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Plowing Carbon Into the Fields
OzPeter writes "A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at the same time saves himself up to $500,000 (AUD) that would have been required to fertilize his 3,900 hectares in the traditional way. Yet his crop yields over the last two years have been at least on par with his best yields since 2001. The technique was developed by a Canadian, Gary Lewis of Bio Agtive, and is currently in trial at 100 farms around the world."
Let's ignore for the moment the problem that carbon isn't fertilizer.
He can't possibly be getting enough exhaust to make a difference. There's just not enough carbon in the tank of Diesel to make a difference when spread across the field in the amounts he burns it during tilling/planting.
As much as we talk about carbon emissions, the exhaust coming out of his equipment is barely changed from what went in. If pumping in the exhaust from his equipment had a noticeable effect, then pumping in twice as much just plain air (readily available) as that would have a much larger effect and being nearly free would seem rather tempting for all farmers.
This sounds like bunk.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
A 10% drop in population is a decent-sized dent in my books, and certainly preferable to an 10% increase in population. The problem is that war is now expensive, whereas disease is cheap. From a population control point of view, crossing H1N1 with some other lethal disease is cheaper. Now that we can engineer diseases that attack specific sub-populations based on their genetics, don't be surprised if the next "final solution" is biological, and takes out half the population.
Of course, like anything else, this could backfire and wipe out the whole human race ... but uncontrolled population expansion will also have the same effect. A better one would be to engineer a bug that inhibits either male sperm production, or female pregnancy. Drop the population below 2 billion over the next 50 years.