Slashdot Mirror
Cellulosic Biofuel Finally Ready For the Road
wdebruij writes "After years of research, promises, and plenty of discussion here, biofuel from inedible greens such as switchgrass — and even from corn cobs — may finally be getting economically viable. Two enzyme producers, Novozyme and Genencor, have both announced that they can now produce fuel at prices competitive with current corn and petrol-based methods. This is particularly good news in the wake of another report that food-based biofuels could cause hunger."
First post! And since this stuff is finally going to be hitting the road, when will my gas prices become reasonable (for the US) again? I'm tired of $2.96 a gallon and only getting 300 miles out of it.
This is particularly good news in the wake of another report that food-based biofuels could cause hunger."
They JUST figured this out!!!????
This is the problem with the green lords... they don't think ahead of the unintended consequences!
I've HATED Corn based ethanol for YEARS... Everyone would point to some country in South America (Brazil?) about how good Ethanol was and the amount of fuel created etc... But that was end of process SUGAR CANE! NOT a major food source!
Glad someone is finally waking up.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
More reason to chop down more of the rain-forest. Instead of using food for bio-fuel (in turn starving people), we'll use trees for bio-fuel (in turn starving the environment, suffocating us). So basically we'll go from wanting the mineral underneath the tree of the Na'vi village to wanting the tree itself. Not much of a change if you ask me.
Has anyone done anything about the huge water requirements of ethanol production? In Chester, South Carolina there have been voices screaming about the proposed ethanol plant. One side is desperate for the jobs, the other side is desperate to protect the Catawba River.
Maybe now I'll have a way to make money off all the weeds in my front yard. I'll finally be able to prove to the neighbors that an unkempt yard is actually worth something.
The main issue with biofuels isn't really food or cost. It's about land use, energy efficiency and sustainability. Brazil is usually given as a great example, but they have only 8 million cars, which use a maximum of 25 percent biofuel, the rest is still gasoline or diesel. And Brazil is one of the countries that is deforesting the fastest in the world. The US has 250 million cars. There's not enough land left in the world to clear to make enough biofuels for that.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2010/01/biofuels.html
Poor market management, lack of planning or agricultural investment and war cause famine, not biofuels. Zimbabwe is host to some of Africa's best ariable land and yet there are thousands who are starving. If the people hadn't let all the farms fall into disrepair after the revolution they would have so much food they could be exporting to other regions.
There is enough farmland available to grow enough food for all the world. Better prices for biofuel stock might drive up prices short term, but will lead to greater investment and supply long term.
Even in the 10% mixture we are currently seeing, ethanol in engines meant for gasoline is bad! It causes all manner of problems in the long term.
Running pure ethanol will simply require a complete change in the engine to work well. Has there been much discussion of that? I fear there hasn't been any.
You can easily make diesel out of dead fetuses and euthanized old people.
I see speculation on the cost of the fuel, but nothing whatsoever on the performance of it. This makes my suspicion meter go into alarm mode...
Though, to be fair, ethanol suffers from the same issue.
Looking at the 2010 Town and Country (a similar vehicle to my own Flex-Fuel van), I see these ratings:
E85 - 17mpg
Gas - 24mpg
Adjusted into dollars-per-hundred-miles, using these prices, that's something like:
E85 - $14.13 ($2.403/g)
Gas - $10.87 ($2.610/g)
So even though the price at the pump is less, I'd be a fool to run E85 in even a new vehicle of this class.
Unless this new fuel is better than E85, I can't see how getting it down to a comparable price at the pump is doing us any favors. Now if it is somehow better than E85, then that would be some good news. Alas, the story is mute on this topic.
Well, it's certain that filling their tanks with Arabs hasn't upset them at all in the last hundred years.
Maybe the solution is to reduce the number of cars instead of trying to figure out a way to power them (in an unsustainable manner)
What about algae farms on the ocean? Seaweed farms? Who says the biomass has to come from corn or any other land based crop? The farms could be right next to the data centers.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Why euthanize them when you can put them to work pushing your SUV until they drop dead?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This a positive step in the right direction. I always felt that by George W. Bush touting bio fuels through corn was exceedingly stupid and shortsighted - even for him. This drove the price of cereal up as we should all recall in and around 2007 when cereal suddenly sky rocketed. A cellulose process makes far more sense, from an economic and an environmental standpoint because waste products can be used. After all, who eats the corn cob? This is a step towards energy independence but still does not fully address the environmental concerns. We need to move away from internal combustion, carbon emissions and look towards fuel cells.
I've been following the biofuels industry pretty closely. How about Duckweed? Like algae it does not compete with cropland, it grows fast and unlike algae, it is easy to harvest (just skim off the top rather than concentrating water). Also easier to deal with "weeds" (algae ponds get contaminated by other species and this is hard to control). Duckweed is mostly cellulose and so fits into a feedstream amenable to the fermentation described by the article.
It's much easier to convert plant oil into diesel than it is to convert plant sugar into ethanol.
You can drop 100% pure biodiesel into an engine with zero modifications(unless it's a very old engine with rubber seals, which can corrode), and it will run fine. Better than fine even; biodiesel lubricates better than oil-diesel, so engine wear actually decreases. (One caveat to that is temperature; if you live somewhere with very cold winters, you need to either install a fuel line heater, or run on only 5%-15% biodiesel, blended with oil-diesel, but this is a fixable issue.)
Additionally, oil crops like camelina or jatropha can be grown on marginal land not suitable for agriculture, or can be rotated with food crops like wheat, without sucking all the nitrogen, etc. out of the soil.
Rather than fermenting into ethanol, the sugar stream could also be converted into biogasoline down the road. There are lots of initiatives working towards getting bacteria/algae/fungus to get to this end.
Biogasoline
- Would work with existing distribution infrastructure
- Would work with vast majority of existing fleet
- Is more energy dense than ethanol, making it more efficient for a vehicle solution
Let me know when they can make fuel from cellulite, that should solve America's dependence on foreign fuel supplies for quite some time.... I'll do my part, converting potatoes into fuel one delicious french fry at a time
Try New Texaco Green, It's People!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
"This is particularly good news in the wake of another report that food-based biofuels could cause hunger."
The ugly truth is the birthrate causes hunger. What will be the cause of hunger if the population doubles? It always drives me crazy to hear all the finger pointing about what is causing hunger when it's politically incorrect to discuss the real cause. It's wonderful news about being able to hopefully use non food sources but we also need to face facts. The planet is running out of resources fast. The planet is likely to max out with around 9 billion people, better than 6 billion now. The number it can support is more like 3 to 4 billion, multiple studies place it in that range. We don't have enough food, water, and even base raw materials for the current population. Another one brought to light lately is a coming shortage of rare earth materials. There literally isn't enough available for everyone to have a cell phone and a computer. This is an important step in bio-fuels but blaming bio-fuels as the real source of hunger is unrealistic. Population control is a taboo subject worldwide, China is the only country to attempt it, but until we address it the rest is just delaying problems not solving them. Anyone that doubts what I'm saying research the subject. All studies point to a maximum sustainable population being passed in the early 80s. Essentially everyone added to that number will have to leave in the next 100 years, less actually. If the population hits 9 billion then 5 billion must leave. Picture 5 billion dying in the next 50 to a 100 years and see what we face. It's not off topic I'm simply contradicting a statement made concerning bio-fuels. Bio-fuels have been demonized as causing a problem when the obvious source of the problem can't be discussed. A good subject to discuss would be rare earths since most of the miracle technologies depend on them. Battery and hydrogen cars may not be possible as a replacement simply because there may not be enough rare earth materials to make them. A lot of rare earth materials used in things like cell phones are in small amounts, grams worth, but it still reflects a 1,000 tons or more a year. The small amounts are hard to recycle so how long until we run out? Many people on this forum may live to see cell phones once again become rare luxuries. Then what since we are slowly abandoning landlines? The biofuels have one massive advantage, alcohol can run even a basic engine that doesn't depend on rare elements. We may be back to lead acid batteries and internal combustion engines before the century is out. The future may in fact look more like the past than even the present.
I bet if you took any field currently used to grow corn for ethanol, you could find another crop to grow on that field for ethanol use such that it produced more energy at the other end (i.e. after you subtract the amount of energy required in the production process).
Switchgrass and other types of biofuel are being suppressed because the big bio-tech firms like Monsanto dont profit from those (seed sales, chemical sales etc)
Although to be fair I have no idea how hard it is to take factories that turn corn into biofuel and make them able to turn other things into biofuel as well.
The market cannot answer your question.
Did you ask, "How can I increase short term profit for my shareholder?"
If you asked a different question, please try again.
Stock ticker DBA is smiling and will keep on smiling
"When it's unreasonable, you DON'T pay for gas."
I guess that same argument works for kidney dialysis, too, right? The people who aren't paying for it because they can't afford the prices are doing it out of choice... not because they live where they can afford to live, and work where there's a job available.
-- Terry
They are jumping the gun here, enzymes are only one piece of a complex puzzle, and the amount of misinformation due to marketing/sales/investment needs in enormous. I am a senior scientist at a cellulosic biofuel R&D company who is partnered with Novozymes (I have used Genencor products as well, even comparing head to head). For many reasons (which I will not get into) we are still in the infancy stages of large scale processing and production. Current outlook is probably more like 5 years...
-my 2 cents-
Other than that, I will enjoy reading all of the regurgitated malarchy people will post in this thread. :)
What he said is true. Engines have to be designed to function well with ethanol fuels. It's not *terribly* different from pure gasoline, but enough it has to be taken into consideration. The octane is higher, gallon for gallon, so you have to deal with that, and the gaskets and seals and fuel lines, etc have to be able to withstand the more-corrosive effects of alcohol. Regular car engines today can handle up to a ten percent blend, after that you can have problems if they haven't been engineered for alcohol fuels in the first place.
Most modern cars today can handle it better, and a lot of flex fuel cars are out there now that can handle up to e-85 blend. Small engines are lagging, and just tons of people with boats that have fiberglass fuel tanks have had serious problems with their carbs getting gunked up with fiberglass gunk that got dissolved because of ethanol in the fuel. A lot of small engines like mowers and weedeaters, etc are also having problems now that the normal ethanol blend is ten percent, and soon to be higher in some places. I've had to fix several, the gas lines just rot, turn to mush. Fast, too, within one season for some I have seen. Freaking dangerous as well, I had one on a gravity fuel feed portable generator that rotted on me and I didn't pick up on it until *I was running the thing and the fuel line just glopped off* and dumped raw gas on the running generator.
Tell ya whut, that was a pucker factor 10 for a few seconds there. I mashed that off button and ran like crazy the other way. Lucked out, it didn't catch, but it could have.
I have since gone around and replaced in advance every single small engine fuel line I have, which is quite a few little engines.
Here, take yer pick...
http://www.google.com/search?q=ethanol+rots+fuel+lines
With that said, I am in favor of biofuels, and see corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel as just a transition step. It's needed to get the ball rolling and that is what opur farmers are setup to grow in mass quantities anyway, so it is natural they went that way. It ain't permanent, so I wish folks would stop worrying so much about it. It's an agricultural evolutionary process, that's all. Brazil uses cane, we have way more corn, etc. We'll get there with different crops eventually, and the work needs to be done now and the nation's fleet gradually converted over so they can run on these alternative fuels.
I am way in favor of getting rid of the *stupid beyond belief* ban we have on industrial hemp production. that would be a spiffy cross product alternative crop. You can get fuels, food, fiber, cellulose for paper, plastics, all sorts of stuff from it. Yields per acre are rather impressive as well, and it is easy to grow.
I'm also in favor or legalizing the "other" hemp like plant as well, for medicinal or alternate reality uses. I see no sense in not learning from prohibition history.
Naw, filling your tank with arabs doesn't work at all. The amount of electricity needed to run the blender/juicer is pretty close to what you get by burning the resultant fuel. It's not a long-term sustainable solution.
Industrial Hemp.
4 times the yield per acre than trees, only takes one season while trees take years, needs no fertilizers or insecticides, very low THC levels.
I leave the Googling to those interested in knowing more, those not interested wouldn't follow the link anyway having bought into the fear mongering media hype about it.
cue lame jokes about getting high smoking it, tho industrial hemp will only give you a head ache if you do.
I had a good friend who happened to also be an exiled member of Liberia's parliament. He said the major problem they were having were as follows:
Due to the currency trade, it costs about 1 million dollars (adjusted) for them to buy a tractor to farm their lands. Is that unreachable? No. Is it ridiculously overpriced? Yes. Do multiple families have to pull together in order to purchase a single tractor? Obviously.
Once the people have a tractor, and something breaks on it, they have to hire help, and that help has to purchase parts from out of the country -- which screws them again on their currency trade. This maladjusted currency business affects them on their importans and it affects them on their exports.
"Well, what if a kind, European business decided to dump a bunch of tractors on the people and buy up their farmland and run a business from it?" you may ask. That sounds like a good idea, until the business sees that every Euro they make doing business with the Liberians could be 10 Euros if they turned around and sold their produce to their own countries!
In this case, the tyrant is the European Union and their currency exchange rates with the African nations, moreso than dictators who can afford to feed themselves, but stare at a steep wall when it comes to the international commerce they would need in order to supply their own agricultural revolutions.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
"Hard to distribute" and "irregular supply" come to mind.
Instead, we should leverage our domestic fat supply by pyrolizing the liposuction from our motoring population into bio-diesel. A suction tube integrated with the seat belt could clip into driver and passenger stoma to harvest while driving. The corn syrup in many foods would support farmers, lipo would keep us thin, and the product would power our SUVs.
It ain't perpetual motion, but it's close.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
True, the corn syrup issue is caused by too much corn, NOT too little sugar.
The problem is we (like every other industrial nation) makes far more food than we need. This leads to a problem of excess supply, which means farmers go bankrupt as the cost of the good is below what it costs to make the good.
Also, this doesn't solve "world hunger" because shipping the food someplace else is prohibitively expensive.
So, to keep farmers from massive bankruptcy and to slow (not stop, which they would have if they could have) the absorption of small family farms into corporate mega-farms, high tariffs on sugar were imposed AND (2 prong attack) corn was marketed as the answer to any God Damn problem corn could possibly solve (corn syrup, corn gasoline, etc. etc.)
Also adding to this problem is that corn is high in energy and easy to grow. This is compared to other regional crops such as rice, which is high in energy but hard to grow, or wheat which is low in energy but easy to grow.
I've been saying something along those lines for years.
(unchecked immigration + american diet) + liposuction = cheep bio-diesel
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
I'm happy about the progress, but I have a few questions.
The feedstock ({corn cobs|sawdust|whatever}) will have to be transported from {the farm|the sawmill|wherever} where currently it just collects or is burned. The feedstock is bulky and if it has high moisture content it is heavy. They are talking about large facilities, so the transport distance will be appreciable. How much effect will this have on the energy efficiency budget?
There will be a distillation stage in production, which requires a heat source. Where will they get this heat? (Hopefully, by burning some fraction of the ethanol they've just produced, or some of the feedstock. If it turns out to be cheaper to burn natural gas for the distillation rather than ethanol which needs no transportation and is available in bulk at wholesale price, this will say something very bad about the economics of the production.) An additional thought: if wind energy really picks up, we'll have a situation where electricity prices for bulk consumers will be highly variable, depending on the wind. It would cost little to put electric heaters into the distillers, which you could then use only when electricity is cheap. You do, however, have to pay for a high capacity connection to the grid which you will only use intermittently.
There must be some waste from this process. What is the nature of this waste, and will it be difficult to dispose of safely?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Here we go again, biofuels and all. First off, lets talk about enzymes. People say that cellulose is hard to break down. Here's how to break it down, much more efficiently and cheaply than enzymes: 500 degrees C. The fact is that gasification and thermochemical processing will be more efficient. Many coal and biomass to liquids processes are 85% percent plus energy efficient. Ethanol fermentation is less (appears 75% biomass to ethanol). Instead, let's go for gasification and produce biogasoline, a real fuel with a proven track record. Where does the heat from gasification come from? The sun. We will use big, cheap arrays of mirrors to heat up containers (made of iron?) of the biomass, what ever it may be. Then we remove crud like sulfur and nitrogen, and pass it over a series of catalysts the make gasoline. This happens in one huge desert solar power plant. Of course, as Elon Musk said, it would be better just to burn all that biomass in a big combined cycle power plant and charge up our electric cars. The thing about biofuels is that they are ridiculously inefficient. Even algae, the most efficient biofuel, is only %6-7 efficient solar to fuel conversion, and most are less than %1. A much better way to convert solar energy to fuel is with Sandia's sunshine to petrol program. We could be looking at much higher efficiency (%40+). They react a metal with water to create metal oxide and hydrogen, and then heat up the metal oxide to regenerate the metal. The hydrogen then is reacted with CO2 to produce gasoline. About 1 gallon of water is consumed per gallon of gasoline, and they could operate on waste water anyway. This is real, drop in replacement gasoline.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
This is encouraging, because there's plenty of cellulose available as agricultural waste. Corncobs, corn husks, straw, bagasse (sugar cane after sugar extraction), and similar trash are all mostly cellulose.
If they could use kudzu it would save the South!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Not a single mention of EROEI. Everyone fails to look at the fact that most of the Ethanol in question is produced with oil products as a basis. People are WHINING about "high prices".
Here's a clue: Go open your refrigerator door. Take all the food out. Throw it away. Destroy your car. You cannot go to the grocery store, because for this little thought exercise, it effectively has closed its doors and there is no food on the shelves. Go outside and look around for food. Find any? No? Hungry? Wondering just what the fuck you're going to do?
Guess what. That's gonna happen in about two decades, unless we get our collective shit together and figure this out. Given humanity's great penchant for fucking over long term viability for short term gain, I highly suspect the future will look less and less like the streamlined utopias of the 70's/80's and more like a bad rerun of Mad Max Thunderdome.
There is no magic bullet to fix the current world-wide resource depletion that we are experiencing other than "we're gonna build a metric shitload of nuclear reactors" or "we'll damn the ever-loving crap out of what little freshwater waterways are left", or any other number of potential "issues". No matter how you slice it, unless we get something like ultracheap fusion under control, we're pretty much fucked.
"But people will invest in tech blah-blah and it will save the day". No it won't. Vested interests have too much money to loose and too much inertia; they'll invest in anything under the sun to stop it, including sueing you, bankrupting you, sladering you, or ${DIETY} forbid, worse.
"But people will do behavior X because the cost of Y will be so high that it suddenly makes sense to change behavior." Wrong again. This is the same classic problem that economists always have - assuming that people are "rational consumers". Guess what, they aren't. Your neighbor will gladly stab you in your sleep to steal a peanut butter jar if people are starving. Crime rates go UP during hard economic times because - you guessed it - it's easier to steal than to find a job. Of course, it would be cheaper to find some way to make a community co-op farm on a plot of land in the city, but where's the fat profits to be had that you can currently get from outsourcing prisons? People are NOT FUCKING RATIONAL.
"But we've had downturns before" Yup, but if you look closely at each downturn, and overlay them from start to finish, they keep getting longer and longer...last one was years in the making. The "economy" is oscillating more and more as the system becomes unbalanced. At what point does it oscillate so badly that you don't live long enough to see the "recovery".
"But capitalism will solve this". No, it will make it far, far worse, especially combined with America's stupid penchant for "growth at all costs". It will encourage people to consume even more finite resources on the predication that there is an infinite resource base to draw from, because in America's current economy, everything is about growth. How do you grow something with finite resources? Sooner or later, you run the fuck out. And guess what, your business shutters and people go without a job. Hm, where have I heard that? Oh, that's right, the fucking news...
PS. You do know that about 90% of the food that was grown and eventually turned into "something else" in your fridge is directly reliant on nitrogen fertilizer that's derived from oil, right? What, you think that the soil will just provide infinite amounts of resources? That the magic nitrogen fairly sprinkles pixie dust on those crops?
PSS. Go over to http://www.theoildrum.com/ and get an education that doesn't involve twiddling electrons into pretty pictures and fiat money.
(and the many who died) definitely haven't forgotten
I assure you, those that died don't remember
Who says they didn't think of this? The ones proposing it put forward ideas like: use scrubland. Use hemp or weeds. Use the cellulose in the unused parts of plantstock.
But, no, you HAVE to consider that they're idiots because that lets you be the smart one, therefore you can see through their "deception".
hey, home ownership is not a requirement for life. choosing to do so is indeed a choice. choosing not to live near your job is a choice. for thousands of years people had to work close to home. now we have cars, so you can CHOOSE to live differently, but that is still a choice.
let's not pretend that there is a gun to any commuter's head. before any holier than thou comments are made, I will note I am in the same boat, stuck with what I now consider to be an unwise house decision and no way to sell, and a 30 minute commute by car with no public transit option. all I can do is carpool. I just don't pretend I was forced to buy the house where I did, or to buy a house at all.
Depends entirely on what you decide is your baseline. I got my drivers license about a month before gas hit 99 cents in MA for the first time. I had a solid 4 years of gas hovering around a dollar per gallon, occationally dropping down to around 79 cents at a handful of stations in my home town. Like most of us, what I paid for something the first time I bought it is what seems normal to me. I'm not saying that gas should be 99 cents. I realized even then that it was an untennable price and that it could only go up in the long run. However, you can't honestly believe that the price of gasoline has trippled in the 14 years since I got my license simply because of inflation. Contributing factor, sure, but not even the primary cause.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
With sun-powered desalination of sea water we can make the deserts bloom.
Thus destroying the ecosystem of the desert and the culture of any indigenous people.
With making the UN admit that they have lost the war on drugs we could make the deserts bloom with few pesticide AND cover it with a fibrous carpet to slow down erosion, by growing hemp.
What makes you think that the blooming desert won't attact pests?? It's not like the pests happen to be endemic to the regions we just happened to be growing corn in. The pests follow their prefered food. Biosecurity can be useful in delaying the appearance or spread of pests, but they'll show up eventually (Sooner rather than later unfortunately) and then you'll be in the same situation. Furthermore, errosion is not a problem in the desert so I don't know what problem is being solved here.
The fertilizer is easily provided by the world's industry lobbyists, put their bullshit to good use.
Sooo, you're against pesticides, but in favor of widespread use of fertilizers?? Normally being against one means you are against the other. Either this means you are very uniquely open minded or you are unaware of the very real benefits of the former and the very real negatives of the later. Eutrophication of freshwater is caused in large part by runnoff of phosphorus from fertilizers, whereas eutrophication of saltwater ecosystems is caused by runnoff of nitrogen from fertilziers. Admitedly, not a whole lot of water in the dessert, but if we are going to be undertaking a massive irrigation effort in the dessert, we'll be creating an ecosystem of sorts, and at least some of the irrigation water is going to get back to natural aquifers and bodies of water. Also, I would assume that most lobbyist don't have access to large quantities of fertilziers themselves. Some might be able to acquire it from the industries that they represent, but it's not like the guy wispering in your senetors ear has a half acre lot piled 20 feet high with generic fertilizer somewhere.
Ultimately your post strikes me as a collection of half-thought out pipe dreams (emphasis on the pipe) and liberal prejudices (ie the nonsense about lobbyists) I'm not nocking hemp itself, just your belief that it is a panacea instead of just an alternate crop that got a bad rap due to it's kinship with marijuana.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
home ownership is not a requirement for life
Nobody said anything about ownership. Perhaps you live in your mum's basement and she doens't charge you rent, but most grown-ups have to pay for their accomodations, whether it be in the form of rent or some combination of mortgage payment, property taxes and association fees. Those costs are all directly associated with the market value of the property where you live, and as cruel as it seems, those places that are closest to the most places of employment, public transit choices and other amenities are often the most valuable/in-demand/expensive. Living in the most convenient location is indeed NOT the choice for many people.
choosing not to live near your job is a choice
Everyone has choices, but often there is only one reasonable choice. These days, many people don't even have the choice to have a job at all, and those that do have a job aren't going to be picky about where they work...and if that happens to require a lengthy commute so be it, because paying for it a tank at a time is the only affordable option to sizeable relocation costs. Furthermore, not all choices line up. You cannot undo choosing to raise a family, and what if you cannot find a home, a workplace AND a school all within one area? Very few people are that lucky.
let's not pretend that there is a gun to any commuter's head
in some urban centres that is a distinct possibility ;-)
I will note I am in the same boat, stuck with what I now consider to be an unwise house decision and no way to sell, and a 30 minute commute by car with no public transit option. all I can do is carpool
Well, then you DO have the "right to bitch". I don't like it when people complain about their situation when they have no real reason to do so, but regardless of your past "bad choices" you are in a situation now where your choices are restricted, and if something is intolerable you SHOULD complain, and you SHOULD get involved in solutions (like, as you mentioned, carpooling, should it work for you). People who just sit and suffer in silence do nothing to make the world better for themselves OR for anyone else.
I am curious about the other side of the fuel supply question for combustion engines, both internal and external; where does the oxygen come from? Does the earth have a limitless supply of O2? All the schemes I've seen assume that oxygen is available from the atmosphere no matter what, and produce water and CO2 as byproducts. Both these compounds are extremely stable and it's requires a fair amount of energy and/or finesse to separate them for the O2 re-supply cycle to continue. The forests and oceans have helped mitigate the effects of CO2 in the past, but they have limited capacity and recent humanity activity has diminished their ability to function in this regard. What we need are energy systems that don't use chemical combustion, at least not as a long term solution, such as solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and - dare I say it - nuclear. Our efforts and money should be spent developing these and not on more hydrocarbon based systems. Let's hear it for "clean" coal...
Biofuels need not be made of corn, and no environmentalist has suggested this is the best alternative. The choice is chiefly a political one, meant to prop up corn demand because the US produces an INCREDIBLY MASSIVE GLUT of corn FAR exceeding practical demand. It is a market so distorted by political interference it bears no resemblance to a free market and as such decisions are made in absence of economic soundness. These studies making out biofuel to be dangerous to our food supply make assumptions that would never happen in a free market--that biofuels would continue to make use of human-grade foodstock like corn, that such fuels would replace a sizeable amount of conventional fuel demand, that harvesting biofuel feedstock would not become more efficient, ignores the possibility of using waste food prodcuts and so on.
Americans scarcely eat HALF of the edible food crops grown for their consumption. That INCLUDES crops fed to animals that are subsequently turned into meat. The rest goes to waste--often not even into compost to recycle into fields. It would break your heart to see how much food goes into landfills--buried in anaerobic conditions where it not only doesn't nourish fields for future crops it doesn't even properly decompose for a decade or two!
Make no mistake, there is an AMPLE supply of feedstock for biofuels, and it is well worth the investment in research like making cellulosic ethanol and biodiesels made from waste oils cost-effective as a means of recovering this massive waste.
US Corn exports, even in this time that ethanol is supposedly starving people to death, has INCREASED!
In 2007-2008 the US's Corn exports rose 6% to the highest export volume that we've seen in 18 years! If you compare the export rates over the last 8 years, we are up across the board. At no point in the ethanol push have we returned to our corn export levels of 2002.
All of this crap about ethanol causing food shortages is complete BS. Prices are increasing, but the majority of those costs are due to TRANSPORTATION cost increases. Fuel costs have almost doubled in the last 8 years in the US. And seeing as how the US is the top corn exporter in the world, those costs are going to be passed along to all purchasers.
What is up with your links? Did you read them? The CBS story is about increased protein demands, it talks about increases in prices across the board. The only citation they have attributing the raise in cost being due (in part) to Ethanol is from attributed to "Grocers". I don't know about you, but asking random people that work at grocery stores about supply and demand issues completely out side of the scope of grocery stock seems exceptionally suspect.
The G&M site lists a slew of other likely causes and contains only one reference to ethanol prices being a major factor, and that is attributed to an investor analyst at Goldman Sachs. And we know just how much credibility those folks have. ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This is off topic, but I hear this a lot and it frustrates me.
"In a week in Chicago, I was able to get almost everywhere except for the Navy Pier and the Museum of Science & Technology via mass transit..."
You can get everywhere that rich white people want to go, except the suburbs. You can get to some areas with blacks and hispanics, but not most. The trains are on a hub and spoke model -- as you get further from the hub, property values go down, and residents happen to be poorer, and perfectly coinciding with this, the areas between the hubs get wider and wider.
You can get to everywhere if you're willing to put up with very long, irritating bus rides, including Navy Pier and the Museum of Science and Technology. But if you want to hop on a train and get somewhere with good soul food, forget it. If you want a reliable way to take a train to your job with a short commute time, you have to be pretty lucky, geographically speaking, unless you live in the white yuppie corridor, in which case your convenience is relatively assured.
If gas prices go up, yes, public transport gets better -- for the people who "matter". The poor and less powerful don't get better transport.
I don't say this to demand cheap gas. I want VERY, VERY expensive gas and an end to bad fuel economy vehicles, polluted air, high medical costs due to asthma, etc. But let's not delude ourselves in the process. Supply and demand is only half the battle.
Whereas every other country has always taxed it to compensate for the huge amount of damage cars/vehicles make to infrastructure and environment.
Actually, it's worse than that, and it isn't just damage, it's economics. Oil is paid for in dollars. US dollars. You want oil? You buy US dollars first.
See the trick? America gets paid for Saudi oil before the Saudis do. It gives the US a huge advantage economically. The US gets to export a significant proportion of it's inflation to the rest of the world and gets real value for it. Print a trillion dollars here, the price of oil goes up, everybody buys those fresh new bills cos they still need oil. Oil purchases for the rest of the world export value to the US.
Deleted
Why don't you try to create services to reduce the number of cars in the world? Like carpool services, buses, trains, etc.? You can make money and save the environment. Try it - you'll like it.
The problem is that the market is a form of democracy, albeit a little bit hacky one. The market tells us that most people want to drive cars, not sit around in trains and buses, riding bicycles all day.
So here is your business plan:
1. offer services such as bicycle repair, carpool services, buses, etc, etc.
2. create advertising, books, TV shows, get celebrities to go car-free.
3. use this to create an image that car-freeness is cool.
4. create mass transit, trains, etc.
There is a possible set of investments here if you think through the process. Notice the huge potential for profits here. Think about city car share and zipcar - they are a start for what you want. While you are doing this, I will try to make (indirectly) solar powered SUV's and cars. We will let the market, and by extension the people, decide.
Your sig:
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky"
You could rule the corps if you start your business today.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel