Electric vehicles can be about 75% efficient including regenerative breaking. Presumably the drive train will be used for some slowing here recharging the air tank. Compressing air always produces substaintal waste heat so the base efficiency will be less than for a battery-motor combination. Let's say that they do well and get 50% efficiency on compressing/decompressing. In that case, if we expect about 0.2 kWh/mile for an electric vehicle, we might get 0.3 kWh/mile for this vehicle. That is about 3.3 cents/mile (11 cents/kWh). For a 30 mpg car at $3.00/gal we get a fuel cost of 10 cents/mile. So, the cost could be about a third of the cost of gas.
I put the fuel production where the waste heat can be used. There is quite a bit of it in Fischer-Tropsch. I think that the waste heat could also be used to drive an air contitioning cycle in another season. If you don't use the waste heat, then the cost of the fuel pretty much doubles. Your idea of making some fuel and then using some fuel could make sense to even out electricity supply issues especially initially, but in a renewbale grid I think that we'll probably have a good bit of over-capacity so that base load won't really be a useful concept anymore. The wind resource is Maine is actually pretty good on the coast so I'd be surpised if with an Architecture 2030 class house with good insulation you'd need to worry too much about intermittancy. I suspect that the over-capacity in renewable energy will be put towards carbon sequestration for several decades or more, and after that it will be available to play with. I'm thinking space catapult or that kind of thing. One thing about huge challenges like this is that you end up with a lot wealth at the end. Industrial capacity after World War II, for example, did wonders for diet through mass production of refridgeration.
On centralized production, there is the issue of being able to use the waste heat to save on the cost of the fuel, and there are also beginning to be some problems with thermal pollution. France has had to shut down reactors in the summer for some years now and the Southeast drought in the US caused the same thing this summer. With the uncertainties of climate change, I suspect that more dispersed production will be more robust. That said, one place where waste heat could be used is in desalinization if one is willing to move the facility back from the ocean as the sea level rises. This may help regions whose aquifers face saline intrusions. On the other hand, reverse osmosis is being used more and more in desalinization so that this may not turn out to be a good heat application.
We had a nice salad last night from the indoor garden, so that is something to start with anyway.
To get limestone you need calcium. When both calcium and magnesium are used you get dolomite. With magnesium alone you get magnesite. It should be remembered that the remaining elements of the silicate rock will be mixed with the product and if heavy metals are present they may be released to the environment. Serpentine soils are not very fertile, in part, because of this effect.
That is not an oversimplification, it is exactly right. But, it does point to the need to plan for renewable energy capacity that can cover this cleanup expense.
Using renewable energy to form liquid hydrocarbon fuels is not sequestration but it can reduce emissions. In my opinion, we only need these fuels for aviation. Here is my thinking on how this might be done in a cost effective way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html.
Mineralization is often thought of a taking silicate rock and turing it into silica and calcium or magnesuim carbonate. Often serpentine is cited, though the associated heavy metals make me think this is a poor choice. Wollastonite might be better. If you want to produce elemental carbon, you need to add in energy. The conversion of silicates is exothermic, but removing oxygen from carbon dioxide to make pure carbon requires just as much energy as you got from making the carbon dioxide in the first place. Forming terra preta from biomass can get you to elemental carbon (bio-char) and produce some energy along the way, but the biomass has solar energy input to convert carbon dioxide. One can form methane pretty easily from hydrogen and carbon dioxide using the Sabatier reaction especially if you have a use for the excess heat from this exothermic reaction. The methane might be turned into polymers that have useful microstructures when the hydrogen is removed leaving a carbon residue similar to bio-char. Forming graphite or diamond would probably be limited to uses that are too small scale to accept much carbon.
There is a form of diamond that appears easy to manufacture called Lonsdaleite. It is not gem quality but is thought to be just as strong. I calculate here that replacing all steel, wood and concrete in construction with this material would sequester at most a few percent a year of our current emissions. The place where carbon has to go is in the soil or the sea. In the soil, terra preta looks like a good bet. In the sea, calcium carbonate seems like the most natural place.
You must be looking at the wrong data. The global average temperature binned annaully is very clearly increasing. Perhaps you are looking at daily data, or worse, data from a small region? It is certainly settled that the world is getting hotter.
If you look at the bill itself, you'll see that it is added to an existing list as "climate change." There are instructions at the bottom of the
original article on how to do this. Since it goes in as climate change, the direction of the change is not specified.
I think that massive eruptions of volcanoes is quite likely over the next couple of centuries. They do produce short term cooling but for the most part they add to warming. I suspect that since the implementation is left to the board, there is every expectation that the consensus position will be taught with perhaps discussion of new data that have not yet been folded into the consensus. For example, there is recent work showing acceleration of ice loss in Antarctica that might be worth some study. The view that sea level rise will be several meters this century is also gaining ground. A look at why this is would be an interesting subject and would illustrate how progress in made in science.
Curricula are genrally set as public policy. Sometimes by an apointed or elected board and sometimes by a legislature. Ultimately there needs to be accountability back the the citizens. In the case of a legistature, this is handled using elections. With an appointed board, the election would be to decide who does the appointing. Hope this helps.
I think you misunderstand science. If understanding changes, then the science has changed. Obviously global warming is happening, it is getting hotter. Our best understanding of this is that we are the cause. The measurements are not going to change, it is getting hotter, but it is possible as you point out that our understanding could. As an example: planets move in the sky, that does not change. Our understanding has changed though: they do this because they orbit the Sun not the Earth. That change in understanding changes the science.
Including global warming is science curriculum is a very good idea. For one thing it is topical, it gets in the news quite a bit. This helps with engagement in science. Further, it seems like a pretty practical matter for the generation now in school. To avoid catastrophe, they may need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would be a pretty big undertaking. If this is the case, not only would this be a good science subject to learn, but it would also be a survival skill. Finally, this is a subject where there has been intentional dishonesty on the part of fossil fuel companies to attempt to muddy the waters. Teaching the actual science can help students to understand that it is not just the case that not everything you hear is true but that some of it is intentionally deceptive. They can also learn about this in history when they study the tobacco settlement but seeing it in actual operation is also helpful.
I linked that paper here and it is cited in the Serchinger et al. paper being discussed right now. Another paper that might interest you was published by the National Academy of Sciences. Agrawal et al. (2007) propose overcome scale problems with biofuels by suplementing the energy input with other sources such as solar and wind. I think that we can skip the plants entirely and do much better than that.
Wind and solar already match petroleum in terms of energy returned on energy invested and certainly beat it if the end use is electricity. Biodiesel may match petroleum eventually as petroleum becomes harder to extract, but it won't come to the same scale. However, wind and solar can be used to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels directly, so there may be no need to use plants at all and the scale issue would be less of a worry.
The articles appear in a peer reviewed journal so that there methods are published. You'll want to give them a read to see if the methods are actually too flawed to be reliable. The point really is about land use, and in the case fo the US, using cropland to grow fuel. Switchgrass or sweet sorghum or tropical maize might get you more energy out, but it does not get you better emissions than gasoline if cropland is taken out of food production. Both papers do mention using ag waste as not having this problem, though I think you'd want to be sure that the waste is not diverted silage. It is the disturbance of new lands for agriculture that causes the emissions so the particular energy crop, with the possible exception of cane, can't overcome the extra emissions for several decades or more. The papers could be wrong, but they are surely scientific since you have the opportunity to look at how they are put together and attempt to falsify them.
The original poster mentioned living in New England where there has been a move towards sustainable forestry. Burning wood there tends to be carbon neutral. You sound like you have it pretty bad where you live.
I think that is the main point. You need to look at biofuels in context and that context is a world argriculture system that needs to feed people. These papers are about land use pattern changes that are a consequence of biofuel use.
Both articles make the point that producing biofuels from land that is not displacing crops or causing release of carbon from soil or forests does not suffer from the effects they are considering. The point is that using cropland or plowing up marginal land or cutting down forests causes more emissions than using conventional oil at least over the timescale of most interest for global warming. So, growing switchgrass on croplands causes about 1.5 times the emissions of using gasoline. Growing it on abandond agricultural land does not. It is not a matter of which ethanol technology is used (though this is also important) but how land is used.
I agree with you that dependence on foriegn sources of energy is a big mistake for the US. But, getting off of foreign oil and gas does not have to mean getting onto biofuels. Plants are just not all that efficient at turning sunlight into usable energy. We do much better doing that bit ourselves. It seems to me that the electrification of transportation and home heating make more sense. The place where we need liquid fuels is in aviation, and for that, using solar or wind power to produce the fuel directly from the atmosphere rather than going through plants makes much more sense to me. One can even find synergy between electric heating and fuel production I think.
It is not that the biofuels themselves don't displace some fossil emissions, but rather that that the land use changes brought about by large scale production of biofuels releases carbon from soils and forests that would otherwise hold it. When US corn crops are diverted to fuel, more land needs to be put under cultivation around the world to make up for the missing grain. Or, in the other paper, when forests are converted to palm oil production for biodiesel, the peat in the soil rots and the carbon enters the atmosphere. Brazil, for example, expects to have only one 40th of the energy input for castor bean biodiesel coming from fossil inputs once they can get the transesterification to go using ethanol rather than methanol and they may get away with not using land in a way that releases more carbon dioxide or forces other land to be put to use for growing food. But, most North American and European biofuel use is boosting rather than reducing carbon dioxide emisions because it is forcing land use changes globally.
That is biomass rather than biofuel. The issue in the US is that taking up cropland here means plowing up marginal land elsewhere. This disturbs soils which hold carbon and thus that carbon is released. With your firewood, this is not the case. The soil is not disturbed and your use of the wood is not causing others to be hungry. You should mention the benefits of excercise in splitting and hauling wood as well.
Both papers are published in Science Express rather than the regular journal yet. Here are the abstracts:
Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt
Joseph Fargione Jason Hill David Tilman Stephen Polasky, Peter Hawthorne
Increasing energy use, climate change, and carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to lowcarbon
fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential lowcarbon
energy source, but whether biofuels offer carbon
savings depends on how they are produced. Converting
rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce
food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the
United States creates a 'biofuel carbon debt' by releasing
17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas
(GHG) reductions these biofuels provide by displacing
fossil fuels. In contrast, biofuels made from waste biomass
or from biomass grown on abandoned agricultural lands
planted with perennials incur little or no carbon debt and
offer immediate and sustained GHG advantages.
Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change
Timothy Searchinger, Ralph Heimlich R. A. Houghton, Fengxia Dong, Amani Elobeid, Jacinto Fabiosa, Simla Tokgoz, Dermot Hayes, Tun-Hsiang Yu
Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.
While this work is very useful, the immediate concern would seem to be that grain carryover stocks are becoming quite low as a result of ethanol production. They are now at about 54 days worth of world consumption compared to over 100 days in 2000. Much lower stocks would mean making a choice between starvation of people or reducing feedlot operations and meat availability.
Thanks for linking this. The fuel does not come cheap owing to the efficiencies, but if you make use of the heat from this for another purpose, you get to $3.60/gallon, and I was looking for a flow through deal from a wind farm at $0.07/kWh to get to $2.50/gallon. But, if you do it for the fuel alone, and not for the heat as well, it would not be competitive. Also, the equipment is probably still to expensive. Restrictions on fossil carbon use may make this more attractive in the future.
Thank Linda Schade of the Maryland Green Party. http://truevotemd.org/ was all over this. But, defeat could still be snatched from the jaws of victory. Keep calling your legislators.
I worked on this issue pretty hard. One of the things that I think the legislature found persuasive, especially on the finance committee, was that the optical scan machines would be less expensive in the long run. The Diebold machines were showing signs of aging and needed much more repair than expected. The optical scan machines are known to last longer and work with fewer problems. This is pretty sad considering that voting machines are used quite infrequently. The other arguments were more important, but the financial issues were a consideration I think.
Slashdot Mirror
The lithium ion batteries being adopted for transportation, e.g. the Tesla batteries, are reported to have a charging efficiency of 86%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system Some batteries are not as good though vanadium oxide batteries look like they compare well. http://www.risoe.dk/Research/sustainable_energy/wind_energy/projects/vanadiumbattery.aspx
Electric vehicles can be about 75% efficient including regenerative breaking. Presumably the drive train will be used for some slowing here recharging the air tank. Compressing air always produces substaintal waste heat so the base efficiency will be less than for a battery-motor combination. Let's say that they do well and get 50% efficiency on compressing/decompressing. In that case, if we expect about 0.2 kWh/mile for an electric vehicle, we might get 0.3 kWh/mile for this vehicle. That is about 3.3 cents/mile (11 cents/kWh). For a 30 mpg car at $3.00/gal we get a fuel cost of 10 cents/mile. So, the cost could be about a third of the cost of gas.
I put the fuel production where the waste heat can be used. There is quite a bit of it in Fischer-Tropsch. I think that the waste heat could also be used to drive an air contitioning cycle in another season. If you don't use the waste heat, then the cost of the fuel pretty much doubles. Your idea of making some fuel and then using some fuel could make sense to even out electricity supply issues especially initially, but in a renewbale grid I think that we'll probably have a good bit of over-capacity so that base load won't really be a useful concept anymore. The wind resource is Maine is actually pretty good on the coast so I'd be surpised if with an Architecture 2030 class house with good insulation you'd need to worry too much about intermittancy. I suspect that the over-capacity in renewable energy will be put towards carbon sequestration for several decades or more, and after that it will be available to play with. I'm thinking space catapult or that kind of thing. One thing about huge challenges like this is that you end up with a lot wealth at the end. Industrial capacity after World War II, for example, did wonders for diet through mass production of refridgeration.
On centralized production, there is the issue of being able to use the waste heat to save on the cost of the fuel, and there are also beginning to be some problems with thermal pollution. France has had to shut down reactors in the summer for some years now and the Southeast drought in the US caused the same thing this summer. With the uncertainties of climate change, I suspect that more dispersed production will be more robust. That said, one place where waste heat could be used is in desalinization if one is willing to move the facility back from the ocean as the sea level rises. This may help regions whose aquifers face saline intrusions. On the other hand, reverse osmosis is being used more and more in desalinization so that this may not turn out to be a good heat application.
We had a nice salad last night from the indoor garden, so that is something to start with anyway.
To get limestone you need calcium. When both calcium and magnesium are used you get dolomite. With magnesium alone you get magnesite. It should be remembered that the remaining elements of the silicate rock will be mixed with the product and if heavy metals are present they may be released to the environment. Serpentine soils are not very fertile, in part, because of this effect.
That is not an oversimplification, it is exactly right. But, it does point to the need to plan for renewable energy capacity that can cover this cleanup expense.
Using renewable energy to form liquid hydrocarbon fuels is not sequestration but it can reduce emissions. In my opinion, we only need these fuels for aviation. Here is my thinking on how this might be done in a cost effective way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html.
Mineralization is often thought of a taking silicate rock and turing it into silica and calcium or magnesuim carbonate. Often serpentine is cited, though the associated heavy metals make me think this is a poor choice. Wollastonite might be better. If you want to produce elemental carbon, you need to add in energy. The conversion of silicates is exothermic, but removing oxygen from carbon dioxide to make pure carbon requires just as much energy as you got from making the carbon dioxide in the first place. Forming terra preta from biomass can get you to elemental carbon (bio-char) and produce some energy along the way, but the biomass has solar energy input to convert carbon dioxide. One can form methane pretty easily from hydrogen and carbon dioxide using the Sabatier reaction especially if you have a use for the excess heat from this exothermic reaction. The methane might be turned into polymers that have useful microstructures when the hydrogen is removed leaving a carbon residue similar to bio-char. Forming graphite or diamond would probably be limited to uses that are too small scale to accept much carbon.
There is a form of diamond that appears easy to manufacture called Lonsdaleite. It is not gem quality but is thought to be just as strong. I calculate here that replacing all steel, wood and concrete in construction with this material would sequester at most a few percent a year of our current emissions. The place where carbon has to go is in the soil or the sea. In the soil, terra preta looks like a good bet. In the sea, calcium carbonate seems like the most natural place.
You must be looking at the wrong data. The global average temperature binned annaully is very clearly increasing. Perhaps you are looking at daily data, or worse, data from a small region? It is certainly settled that the world is getting hotter.
If you look at the bill itself, you'll see that it is added to an existing list as "climate change." There are instructions at the bottom of the original article on how to do this. Since it goes in as climate change, the direction of the change is not specified.
I think that massive eruptions of volcanoes is quite likely over the next couple of centuries. They do produce short term cooling but for the most part they add to warming. I suspect that since the implementation is left to the board, there is every expectation that the consensus position will be taught with perhaps discussion of new data that have not yet been folded into the consensus. For example, there is recent work showing acceleration of ice loss in Antarctica that might be worth some study. The view that sea level rise will be several meters this century is also gaining ground. A look at why this is would be an interesting subject and would illustrate how progress in made in science. Curricula are genrally set as public policy. Sometimes by an apointed or elected board and sometimes by a legislature. Ultimately there needs to be accountability back the the citizens. In the case of a legistature, this is handled using elections. With an appointed board, the election would be to decide who does the appointing. Hope this helps.
I think you misunderstand science. If understanding changes, then the science has changed. Obviously global warming is happening, it is getting hotter. Our best understanding of this is that we are the cause. The measurements are not going to change, it is getting hotter, but it is possible as you point out that our understanding could. As an example: planets move in the sky, that does not change. Our understanding has changed though: they do this because they orbit the Sun not the Earth. That change in understanding changes the science.
Including global warming is science curriculum is a very good idea. For one thing it is topical, it gets in the news quite a bit. This helps with engagement in science. Further, it seems like a pretty practical matter for the generation now in school. To avoid catastrophe, they may need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would be a pretty big undertaking. If this is the case, not only would this be a good science subject to learn, but it would also be a survival skill. Finally, this is a subject where there has been intentional dishonesty on the part of fossil fuel companies to attempt to muddy the waters. Teaching the actual science can help students to understand that it is not just the case that not everything you hear is true but that some of it is intentionally deceptive. They can also learn about this in history when they study the tobacco settlement but seeing it in actual operation is also helpful.
I linked that paper here and it is cited in the Serchinger et al. paper being discussed right now. Another paper that might interest you was published by the National Academy of Sciences. Agrawal et al. (2007) propose overcome scale problems with biofuels by suplementing the energy input with other sources such as solar and wind. I think that we can skip the plants entirely and do much better than that.
Wind and solar already match petroleum in terms of energy returned on energy invested and certainly beat it if the end use is electricity. Biodiesel may match petroleum eventually as petroleum becomes harder to extract, but it won't come to the same scale. However, wind and solar can be used to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels directly, so there may be no need to use plants at all and the scale issue would be less of a worry.
The articles appear in a peer reviewed journal so that there methods are published. You'll want to give them a read to see if the methods are actually too flawed to be reliable. The point really is about land use, and in the case fo the US, using cropland to grow fuel. Switchgrass or sweet sorghum or tropical maize might get you more energy out, but it does not get you better emissions than gasoline if cropland is taken out of food production. Both papers do mention using ag waste as not having this problem, though I think you'd want to be sure that the waste is not diverted silage. It is the disturbance of new lands for agriculture that causes the emissions so the particular energy crop, with the possible exception of cane, can't overcome the extra emissions for several decades or more. The papers could be wrong, but they are surely scientific since you have the opportunity to look at how they are put together and attempt to falsify them.
The original poster mentioned living in New England where there has been a move towards sustainable forestry. Burning wood there tends to be carbon neutral. You sound like you have it pretty bad where you live.
I think that is the main point. You need to look at biofuels in context and that context is a world argriculture system that needs to feed people. These papers are about land use pattern changes that are a consequence of biofuel use.
Both articles make the point that producing biofuels from land that is not displacing crops or causing release of carbon from soil or forests does not suffer from the effects they are considering. The point is that using cropland or plowing up marginal land or cutting down forests causes more emissions than using conventional oil at least over the timescale of most interest for global warming. So, growing switchgrass on croplands causes about 1.5 times the emissions of using gasoline. Growing it on abandond agricultural land does not. It is not a matter of which ethanol technology is used (though this is also important) but how land is used.
I agree with you that dependence on foriegn sources of energy is a big mistake for the US. But, getting off of foreign oil and gas does not have to mean getting onto biofuels. Plants are just not all that efficient at turning sunlight into usable energy. We do much better doing that bit ourselves. It seems to me that the electrification of transportation and home heating make more sense. The place where we need liquid fuels is in aviation, and for that, using solar or wind power to produce the fuel directly from the atmosphere rather than going through plants makes much more sense to me. One can even find synergy between electric heating and fuel production I think.
It is not that the biofuels themselves don't displace some fossil emissions, but rather that that the land use changes brought about by large scale production of biofuels releases carbon from soils and forests that would otherwise hold it. When US corn crops are diverted to fuel, more land needs to be put under cultivation around the world to make up for the missing grain. Or, in the other paper, when forests are converted to palm oil production for biodiesel, the peat in the soil rots and the carbon enters the atmosphere. Brazil, for example, expects to have only one 40th of the energy input for castor bean biodiesel coming from fossil inputs once they can get the transesterification to go using ethanol rather than methanol and they may get away with not using land in a way that releases more carbon dioxide or forces other land to be put to use for growing food. But, most North American and European biofuel use is boosting rather than reducing carbon dioxide emisions because it is forcing land use changes globally.
That is biomass rather than biofuel. The issue in the US is that taking up cropland here means plowing up marginal land elsewhere. This disturbs soils which hold carbon and thus that carbon is released. With your firewood, this is not the case. The soil is not disturbed and your use of the wood is not causing others to be hungry. You should mention the benefits of excercise in splitting and hauling wood as well.
Both papers are published in Science Express rather than the regular journal yet. Here are the abstracts:
Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt
Joseph Fargione Jason Hill David Tilman Stephen Polasky, Peter Hawthorne
Increasing energy use, climate change, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to lowcarbon fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential lowcarbon energy source, but whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are produced. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a 'biofuel carbon debt' by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels. In contrast, biofuels made from waste biomass or from biomass grown on abandoned agricultural lands planted with perennials incur little or no carbon debt and offer immediate and sustained GHG advantages.
Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change
Timothy Searchinger, Ralph Heimlich R. A. Houghton, Fengxia Dong, Amani Elobeid, Jacinto Fabiosa, Simla Tokgoz, Dermot Hayes, Tun-Hsiang Yu
Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.
While this work is very useful, the immediate concern would seem to be that grain carryover stocks are becoming quite low as a result of ethanol production. They are now at about 54 days worth of world consumption compared to over 100 days in 2000. Much lower stocks would mean making a choice between starvation of people or reducing feedlot operations and meat availability.
Thanks for linking this. The fuel does not come cheap owing to the efficiencies, but if you make use of the heat from this for another purpose, you get to $3.60/gallon, and I was looking for a flow through deal from a wind farm at $0.07/kWh to get to $2.50/gallon. But, if you do it for the fuel alone, and not for the heat as well, it would not be competitive. Also, the equipment is probably still to expensive. Restrictions on fossil carbon use may make this more attractive in the future.
Thank Linda Schade of the Maryland Green Party. http://truevotemd.org/ was all over this. But, defeat could still be snatched from the jaws of victory. Keep calling your legislators.
I worked on this issue pretty hard. One of the things that I think the legislature found persuasive, especially on the finance committee, was that the optical scan machines would be less expensive in the long run. The Diebold machines were showing signs of aging and needed much more repair than expected. The optical scan machines are known to last longer and work with fewer problems. This is pretty sad considering that voting machines are used quite infrequently. The other arguments were more important, but the financial issues were a consideration I think.