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China To Plow $361 Billion Into Renewable Fuel By 2020 (indiatimes.com)
China will invest $361 billion in renewable power generation between 2016 and 2020, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday, as the world's largest energy market pushes to shift away from coal power. From a report: The investment will create over 13 million jobs in the sector, the NEA said in a blueprint document that lays out its plan to develop the nation's energy sector in a five-year period. The NEA repeated its goal to have 580 million tonnes of coal equivalent of renewable energy consumption by 2020, accounting for 15 percent of overall energy consumption.
+1 Very interesting... I had no clue.
Some other interesting trivia for fellow fungiphiles: As the plants sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere, and failed to rot because of the lignin, CO2 levels dropped below 300ppm and oxygen levels soared to over 35%. This is believed to be a major cause of the Karoo Ice Age, which lasted for about 100 million years.
Whenever I hear the canard that "life finds a way", I like to point out the 60 million years when life failed to "find a way" to digest lignin, despite ample piles of energy rich food available. When the first fungus finally "found a way", it was not an elegant enzyme that carefully dismantled lignin. Instead, it just blasted the lignin with oxygenated free radicals, and then slurped up the resulting hydrocarbon soup. It have heard biochemists describe it as "untieing a knot with a flamethrower". Today, 300 million years later, all known lignin digesting organisms can be traced to that single breakthrough, and they all still use the same method.
I have been in the microbial biotech world for a decade now and I didn't know this.
I am actually a software guy myself, but my daughter is a biotech major in college and we frequently talk about this stuff over dinner ... and speaking of dinner and lignin-consuming fungus, my Chinese wife is stir-frying some mu-er ("wood ear"), right now. If you are used to "normal" mushrooms (which cannot digest lignin), mu-er can taste funny, and some people complain that it is too "slimey", but I love the stuff. If you have never tried mu-er, please give it a try the next time you are in a Chinese restaurant, but take a moment to consider that these little black fungus are the reason the earth escaped becoming a permanent frozen wasteland, devoid of higher lifeforms.