospheric carbon comes from us digging coal out of hillsides and pumping oil from underground, then burning it - adding it to the cycle. But it has nowhere to go in the short term, as in a few hundred or thousand of years, so results in increased atmospheric concentration.
Things that grow, live, eat, die, don't affect the net balance of atmospheric carbon. It doesn't matter how much you breathe, fart, your cows fart, or whether you brew beer. 1 lb of carbon in plant matter in can't result in more than 1 lb of carbon out or vice versa. It also makes no difference if it's CO2 or methane - the net result is for all practical purposes the same. (Methane is what, 15x more potent, but CO2 lingers about 18x longer; so over their lifetime it's a pound-for-pound toss-up.)
This is why unpressurized casks or (in a pinch) Nitrogen-pressurized casks are far superior.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Don't worry about going green, worry about getting a life. Honestly, who blasted stupid can you be to worry about whether beer is going to doom our planet because of its CO2 footprint. Much more damage is done by 6 Billion people farting than through Alcohol production, much less the tragedy of those addicted to the stuff. So either go have a beer or six or go stick your head in a toilet!!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
Yep, all that CO2 was in the atmosphere and there was plenty of life on Earth. If we put it all back then the Earth as a biosphere will be just fine. But we humans will have a little adjusting to do while the ocean currents stop, the jet streams shift a thousand miles, and most plant and animal life dies because the climate at home is no longer the climate it adapted to.
We might also have to rebuild our coastal cities (and there are a few) since shorelines can vary by hundreds of miles with varying sea levels. And farming will be fun when centuries of climatic experience are no good and a little place like Kansas stops growing wheat but you have no way to predict where else wheat will grow year-to-year.
So in short, "Is alcohol killing our planet?" - no. "Is burning fossil fuel killing our planet?" - no, not literally. At worst it will kill a large percentage of the individuals living at the time of rapid climatic change and it might kill a few of the less adaptable species. But there will still be lots of biomass on Earth.
Fuck you, Mark.
Thanks to evolving meat alternatives you can now enjoy steaks of similar texture and taste without the guilt of environmental destruction, animal suffering, world hunger, acceleration of drought, and looming heart disease. It may not look or taste exactly the same, but with an open mind and a sense of ethics one can overcome these prejudices and enjoy these healthy alternatives to animal flesh.
The cows will be reduced in number as markets shift away from the resource hungry and environmentally destructive sources of food. They may still live out their lives in some marginal lands, but no more rainforests will need to be leveled to grow all the soy and corn it takes to feed these miserable animals.
Change is a concept whose time has come.
probably the amount of co2 used by the plants that were grown for the alcohol industry at least equals the amount of co2 produced while fermenting carbohydrates. cheers
Some kegs use nitrogen which creates much smaller bubbles and a thicker richer (tastier) head. Other kegs use a mix of N2 and CO2 (with lots more N2 than CO2 in many cases).
I'm actually not a fan of beers that just use CO2 in their kegs as they can taste very sharp and are harder to drink IMO.
I drink Rye or a good Kentucky Bourbon.
Jim Beam Rye is good and Cheap. Old Overholt and Wild Turkey Rye are good too.
Eagle Rare, or Knob Creek as as good as it gets.
photosMy Photostream
Many scientists have highlighted that temperature is driving CO2 levels, and not the opposite way. What people have for long think as a fact may not be one. The 4th report of the UN talks about it, but this is not being relayed by big medias.
Also, it's quite clear that what happened to earth on the last few years is that the sun is heating us more than before. NASA has released some photos showing that the ice on mars is melting.
While trying to protect earth is for sure a good thing, I am not sure that we all have the accurate information here.
yeah, some mods are real idiots.
If I think something is funny, I will probably mod it +1 Insightful. "It's funny because it's true."
I may be a bit late to this discussion, but I did a quick search for the "carbon neutral" answer and came up with nothing. The yeast which produce alcohol, do not make carbon, they convert sugars into carbon. Those sugars were previously converted from water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and whatever else is required for photosynthesis. Since, only a small portion of the plant matter is actually used in beer making and much of the remaining plant matter will take some time to decay and since celulose is also a by-product of making alcohol one could say that making alcohol is a short term carbon sink.
Your kidding right?
The End is Nigh! The End is Nigh! NOT!!! NOT!!!.
You're being irresponsible shouting wolf or fire when there is nothing to see. Move along already.
Clearly the evidence for C02 as a poison and agent of global warming has been utterly debunked by now: here at Watts Up With That on a daily basis and the goring the science fiction spun by Gore and the ice age and making sense of data here and the spinning alarmists and generally Paths To Knowledge dot Net climate science category. Most importantly don't forget Unsetteling Foundations of Climate Science by Dr. Lindzen. Then there is Climate Audit dot org that regularly excoriates the so called climate science.
C02 as THE cause of Global Warming is nothing more than a lame correlation, there are a number of other correlations that are much better. Also C02 levels can be much higher without harm as it was in the many millions of years of Earth's history when the levels where 10 times higher than now!!! Life lived and evolved just fine under ~4,000 ppm of C02 in the atmosphere.
And if you think that the science is settled then you are NOT a scientist and you DO NOT support the scientific method or the process of science education where people who are ignorant of the science ask questions to learn: see Richard Feynman on Scientific Investigation here. Besides almost all Canadians that I ask want it to be 5c to 10c warmer up here as that will open up the Northern areas, which are a plenty, for development and farming opportunities! We're tired of 90% of us living within 200 miles of the USA border! We're tired of our igloos, we want actual homes!
To offset this, we simply need to grow more pot! That will consume the CO2 and produce oxygen.
OK comes from "okay" which comes from a native American language, Chocktaw, "okeh", meaning "it is so" or "thank you" depending on context and inflection.
Anyone would think CowboyNeal has an infection.
.
Oh god here we go with more idiots and bad science.
Oh yeah and I forgot the Polar Bears are drowning too.
But lets completely forget that A. Polar Bears were endangered 20 years ago and are no longer endangered, B. If actual science were attempted to be used to prove global warming is real its impossible at this point. Please for the planet dont fart, dont drive SUVs , please give up freedom of speech,Give up your private property, your guns,etc... please give up all of your freedoms for the following: Save the planet, Save the children, Save Grandma and last but least the most important reason of the all Give ignorant intellectual wannabes a reason to exist and force there version of control over everyone.
Yeahhh sign me up....
God I hate April 1.
CO2 that is part of the natural carbon cycle is certainly not the problem. Yeast eats sugar that contains carbon that was bound from the atmosphere by a recently living plant. It's just not the same as dumping carbon into the air from materials that were sequestered and out of the atmosphere for millions of years. Remember, alcohol is a renewable resource, and if we can find a way to make it without burning fossil fuel, a darn good way to make a dent in net carbon emissions.
No alcohol has been harmed in the making of this .... ahh shite... whatever... oh.. crap... man that vodka is good...whatever... drool
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Whether this has any significant effect on climate change I do not know, but in Australia at least this is an area that is beginning to be looked at. I work for a rather large wine company, producing many millions of litres of wine every year, and we now need to start looking at the amount of carbon dioxide produced during the fermentation process. The carbon limits set up by our green-loving government (which I do not pretend to understand) have our company pegged on the limit of a "high level" carbon emitter. These limits are due to be revised in the next couple of years (so I have been told), and this will tip us over the edge. So, alcohol may or may not be contributing significantly to global warming, but carbon emissions in the alcohol industry is an area where Australian businesses need to look.
This is so dumb I don't even know how to respond. "yeah, lets get rid of alcohol, and cars, and lightbulbs, and cattle for crackpot politically driven theories!!"
The CO2 released from brewing or baking, not counting the fossil fuels used to fertilize, harvest and process the grain, have a net zero effect because the grain harvested the Carbon from the atmosphere. Think of it as a biofuel, Ethanol to be precise.
You seems to be unaware what hops are. They are plants, thus their carbon is temporarily fixed from the atmosphere, you are right there. But they do not constitute the main ingredient, which is water and malted grain (barley or sometimes wheat). The hops are there for their antimicrobial and taste (bittering) properties. Most of the hops are removed together with the yeast residue, and it wasn't very much to begin with. (pounds of grains, ounces of hops). Know your beer man, it's sacred!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Isn't it releasing the same CO2 that was used during photosynthesis?
"As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction."
Well, I haven't been alseep and still question this audacious assumption.
This question makes me wonder about a related topic: Is Andy_Spoo killing our planet?
One of the easiest things you can do to help the environment is consume less beef & dairy products.
Until you scrap those big American gas-guzzling cars, you can only dream of prying my beef and dairy products from my cold dead hands.
Considering there's almost 200% as many people drinking soda pop, one would think there's more of a threat from drinking a Coke than someone drinking a beer.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It's a natural cycle that we can't do anything about. The cause: the Sun. To say that we are causing climate change is retarded and bad science. Look at the history records and you will see that the climate was much warmer in the middle ages before getting cooler in the 17th and 18th centuries. Go back even further and you will see that the earth's climate cycles match solar activity. We are being taxed because of this and there is nothing we can do about it. Climate change is nothing but a money spinner.
Alcoholic beverages are a CO2-storage. All the beer that's stored somewhere in pubs or your fridge or basement contains CO2, which, therefore, is temporarily out of the atmospheric CO2-cycle. It sort of takes the place of that other CO2-storage, which we're slowly emptying, namely oilfields and the likes. The more alcohol we drink, the more has to be in storage, the more CO2 is temporarily out of the loop. Just like with wooden houses, carbon bikeframes and the likes.
And, even better, since CO2 is used to pressurize taps for alcohol beverages, even more CO2 is out of the loop. The latter is even actually taken directly from the atmosphere!
Also, alcohol consumption lowers the average lifespan of humans, thereby making the problem - humanity - smaller;-)
But that's theory. Reality is a bit more painful; the amount of CO2 in alcohol is miniscule compared to the amount of CO2 that comes into the biosphere through the use of pesticides and fertilizer, which are mostly produced from natural gas. What you should understand, is that for everything you eat and drink, about TEN TIMES AS MUCH energy is needed to produce it than is contained within the food. Therefore, some people say, "we actually eat fossil fuels".
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
So the bottomline is: yes, alcoholic is killing our planet. But that's not due to the fermentation process, which does not bring NEW carbon into the cycle. Instead, it is due to the energy that's added when growing and transporting it, which basically comes from fossil fuels. The same goes for most other foods and drinks; for each calory you eat, ten calories of fossil fuel were used to produce it.
Possibly more interesting is that the fact that you ask this question shows your lack of understanding of the amount of CO2 that a simple car produces. There's about 50-60 gram of CO2 in a liter of beer. Using a liter of fuel in your car produces about 2500 grams of CO2. That's about 50 times as much. So, if you want to compensate for your beer consumption, just try to use 1 tank of fuel less a year; that'll give you enough CO2-credits to drink well over 20 beers each day, which should be more than enough:-)
0x or or snor perron?!
I love it, the new puritans are still bothered about alcohol, but now it is about the bubbles
...it's the stupidity that's killing the planet.
At least I'm going to die drunk.
This is April second.
Yesterday was Fools Day
Wait a minute, let's be clear, the worst offender is BEER, get rid of beer, we cut down on 2/3 of the problem, the rest coming from the production of great vodka and all, I have a shot to that!
NASDROVIA!!!!
It is a proven fact that as CO2 levels increase the earthâ(TM)s temperature does not go up, it in fact does the opposite the temperature decreases. you can see this by looking back at data billions of years old from the earth. Global warming is a misconception brought about by the government to slow down economic development in 3rd world countries!
Yeast do not create carbon from thin air. They convert the sugars in the plants (grapes or barley) into alcohol and CO2.
The plants have absorbed that carbon from the atmosphere using photosynthesis.
So the total sum of carbon added to the atmosphere is zero. And this is a dumb article.
I would think that CO2 from alcohol production is carbon neutral... that is, the CO2 involved in the process is CO2 that is already in "circulation" and part of our biosphere's natural cycle. Contrast that with fossil fuels, which has carbon that was locked away underground and taken out of circulation millions of years ago. I think the prevailing theory is that it is the release of this ancient carbon source which is believed to create the increase of available carbon (and hence CO and CO2) that we are measuring.
Is CO2 really the primary bi-product of alcohol that is truly killing the planet, or is it over population caused by all the babies from having meaningless one night stands with strangers? Especially since the "religious concervatives" have made it illegal to have an abortion, what the Hell happened to separation of church and skate.
How did this asinine post make it to Slashdot?
Let's normalize the DOE numbers - 1,145.6 x 10^6 = 1.1456 x 10^9, which is, like I said, about a billion tons per year, or roughly 200 great pyramids.
The total mass of earth's atmosphere, as you said, is 1.135 x 10^16 tons. The present carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is 582 parts per million, so roughly, the mass with which we are concerned is only about 6.6057x10^12 tons. If we calculate a little more, we can readily see that each year of burning, given a world wide manmade CO2 production is about 1 part in 825. It's not really a lot, but it does pile up. There is no discovered mechanism by which our CO2 production is magically removed from the air and indeed, direct measurements show that CO2 is rising at about a few ppm per year in way that is consistent with the amount of CO2 man produces.
I agree with you about AGW and I certainly distrust the motives of those who promote carbon taxes and massive energy changes. I do not believe in environmentalism as a proxy for socialism. But I do know that at our present rate of burning, we know that 20% of all humans will start to feel the actual health effects of CO2 in the atmosphere at 1000ppm, and that, at, the prehistoric levels of 3000ppm which are arguably more "normal", most humans actually will be continually sick. We really do not want to keep jacking up the CO2 into the air.
I look at it this way - would you swim in a pool that someone else pissed in? By volume, a little bit of pee is not very much compared to the overall mass of the pool, so why not hop in? We manage our water, we manage our soil, and I think we need to manage the air as well. That's all I'm saying.
I certainly do NOT think that we put ourselves into the stone ages. I think instead that we should be building nuclear power plants like no tomorrow. I would have much preferred Obama to take that 800b in stimulus money and begin construction on the hundreds of nuclear power plants, retire coal and natural gas plants, and move on. Enviros will bitch about the waste. Reprocess what you can and put the rest in the ground. The earth ways a lot more than the atmosphere and so the ground is the safest place to put things. When nuclear power runs out, then, we should hopefully be onto fusion.
All the windmills and energy cuts are ridiculous, I agree, but we do need to be building nuclear power plants and NOW.
This is my sig.
Exhaling produces CO2: Quick! Everybody stop exhaling!
Apparently it is in dispute, but is certainly not bullshit. It is one of many possible origins. Okeh as the Indian word is what I was taught way back in grade school, and is number #2 in this following list. Here is the answers.com page that has all the possibly etymological origins, "OK" has quite the history and could come from any number of original words, or various abbreviations. So take yer pick there, it is pretty interesting there are so many of them.
As to Technocrat, Bruce had posted previously to the takedown that he might have to do that, as it wasn't fitting his idea of what he wanted plus the cost of the site. It wasn't totally unexpected at all.
This seems like the right line of reasoning. Are beer companies taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air (in the form of CO2)?
But even if you just take CO2 production into account, this sounds like a perfect Fermi problem to me. I have seen a lot of posts claiming that CO2 release is minuscule compared to oil and coal burning, but nothing that hints at HOW minuscule.
We probably need to guess at total world alcohol production, world coal and oil burning, and guess how much CO2 is released manufacturing the alcohol. It's tempting to search the web, but the whole point of a Fermi problem is that you don't even have to make good guesses when all you're concerned about is powers of ten.
Alcohol production: maybe 1 beer per person per day, .3 L per bottle, 7 billion people: 10^12 L of beer per year, or 10^11 L of alcohol or 10^11 kg if by weight. Suppose the process produces as much CO2 by weight as alcohol. After all, what do I know? I feel like I've estimated things on the high side, especially bottles per person per day, but come up with 10^11 kg of CO2 per year. this is probably at least 10 times too high.
Coal and oil: this is much harder to estimate and much easier to look up. It's about 3 * 10^13 kg.
So CO2 release from beer production is not completely insignificant as I was guessing at first. I'd guess it's around 1/1000th as much as from fossil fuel consumption, give or take a power of ten.
So the first point now becomes more relevant. The alcohol in drinks is made from sugar, which comes from plants that take the carbon out of the atmosphere. So it's a closed cycle except for the electricity used for manufacturing and gasoline for distribution.
As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction.
I HOPE you were placing your tougue in your cheek when you wrote this....but no, I don't know that for sure.
WTF? Over?
I constantly have alcohol brewing, and it's carbon negative! My fermentation tank releases carbon that came from plant matter, which aquired the carbon from the atmosphere (carbon neutral) the CO2 is then piped into my aquariums, where some bubbles out into the atmosphere, but most is consumed by the plants in the aquarium. The plants are trimmed on a monthly basis, and some are sold to other aquarium owners, while most of the trimmings are composted creating fertalizer to help other plants grow and capture more carbon from the atmosphere. Also, commercial breweries that I've been to capture/ scrub the CO2 out of the tank exhaust, and fill those lovely CO2 cylenders to make additional profit, leaving the production process itself carbon neutral, and just the transport... but then if people were drinking bottled water instead, it would probably produce as much carbon through transport.
Since Cask Beer requires strong forearms and a manual pump, only rich treehuggers like Al Gore can pay for Carbon Beer Offset's
Global Warming... Doom... Destruction... Nonsense.
First off, have you notice it has gone from Global Warming to Climate Change? I'm old enough to remember "The Coming Ice Age" histerical nonsense.
Such fragile little critters we have become where we cannot accept any change, because change is inheritly evil. Sea levels will rise! Then move to higher ground. There will be droughts and famine! And new crop land will open up further too. The whole planet will become a desert! And the sun will blow up some day too. Nothing in history or cosmology says we get to live forever.
Remember all that fossil fuel was organic material that was on Earth at one point and nothing mathmatically says that the planet can suck all that out of the air and back into plant and animal life again, the question is the curve and rate of drawdown versus time and wether Al Gore can make a few more bucks during that window. The maddness is that because the world change from some non-existant "norm" of the last few centuries that the planet is doomed. The Sahara was a jungle once. Which is the norm? Jungle or Desert?
There is no normal except constant change. Change is not good or bad, it is just plain change.
They've built a religion around this crap. Try not building cities below sea level and start planning on buy land that will be ocean front property in a few years according to those forecasts. In the mean time, I'm smoking, drinking, and enjoy life because at any point in a world of inifinite possibilities there is always something that could annihilate us, a magnatar could wipe us out with a high-energy beam (death stars), comets, meteors, nuclear war, roaming feral children with guns, airborn disease of apocolypic scale, etc.
"The greatest of tyrants rise to power on the shoulders of ideals built in the name of the greater good."
You already use the term Heritics, come out of the religious closet and admit that Al Gore is your pope and your religious inquisition is in full swing...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Just in case you missed it, climate change (or global warming if you like) is almost entirely due to solar cycle, not CO2 emissions as some wish to have you believe(and "they" want a new carbon tax). See one of many videos about subject: Global warming and the Carbon Tax Scam ...and yes i know the article is meant to be funny, but it also helps to perpetuate the carbon tax scam.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
Then you have a near-terminal case of Asperger's.
Okay, first of all, you can forget about the CO2 in the pressurization: that was collected from the atmosphere, and goes back, net carbon is zero. Similarly, since beer is made from plants, pretty well all the CO2 produced by making beer is absorbed again making next year's beer.
Just for fun, though, let's do a back-of-envelope calculation of how much there is. According to Wikipedia, humans brew about 133 gigaliters of beer a year, and we can assume it's about 5 percent alcohol, so that's (133×0.05)=6.7 gigaliters of alcohol. The specific gravity of ethanol is about 0.8 so that's 5.3 billion kilograms of ethanol per year. One mol Ethanol (CH3CH22OH) masses 45 grammmes. So that's 5600 billion grams of alcohol, 120 billion mols, and it turns out that there's 1 mol of CO2 per mol ethanol.
Thus we get 120 billion mol of CO2, a mol is 44 grammes, about 5.3 million tonnes. According to WikiAnswers, a car produces about 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per year, so all the world's beer production is about equivalent to a million cars.
So if it worries you, buy a couple CFL bulbs or soemthing. It's pretty small.
(PS. This would look better if /. allowed the sub tag.)
Engage the scientific method sections of your brains and challenge the assertions of those inciting the global warming hysteria. Perhaps humans are damning the planet with CO2, perhaps they aren't...but educate yourselves rather than take Al Gore's word for it.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
i'm going to increase meaningless pseudofacts 23.5% and increase fearmongering demagoguery 51.2884%
watch out good citizens... it's SOCIALISM
AHHHHHHHHHH!!! RUN AWAY!!!
fucking fear addled ignorance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anyway, you said unequivocally that "okay which comes from a native American language, Chocktaw", no "dispute" was mentioned. If you hadn't been so definite in stating this, I wouldn't have called you on it.
As to Technocrat, Bruce had posted previously to the takedown that he might have to do that, as it wasn't fitting his idea of what he wanted plus the cost of the site. It wasn't totally unexpected at all.
I didn't see anything like that myself. It was just all deleted overnight. He didn't have an obligation to support it indefinitely, but it was very abrupt. No chance for anyone to pick up old posts, contact each other. Not that I really miss all the survivalists, gun nuts and climate change deniers.... And I invested quite a lot of time in editing articles for it (not as much as you, of course). All gone without a trace, or a word of thanks (again, no legal obligation existed, but it lacked courtesy).
This is as irrelevant as worring about automobile emmissions.
One coal-fired plant puts out more CO2 in a day than all the alcohol production in the world puts out in a year. And that's to say nothing of all the radioactive waste coal plants spew in the air- Three Mile Island is inert compared to a coal power plant.
Beer is about 5% alcohol by volume, and 4% carbohydrates. Beer is about 85% of alcohol consumed in US by volume, with specific gravity of 1.05 on average. Around 23 billion L of beer are sold in the US per year. Ethanol is 0.789 g/mL at 25 degrees C, with a molar weight of 46 g/mol. 1 molecule of sugar is metabolized into one molecule of ethanol and two of CO2. The ratio of masses of CO2 to ethanol from sugar is 88:46. The sugar comes from barley, which is 73% carbohydrates and 17% dietary fiber by mass. Ethanol is ultimately metabolized into 3H2O+2CO2, and reduces human caloric needs by 7 kcal per gram.
23 billion L of beer means 1.15 b L of alcohol from beer, means 1.35 b L of alcohol total, means 1.07 b kg of alcohol total, means 2.04 b kg of CO2 total, with 23% of carbohydrate CO2 offset by sequestration in dietary fiber (and 137% offset by the plant consuming the CO2 from the atmosphere to grow). When you poop that fiber, it gets broken down by sewerage treatment system though, to produce methane, so I won't count that as true "sequestration." So growing plants to turn them into beer reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere (energy use not factored in here - unless you know how much electricity goes into producing a billion gallons of beer in a large scale brewery).
Since beer costs around $100 per keg (59 L), total energy consumed per L for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, water filtration, heating, refrigerating, processing, waste water treatment, solid waste disposal, packaging, storage and transport costs are significantly less than $1.70/L, or else every brewer would be out of business. If all the cost were from coal electricity (maximum pollution per dollar) at $.08/kWh, that's 21 kWh, and you get .92 kg of CO2/kWh, or an (ultimately useless) upper bound of 20 kg of CO2 per L. For reference, one brewery claims 220 kWh of heat, 80 kWh of electricity, 200 kg of waste, 3 cubic m of waste water, and 4 cubic meters of water purification for 1000 L of beer. So probably more like a tenth of the upper bound.
Further, consumption of alcoholic calories reduces demand for other foods. The average American consumes 2800 calories per day, and wastes 1100 calories on top of that. So the total calories eaten are 1 million per year, with 390 thousand wasted per year. Consuming 1 L of alcohol means 5500 calories, which, unless you're a fatty, you don't eat from other sources.
1 kg of beef production results in 15kg of greenhouse gas equivalent, mainly in methane. 25% of American calories come from meat and dairy (and 38% from "Fats, oils and sweets" which includes butter and lard). The average American eats 44kg of beef, 46kg of chicken, 30kg of pork, 15kg of cheese, 93 kg of milk, 2 kg of butter, 13kg of eggs, 1 kg of lard per year, versus 80kg of beer. 1kg of whole milk (where all dairy calories ultimately come from) is 600 calories, 1 kg of beef is 2800 calories, 1 kg of chicken is 2000 calories, 1 kg of eggs is 520 cal, 1 kg of butter is 7200 cal, 1 kg of cheese is 3800 cal. 1 kg of beer is 410 cal.
So Americans consume around 8.7% of their calories from beef (and 3.9% from milk, and 4% from cheese), so 1 kg of beer reduces calories from other foods by 410, so it reduces beef consumption by 36 calories (and 32 calories of dairy), so it reduces beef consumption by 13 g, or 200 g of CO2 (in addition to the dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, etc that it replaces). Then 23 b L of beer prevents 4.6 b kg of cow fart GHG.
In contrast, 1000 MW of coal power plant running with 100% uptime for one year produces 8.1 b kg of CO2 per year, and there's one in a neighborhood near (read:killing) you.
This tells us:
1) Drinking beer reduces meat consumption and sequesters carbon, reducing GHG
1) Drinking cheap beer reduces the energy costs of overhead, and thus reduces GHG
2) Drinking light beer reduces calories, and thus increases our likelihood to consume meat, and thus increases GHG
3) Drinking beer by the keg further reduces GHG by cutting energy costs
4) Drinking warm beer cuts refrigeration costs, reducing GHG
5) Drinking fresh beer cuts storage costs, reducing GHG
Yes, I know it was April Fools.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The planet? it'll survive alcohol. Intelligent life, however, is in mortal peril.
All these carbon weenies seem to have forgotten the basic science of plant life. We breathe oxygen and exhale CO2. Plants breathe C02 and exhale Oxygen. Warming is a myth!
I seem to recall that a certain Senator Proxmire gave his 'Golden Fleece Award' to a group that was researching methane emissions from cattle. At the time he considered it to be 'frivolous' research. (He also supported the dairy industry in his home state of Wisconsin. HE should have been awarded the Platinum Porkbarrel Award'.)
Isn't it odd that said research might help reduce green house emissions.