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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?"
But more importantly, why you going after beer man? Not cool.
Oh, and regarding the actual article, no CO2 from the alcohol industry is on a wholly different scale from CO2 emissions from industry and transport.
It's like wondering if you peeing in the ocean when you go for a swim is making a difference to global oceanic warming because, after all, your pee is quite warm.
I hate printers.
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!
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?
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.
...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.
Well, there _are_ parts of the planet where bread is not the staple starch source.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
"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
Lame. I'll bet you pronounce nuclear just like Bush as new-que-lurr. Look, if you don't pay attention to at least adhering to a simple standard, you'll look like sloppy to the people who do. Mastering grammar school English composition is a commendable achievement. But if you're going to be sloppy and not pay attention to the details, you inflict your lack of standards on everyone who has to read your work. It's a case of "if you want to look like a sloppy person who does not even proofread his own work, that's fine, but please keep it away from us who don't want to see your lack of attention to detail." Remember that you're penning/typing your message not for yourself but for others to read, you should at least be respectful of the people reading and proof your own work.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Or that he doesn't want Canadians to take over the world. Dunno why. The world would assuredly be a better place if we were in charge.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
"you'll look like sloppy to the people who do."
"Remember that you're penning/typing your message not for yourself but for others to read, you should at least be respectful of the people reading and proof your own work."
This is why it is a bad idea to get too high and mighty concerning spelling and grammar. It eventually makes you a hypocrite. By YOUR standards, you are being disrespectful to me and every other Slashdot reader, and that just isn't nice.
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.
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.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5613/1728 unfortunately I can't find a free fulltext version of it for you but I'd be interested if you can find one. It mentions the relevant information in the abstract though.
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases released by dying wetlands) and that heats up the atmosphere more. Which releases more gases...
Such a feedback system should go out of control, unless there is also a separate negative feedback component in the system that has a stronger effect than the positive feedback component. The data shows that both CO2 and temperature go in cycles, which would indicate, assuming that there IS a positive feedback effect, that a stronger negative feedback component is keeping it somewhat at an equilibrium.
This is my main problem with the whole area, I'll be the first to acknowledge that I'm not a climatologist, and that I quite possibly am wrong, but my area is in artificial intelligence, of which dynamic feedback systems plays a large role. The world is a massively complicated system of multiple feedback loops. With such a complex system there really is no hope of developing accurate models for how it will behave under various stimuli, at least, not without many many more years of studying it in real time. By all means continue research, continue studying, get the best models we can, but leave draconian governmental regulation until we are sure that we are not putting a huge unnecessary burden on our world economy.
And you're right, I don't cite it as a counter argument to AGW, more to counter Al Gore's primary argument(which is the correlation between temperature and CO2 in the ice cores), which unfortunately is the media-friendly face of the science on this matter, which is therefore the extent of the public's and the political knowledge of the subject.
It doesn't make me a hypocrite. You can end a sentence with a preposition under certain circumstances. I did proof my work. If there is a problem with what I wrote, please point it out.
Examples follow:
Please print that out.
Is the radio on?
Please point it out.
It's not high an mighty, it is simply paying attention to the details. You do pay attention to the details in your code don't you?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
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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."
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?!