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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.
I wouldn't fart that much.
Yea, we gotta stop.
Stop worrying, I mean.
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?
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
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.
...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.
No, that's not true. OMG Poniez!!!1! was funny. It's just unfortunate that Taco has not yet topped it.
This year hasn't been that great, I'm afraid. Next year Taco... there's always next year.
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.
your going to blow a vein!
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.
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
Well, if you count growing the plants and fermentation alone it's a carbon sink, because a lot of carbon ends up in stems and other unused parts.
Then you have fuel used for transportation, energy used in sugar extraction, grain-based drinks require roasting the grains, hard liquor requires distillation, and a few types are aged in charred oak barrels. All of these processes require additional energy, which may or may not be carbon neutral. Then again, there would be similar amounts of fuel/energy required to, for instance, process vegetables and deliver them to your supermarket, and then cook them on your stove.
"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
Surely the best way for me to reduce the number of cattle is for me to eat more of them?
Steak anyone?
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.
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.
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.
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.
OK, I went and read the paper, and basically what they're arguing is that the last ice age wasn't ended by an increase in CO2.
Fine. But that doesn't prove that CO2 has no effect on climate. Quite the opposite:
Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter ~4200 years of the warming.
There is, in fact, an argument for manmade climate change. They finish up by saying
The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present-day and future climate.
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...
Feedback loops can cycle out of control damn quickly. Ever held a microphone in front of its own speaker?
One last point: even if you weren't misreading this paper, the way you cite it as counterevidence is totally bogus. There are hundreds of papers making the opposite argument. You don't bring the whole edifice of argument down just by citing somebody's inference from one set of ice core samples.
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.
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
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."
Sorry, but that's bullshit. (Do you have a citation to support this theory?)
-- You're the Zogger from Technocrat? Bruce was a bit of a bastard to pull the plug with not a word of warning, wasn't he. I'll never sign up for anything he does again.
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!
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?!
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.