You better go check the BHP statistical review of world energy production. North American natural gas supplies peaked in Jan 2001 just as I stated. It is possible we could see a new peak of course. One of them has to be the last peak and I expect 2001 is the last one.
We've lost a huge amount of the North American fertilizer industry since then. Its more or less permenantly shut down. Then we had Calpine corporation planning on so many co-gens they would have burned up most of the North American gas supply all by themselves. They almost went bankrupt with this hair brained idea.
They are still in chapter 11 - so I guess technically they did go bankrupt - but may come out of it.
Currently gas supplies are looking ok. If we have a cold winter next year there will be all hell to pay and the industrial use of Gas in the North East will need to be greatly curtailed to leave supplies sufficent for heating. This senerio almost happened a couple years ago.
Even today - the draw down of gas reserves is great enough to be a consern and if March is very cold there could be a problem.
So, you need to check your fact because they are not up to date.
Global warming would be good for the planet. The Medieval optimum as noted from the history books illustrates this. However the amount of warming won't make much difference to the heating bills. Insulation is still a lot cheaper than trying to heat up the outdoors.
We only need to go back as far as the eocene for instance to find when the planet for millions of years was warmer than now. A good place to check is http://www.scotese.com./ During the eocene the planet was both warmer and wetter. A really important issue is to note where the planet was warmer and wetter.
The tropics and subtropics won't warm up much. They are already warm. Water vapour levels can be up around 80,000 ppm (remember CO2 is at about 370) and at these levels the water vapour traps most of the incident solar energy that can be trapped. As we get to higher latitudes we lose H2O because as the temperature drops the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere plumets. When we get down to freezing, we have effectively lost most of the H2O. IE, Antarctica is the dryest continent on the planet even though its covered with snow and the reason is because its so cold. The dryness allows the incident solar energy to escape. So the colder the planet gets the more energy leaky it gets.
If anyone wonders - could the planet flip into a deep freeze and totally freeze up as it loses all of its H2O blanket? The answer is yes. There is very strong evidence this happened several times during the precambrian. Check the Stuartian tillites for instance which were deposited as part of the Flinders ranges in Australia. At the time of these glacial deposts, Australia was north of the equator and quite close to the equator. The theory is that because the planet was totally frozen over, CO2 released by processes such as volcanoes could not be absorbed and eventually built up into levels measured at 1000's of parts per million. At these levels it's green house capabilities were able to make the difference and eventually tip the planet out of the frozen state at the equator at which point as the ice melted water vapour was able to accumulate which added to the effect and Boom - planet earth flipped from a totally frozen state to a warm balmy state about 10C warmer than now... where it stayed for millions of years. Solar energy back then was not as great as today and this would explain why the earth went through several cycles of deep freezing. Also one would expect the orbit of the planet to be somewhat larger than today because there is some debris in space which should apply a little orbital friction. I've not come across how much orbital decay one would expect over the last billions of years.
The CO2 mind you was not able to stay in the atmosphere at these levels. It ended up forming carbonate rich cap rocks which overlay the tilites and are massively thick and found all over the planet.
The best we can hope for if we do have global warming is that high latitudes might warm a little and this might postpone the next ice age. During the last one Toronto for instance was covered with over a mile of ice. I don't think those people would do so well if this re-occurs. I do however suspect many torontonians worry about global warming and do not worry about how to cope with a mile of ice.
If we had global warming to the tune of say 5 degrees, then Calgary might gain a climate more like Denver. Areas of the North West Terriories and Siberia might become more appealing and people might migrate. Agricultural crop bands would move northward to the poles. The tree lines would creap to higher latitudes.
In fact, 5 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. So its obvious the earth was quite a lot warmer back then and it certainly was not because of man made CO2 emissions.
With warming we would expect more moisture and probably a greater accumulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps because these regions would still remain well bel
Typo sorry. If you read the discussion portion of the IFR artical you'll see where I calculated the uranium on hand issue. In the artical its worng. I didn't change the artical because its a moot point (they say "more than") and rather than do an exact calculation... well... long before an IFR technology can chew into the spent fuel and depleated fraction, the artical can be corrected.
But I stand corrected and missed the typo before I submitted it. THanks. And thanks for adding the link.
Also... I might add by way of clarification... the issue of ethanol biofuels.
We hear on the media the term Corn Surplus. This is a euphamism for corn that we export that other people eat. It does not at present go to waste.
You might note that in poor countries we still have starvation. This starvation will increase as more of the planet's grain supply goes to feeding automobiles in rich countries and consequently poor people and especially children have nothing to eat.
Anyone truely conserned about the well being of the planet and its people should note this point. I personally take great exception to the term surplus grain. I would urge that perhaps the general public might want to stand up and become rather vocal and start demanding of these bio-fuel ethanol people how they can justify depriving poor counties and consequently starving children of food so that we can feed our gas guzzlers. This is far more productive in my opinion than pointing the finger at CO2 levels.
In fact, to point the finger at CO2 levels and proclaim ethanol is carbon neutral completely obscurs the point that surplus grain -> ethanol will deprive people in poor countries of their daily bread.
Perhaps what we need to do is start computing the number of children who need to starve to death in order to free up grain for ethanol production.
This doesn't begin to address how we can brew beer for $2.50 per keg. The number is easy to compute. A keg is about 59 liters @ 5% ethanol. 59*0.5 = 2.95 liters. A kg of ethanol has about 25 Mj and a kg of gasoline has about 45 Mj. So, if we have a budget of say $2.50 then if gas costs $1.50 per liter we can buy 2.50/1.50 = 1.67 liters. 1.67*45/25 = 3.0 which is the equivalent number of liters of ethanol we need to provide the same energy as gasoline.
Note: I did not address cellulose, lignans and pentosan -> to ethanol production. I did comment that T. reeshii might do it. This also can compete with food production because some of our favorite mushrooms can be grown on these types of substraits. I share the opinion of many mycologists that this area can be one of the most productive sources of food to feed the planet. However, I'm not too conserned because the cost of substraits is so small in comparison to the amount of gormet mushrooms that I, for instance, can grow that cars can't compete.
There is an issue however. The left over plant mass builds soil structure. Loam and high quality agricultural land contains a very high percentage of biological material that is in the process of decaying. If we harvest this material to produce ethanol rather than return it to the land, then we lose soil structure and turn our loam into basically heavy clays. Anyone who has any knowlege of farming can tell you that these types of impoverished soils are marginal at best. So we will further destroy our soils in our efforts to create ethanol from biomass. It is simply not correct to say that straw for instance is a waste.
Mind you, in some areas we do have a surplus and sugar cane baggase is an example. So, cellulose to ethanol has some future and we can actually probably get quite a lot of fuel from this source. Algae to ethanol and bio-diesel also has a great deal of potential. Perhaps we should look at innoculating large areas of presently dessert ocean with selected strains of algae and iron (because this is in part why these areas of the ocean don't support much life). Factory ships coul
You make a very good point and I agree 100% with you.
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
If we start building the IRF reactor system which was designed by Argonne Labs (and shut down by clinton's administration in 1994!) then we have over 60,000 years of uranium supply on hand already mined... this for a fleet of about 110 reactors. North American can produce 100% of its power from nuclear - but we need about 1200 reactors to do it. We havn't started to build any. Any new reactors are years away.
Then we have the biofuels people. If we take ethanol for instance, it can be produced from pretty much any plant material. Plants are sugar polymers for the most part. We can break these polymers down. This is what fungus do and this is what yeast does... its just yeast needs to start wtih pretty simple sugars whereas a fungus like Trichoderma reeshii can break down celulose and this is why its used to make stone washed bluejeans. How effective T. reeshii will be in celulose to ethanol production is open and then we have that about 50% of plant material is not cellulose but instead is ligins and pentosans - which fungus like Pleurotus and Lentinula spp (and many other species can digest). Whether they will produce alcohol is an open question.
Ethanol from grain is viable. To do this cost effectively is equaivalent to brewing beer at $2.50 per keg. To produce all the liquid fuel North America needs we would need to consume more than the worlds production of grains. Please note: One tonne of dry plant biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil and this is if we can convert it for free.
So, I'm not particularly worried about CO2 levels. CO2 is a fertilizer and encourages plant growth. I am however quite worried about fuel supplies in the not too distant future and I think we are already starting to see supply constraints.
People should start by doing what they can... like insulate their houses for instance. Instead people run around and point their fingers at CO2 levels (and understand practically nothing about it). Heating houses creates CO2 - so why won't they do something that they can do and save themselves money in the mean time? Are they bound and determined to freeze in the dark?
My father who has now passed on is an example. He refused to properly insulate his house. When I grew up and it was 40 below outside there was frost on the walls of the bedroom. He put in an oil furnace about this time and was burning a tank up every 3 weeks. He'd been told oil was cheap and insulation was expensive I guess. I was pretty little but still old enough to remember the 1 1/2" of rock wool he was putting in the walls and I asked him why he didn't fill the whole wall up? He said it was not "cost effective". That xmas my mother and father were looking at their oil bills wondering how they were going to heat their house.
At this point, that house is going through 18 cords of wood per year. It is still not insulated.
A similar size eco-designed house is using 3/4 of a cord per year.
This is what insulation and good design can do. It doesn't cost much extra to build it right in the first place. For instance, R50 fiberglass in the walls will cost about $1 buk per square foot during the construction phase. After the house is finished you need to tear walls down.
If houses in North America were properly insulated they would be much cheaper to heat and much more comfortable to live in. So why won't people do it? It will greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
What really worries me is what the next generation is going to do. Gas hit $17 bux on the Henry Hub a little over a year ago. Next year it might hit $20 bux. While we have a short reprieve, I am personally close enough to the Oil and Gas business t
Bull. The CO2 levels in comparison to the most important green house gas is so minor its like comparing toilet paper to a tree stump.
DO some numbers ok! try comparing 20,000 ppm (H2O @2%) to the total estimated CO2 levels which are now abotu 370 and were estimated (rightly or wrongly) to be about 280 at the dawn of the industrial age. A really good excerize is to use a caliper to show the ratios.
Note that over much of the planet, H2O levels are considerably higher than 20,000 ppm. Next - we have no way currently to tell whether H2O is rizing, decling or staying the same. Water Vapour fluxuates alot. We can have anywhere from practically 1% to over 4% and we certainly cannot measure it within even 1000 ppm.
IE - it swamps CO2 by manyorders of magnitude.
Next, while you are correct that CO2 levels are increasing and that billions of tons are added to the atmosphere, you do not even consider the size of the carbon cycle and whether this will have any significant or cumulative effect.
CO2 originates from several sources including volcanic action and the breakdown of organic matter usually by fungus. It is well documented that plant growth is accelerated by CO2. Ie. It is a fertilizer and it is not harming the planet. The point is that if the growth of plants is accelerated then some of that CO2 ends up trapped for a while in the biomass. But eventually that biomass dies and the CO2 is recycled. So it is clear that the size of the carbon cycle will increase - but we really don't have a good handle by how much. We certainly do know the biomass can handle CO2 levels many times greater than now and the planet can stay at these greatly increased CO2 levels for millions of years. The planets temperature can also go up and down into and out of ice ages with CO2 levels as much as 13x greater than now. The Ordovician is an example and the ice age which occured back can be correlated to the Taconic Orogeny. It does not seem to correlate with CO2 levels.
May I suggest rather than rationalizing, do some research and get some facts.
This reminds me of an argument I had with a stats prof (PhD) who claimed that a 4 byte floating point number in a computer could clearly carry more than 2^32 values. He went so far as to tell me what the range of the exponent was.
No - I was not one of his students, I worked with him.
I gave up. If he wants to believe in virtual bits then let him! He also didn't seem to know how I could stuff floats into an integer array and later pull them back out as floats and all this without losing any precision. You see, ints don't have a decimal right?
Your point is well taken. There are a lot of experts who really don't know all that much.
--------------
I also proofed a PhD thesis in mathematical geology where the author assumed at the outset that the rate of erosion would be porportional to the height of the mountains. Next he determined the amount of sediment buildup would be porportional to the rate of erosion. Later he did an integration and concluded that the rate of mountain building was exponential (this was his thesis!). Of course, he missed the fact that the definition of exp() is a function that grows at a rate porportional to its size... and I leave out many details.
The PhD was awarded. The person in question was a very good geologist mind you and had a spectacular career and has now passed away. I prefer not to name names.
But this does illustrate that there is a great deal of misunderstandings on the part of experts.
I don't think his wife is Random and I doubt she thinks she is random either. What he wrote is correct. Furthermore his wife is an oceanographer, at least according to him. Are you going to question his knowledge of this too?
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument.
The issue is how they can know the ocean bottom is actually warming? Where did tehy get their benchmark data from and if they have good data then how is this new data from the sub surprising?
While I happen to know Compact Fluorescents Lamps are not rated over 50,000 hours, I do get over 50,000 hours.
The trick is to not turn them on and off.
In my office I let them burn 24x7. Here is why... I have 3x13watts. That is 39 watts total. 39*24 = 936 watt hours per day which costs me under 5 cents. This is $1.50 per month.
I need the lights on when I am in the office and I'm in and out at least 12 hours a day. So the max I could save might be 8-12 hours when I'm not in but when I'm not in is not all that predicatable.
Next, since I live in Canada I'm in a heating area and this house has inadequate insulation. The waste energy from the bulbs helps offset some of the gas bill.
This offset is greater than 50% in fact. So I would save maybe 25 cents per month by turning the bulbs on and off.
So... I am energy inefficient ( a little ) and splurge the light. I offset this by not using a screen saver on my computers because screen savers don't save screens - they drive the electronics at probably pretty close to full tilt and wear out the screens. Instead my screens go blank after 5 mins. I get similar life on my screens... over 50,000 hours. As for my computers - well - they are probably getting close to or over 100,000 hours and I don't turn them off ether. But then I don't use silly hot processors like the P4's either.
My point... an incandecent will get maybe 1000 hours. I'm getting more than 50 times this on the CFL's.
If each incandenct costs $1 buk then it would cost me in capital about $50 bux for a single incandecent bulb over 50,000 hours and then I need to consider the energy use.
Capital costs for 3 incandecents is going to run $150 over 5 years and 50,000 hours. However they can be flipped on and off without reducing life so maybe its only $100 bux total costs. (and maybe more too since my incandences never seem to last 1000 hours!)
With the CFLs over 5 years = 60 months so the electricty cost is $1.50 per month for the 3 bulbs in my office for a total (not discounted) cost of $90 bux. Energy costs for 3x40 watt (new high efficiency) would be expected to be 3x greater than the CFL's which is about $270 bux.
Since the CFL's cost me under $30 bux to buy - it looks to me they are about 1/3 the cost or less.
To be very honest a nickle a day is a bit under the radar so I didn't do the calcs in a great deal of detail.
I wouldn't be so fast to say that one idjot tossing a battery and some oil in the bush nullifies it all.
There are several species of fungus that can happily digest petroleum spills. Some of these are quite common and even good to eat. As for the batteries, the H2SO4 will be dealt with quite rapidly. In fact much of the soils in at least the Western part of North America are sulphur poor. So a little carbonate gets weathered away by the battery acid. It'll get weathered away by carbonic acid in rainwater anyways.
The lead mind you might be an issue. If we have a lot of batteries tossed into a small amount of bush then the lead might be a problem. However in this case we might actually have a small lead mine and someone can go pick up the batteries for salvage.
I've observed batteries tossed in the bush and from what I could see the bush really didn't mind very much . This doesn't mean I'm in favour of tossing batteries in the bush, or waste oil either for that matter. Its just that I'm not terribly alarmed about it.
Gawd the moderation around here stinks. But then I guess I'm partly to blame because I often don't meta-moderate and waste moderator points more often than not.
------------
So the moderator calls these comments a troll however doesn't address the comparative nature of the statments in the story. If they were already able to measure in a reliable fashion the temperatures of the region in question, then they probably didn't need the new measurements from the sub to determine if there is a change. IE, they would typically already know what is going on so data from the new sub would not be unexpected (but could still be more complete and nice to have).
If they DO need the measurements from the sub then they cannot have reliable data from before and hense cannot really determine if we have change.
I stand by my former comment that it is fine to say the temperature measurements are unexpected, however to say the temperature measurements indicate a warming is really pushing it. Even if the measurements do indicate a warming, then for how long has this warming been going on? Is there really a good base line already known?
And again, if there is a baseline established then the data gathering before the sub should be good enough that the subs data should be expected... not unexpected.
Why do they think they have to toss in a comment on Global Warming?
Then...
Consider that the oceanic currents have cycle times measured in 1000's of years. Depending on where they are diving, if they are finding unexpected warming then this would mean that mankind would not be responsible for any presumed planetary warming... since the temperature of the water they are measuring was determined centuries ago.
However, closer examination of such a silly statment leaves one with a question... If they had to send this new fangled sub down to measure the temperature then what did they use before and if they didn't have anything to use before then did they really measure the temperature? If not - then one could say the temperature is unexpected but one could certainly not conclude it is warmer or colder since it hasn't been measured before.
Of course, I think the idea that Global Warming should be part of the story is kinda silly to begin with.
If I get modded down because of these observations then it just proves there is a huge knee jerk reaction going on by people who don't really think about things.
Example 5: Windows vs. OS/2 These are the ones that matter. MS won the desktop war by convincing manufacturers to bundle Windows with every PC. IE won the browser wars by being bundled with Windows, and therefore most PCs. Bundling the virtualization with Windows will be a major advantage for MS, but it's still no guarantee. They don't even own the server market like they do with desktops
Bull! IBM shot themselves in the foot so many times I am suprised they could still find feet to shoot.
I used OS/2 for years on a dual head set up. The 1st nightmare was configuring the dual heads. Finally a chap in Boca Raton was nice enough to tell me the magic - all was undocumented of course. It worked. The 8514 card and the Svga card actually worked as advertised (by IBM in their Red Books - which I bought)
But... when I switched from a DOS window it froze and blanked the screen. If I switched from an OS/2 session it just froze the screen. I think it was some perverse manager who figured that in order to encourage running OS/2 apps and discourage running DOS apps that they should pull this dirty little trick. As a developer - it just made my life difficult and meant that I couldn't tell my clients how great OS/2 really was... and why? Because it wasn't. How would anyone feel if the moment a window lost focus the OS blanked it? Hell - you don't need to look at your code buddy when you are running the app! What do you want a 2nd monitor for anyways? But in an OS/2 session they didn't need to blank anything.
Next - the single thread problem and the OS locking up. It was never fixed that I know of. I never did upgrade past Warp. I ended up buying NT4.0 much as I hated to do so - and it ran beautifully and ran the monitors properly too.
Then, a blessing was OS/2 apps! Microsoft did it right. I used Brief under NT4.0 - the OS/2 version. It ran BETTER in NT than it ever did on OS/2 and I didn't have to put up with Frozen screens.
Oh.. tech support! I bought and paid for tech support the whole time I had OS/2. I used it many more times than I wanted too. IBM made me wait on hold - and when the level #1 intake operators came on line they INSISTED on getting every hardware configuration detail and details of my CONFIG.SYS file.. and others. This was even if I already KNEW what the problem was and wanted to simply ask for a work around. This happened OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER.
I offered to write a program for IBM which would collect all this information and send it via modem to their tech support people. My GAWD but it was horrible having to give them the same damn information every damn time. How hard would it have been for a company like IBM to set up a damn database indexed for instance by my phone number and record the conf once? Nope!
I wrote letters to them and suggested setting up an app to scan the system for pertinant config and hardware information... so it could be xmitted via modem. I never heard back from them.
Well - I bought Warp. I replaced it with NT 4.0. I have never looked back.
IBM did it all by themselves. It was their own arrogance and incompetance which destroyed the product. Even the simplest issues could not be effectively dealt with.
In spite of the fact there is criminal legislation in place for copyright infringment, I expect the prosecutors will look the other way and declare it to be civil. This will just be another example of the double standard.
As a civil issue ( the only other legal avenue ), you can only hope to obtain justice through the courts. It will cost $1000's to get a judgment, perhaps $100,000's. There is no justice. All we have is persecution it would seem with the powerful pretty much doing whatever they like with impunity.
While its not fair, the question any prosecutor is going to ask is if spending the taxpayers money on this is a good idea. Of course, spending the taxpayers money prosecuting a person charged with a traffic incident is always considered a good idea because its cheap (usually) and meant to keep the sheep in line and paying the fines.
If another meteor the size of the one from Arizona were to hit a city, which is twice as likely to happen than a terrorist strike, it'd be akin to a nuclear detonation. If something the size of Apophis should strike the earth, well, say goodbye to whatever county (or small state) it lands in.
If this puppy is aimed at the USA then I sure hope Canada sets up a system that requires passports and all sorts of red tape for anyone from the USA who wishes to visit our country!
Of course if any Americans think they might want to visit Russia, then I hope they get treated the same as Dimitris Sklyrov. Anyone who doesn't know what the USA did to him can ask google. The short of it is that he was thrown in jail for months and criminally charged because he exposed the pitifully bad security measures employed by Adobe in its eBook products.
Patents are a form of intellectual property. As such they should attract a property tax. If you don't pay the tax you lose the property.
I'd suggest say $5000 per year per patent but I'm sure it could be adjusted depending on what kind of patent it might be. For instance a "software" patent might attract a high tax load same as a highly desirable view lot attracts a higher tax load. Fair is fair eh?
In the case of a company with a patent portfolio of say 10,000 patents this might generate $50,000,000 in taxes.
I can see little reason why a company such as Microsoft for instance should ask the USA government through its patent system to create intellectual property which it might seek to create a monopoly out of, while at the same time they should expect to not have to pay a tax on this newly created property!
If $50,000,000 in taxes is too low, then the tax rates can be adjusted.
I would think it would not take long at all for companies to start looking through their patents and figuring out which ones they really want and which ones they don't want.
Then, if they turn them in this would clearly indicate that perhaps the patents question should not hae been issued in the first place.
Another idea is that I'd like to see the individual states allowed to levy a state level tax. Clearly the property in question (while virtual) is created by federal government legislation. However, the companies in question have offices in various physical locations and it would seem to make sense that the states should have some opportunity to cash in on this new revenue source.
Now... I don't want anyone trying to tax my moon property until I have representation!
You made the same conclusion I did and I'm probably older than you.
As I see it the short of it is there is little reason for an uraban population to use cars.
Without cars, the USA might start to look more like India.
Instead of 6 lanes of cars in lock-grid traffic - perhaps 6 lanes of rickshaws? or bicycles? Maybe we could have 60 lanes of bicylces... and healthier people?
long before the ideas I just posted come to pass... we'll be building nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium already mined to power the nuclear industry for between 6,000 and 60,000 years.
The energy for ruminants like cows ( 4 stomaches) comes from micro-organisms that digest the complex sugar polymers in herbacious plant material.
Humans cannot digest this stuff. Cows can.
Fungii can digest pretty much everything. I'm talking about the whole kingdom here... the 5th kingdom and I personally think they got it wrong because its the 1st kingdom. IE. Fungii (the 5th kingdom) had to be on earth as life evolved. Without fungii, the earth would be full of garbage.
Your question: Can we make ethanol from other than grain? Ans: yes. We can do it from cellulose using fungii like T. reeshii. But T. Reeshii is a cellulose digester and makes our Stone washed blue jeans. There is some piddling going on in the genome. IE genetic modification.
My short answer? I do not see a solution other than undertaking a massive constuction project for nuclear power plants and in the alternative, the vast majority park their cars and take public transportation (ie - the bus).
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. As I incorrectly pointed out in the prior post - this is 10 million tonnes of dry biomass per day (I had a brain fart which no one picked up on and wrote 40 tonnes).
It was nicely pointed out and correctly I might add that if we were to produce the amount of ethanol required to offset the oil being burned, then we would need more than the world's production of grain.
I did a google search on "world grain production" and was impressed with the increases since the 1960's.
Since I grew up on a grain farm I have a gut feel for this. The increased production came from dwarf grains (more grain, less stalk), irrigation and fertilizer. At this point much of the north amercian farmland has been badly raped of its nutrients. As I write this a major part of the North American fertilizer industry is shut down because of a shortage of Methane. They use methane to create anhydrous ammonia.
The dwarf grains and genetic manipulation lead to mono culture which is questionable sustainable.
The use of methane to create nitrogen fertilizers is past peak by over 5 years in North America. Its a big problem.
The short of it is that there is no way on earth we can double our grain production. We can however produce Ethanol from other than grain.
Cellulose to ethanol is a possibility with fungii like Trichoderma reeshii. But plants also contain pentosans and lignins. T. reeshii likes cellulose.
Personally I think a fungus with more potential is in the Pleurotis genus.
But that is just my guess.
The short of it is that we have a big problem - do we want to eat (grain) or do we want to drive cars.
I hope the cars lose.
As I pointed out before.... the USA would have to convert more than the whole world's supply of grain into ethanol to keep its fleet of car toys on the road.
Slashdot Mirror
You better go check the BHP statistical review of world energy production. North American natural gas supplies peaked in Jan 2001 just as I stated. It is possible we could see a new peak of course. One of them has to be the last peak and I expect 2001 is the last one.
We've lost a huge amount of the North American fertilizer industry since then. Its more or less permenantly shut down. Then we had Calpine corporation planning on so many co-gens they would have burned up most of the North American gas supply all by themselves. They almost went bankrupt with this hair brained idea.
They are still in chapter 11 - so I guess technically they did go bankrupt - but may come out of it.
Currently gas supplies are looking ok. If we have a cold winter next year there will be all hell to pay and the industrial use of Gas in the North East will need to be greatly curtailed to leave supplies sufficent for heating. This senerio almost happened a couple years ago.
Even today - the draw down of gas reserves is great enough to be a consern and if March is very cold there could be a problem.
So, you need to check your fact because they are not up to date.
Global warming would be good for the planet. The Medieval optimum as noted from the history books illustrates this. However the amount of warming won't make much difference to the heating bills. Insulation is still a lot cheaper than trying to heat up the outdoors.
We only need to go back as far as the eocene for instance to find when the planet for millions of years was warmer than now. A good place to check is http://www.scotese.com./ During the eocene the planet was both warmer and wetter. A really important issue is to note where the planet was warmer and wetter.
The tropics and subtropics won't warm up much. They are already warm. Water vapour levels can be up around 80,000 ppm (remember CO2 is at about 370) and at these levels the water vapour traps most of the incident solar energy that can be trapped. As we get to higher latitudes we lose H2O because as the temperature drops the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere plumets. When we get down to freezing, we have effectively lost most of the H2O. IE, Antarctica is the dryest continent on the planet even though its covered with snow and the reason is because its so cold. The dryness allows the incident solar energy to escape. So the colder the planet gets the more energy leaky it gets.
If anyone wonders - could the planet flip into a deep freeze and totally freeze up as it loses all of its H2O blanket? The answer is yes. There is very strong evidence this happened several times during the precambrian. Check the Stuartian tillites for instance which were deposited as part of the Flinders ranges in Australia. At the time of these glacial deposts, Australia was north of the equator and quite close to the equator. The theory is that because the planet was totally frozen over, CO2 released by processes such as volcanoes could not be absorbed and eventually built up into levels measured at 1000's of parts per million. At these levels it's green house capabilities were able to make the difference and eventually tip the planet out of the frozen state at the equator at which point as the ice melted water vapour was able to accumulate which added to the effect and Boom - planet earth flipped from a totally frozen state to a warm balmy state about 10C warmer than now... where it stayed for millions of years. Solar energy back then was not as great as today and this would explain why the earth went through several cycles of deep freezing. Also one would expect the orbit of the planet to be somewhat larger than today because there is some debris in space which should apply a little orbital friction. I've not come across how much orbital decay one would expect over the last billions of years.
The CO2 mind you was not able to stay in the atmosphere at these levels. It ended up forming carbonate rich cap rocks which overlay the tilites and are massively thick and found all over the planet.
The best we can hope for if we do have global warming is that high latitudes might warm a little and this might postpone the next ice age. During the last one Toronto for instance was covered with over a mile of ice. I don't think those people would do so well if this re-occurs. I do however suspect many torontonians worry about global warming and do not worry about how to cope with a mile of ice.
If we had global warming to the tune of say 5 degrees, then Calgary might gain a climate more like Denver. Areas of the North West Terriories and Siberia might become more appealing and people might migrate. Agricultural crop bands would move northward to the poles. The tree lines would creap to higher latitudes.
In fact, 5 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. So its obvious the earth was quite a lot warmer back then and it certainly was not because of man made CO2 emissions.
With warming we would expect more moisture and probably a greater accumulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps because these regions would still remain well bel
Typo sorry. If you read the discussion portion of the IFR artical you'll see where I calculated the uranium on hand issue. In the artical its worng. I didn't change the artical because its a moot point (they say "more than") and rather than do an exact calculation... well... long before an IFR technology can chew into the spent fuel and depleated fraction, the artical can be corrected.
But I stand corrected and missed the typo before I submitted it. THanks. And thanks for adding the link.
Also... I might add by way of clarification... the issue of ethanol biofuels.
We hear on the media the term Corn Surplus. This is a euphamism for corn that we export that other people eat. It does not at present go to waste.
You might note that in poor countries we still have starvation. This starvation will increase as more of the planet's grain supply goes to feeding automobiles in rich countries and consequently poor people and especially children have nothing to eat.
Anyone truely conserned about the well being of the planet and its people should note this point. I personally take great exception to the term surplus grain. I would urge that perhaps the general public might want to stand up and become rather vocal and start demanding of these bio-fuel ethanol people how they can justify depriving poor counties and consequently starving children of food so that we can feed our gas guzzlers. This is far more productive in my opinion than pointing the finger at CO2 levels.
In fact, to point the finger at CO2 levels and proclaim ethanol is carbon neutral completely obscurs the point that surplus grain -> ethanol will deprive people in poor countries of their daily bread.
Perhaps what we need to do is start computing the number of children who need to starve to death in order to free up grain for ethanol production.
This doesn't begin to address how we can brew beer for $2.50 per keg. The number is easy to compute. A keg is about 59 liters @ 5% ethanol. 59*0.5 = 2.95 liters. A kg of ethanol has about 25 Mj and a kg of gasoline has about 45 Mj. So, if we have a budget of say $2.50 then if gas costs $1.50 per liter we can buy 2.50/1.50 = 1.67 liters. 1.67*45/25 = 3.0 which is the equivalent number of liters of ethanol we need to provide the same energy as gasoline.
Note: I did not address cellulose, lignans and pentosan -> to ethanol production. I did comment that T. reeshii might do it. This also can compete with food production because some of our favorite mushrooms can be grown on these types of substraits. I share the opinion of many mycologists that this area can be one of the most productive sources of food to feed the planet. However, I'm not too conserned because the cost of substraits is so small in comparison to the amount of gormet mushrooms that I, for instance, can grow that cars can't compete.
There is an issue however. The left over plant mass builds soil structure. Loam and high quality agricultural land contains a very high percentage of biological material that is in the process of decaying. If we harvest this material to produce ethanol rather than return it to the land, then we lose soil structure and turn our loam into basically heavy clays. Anyone who has any knowlege of farming can tell you that these types of impoverished soils are marginal at best. So we will further destroy our soils in our efforts to create ethanol from biomass. It is simply not correct to say that straw for instance is a waste.
Mind you, in some areas we do have a surplus and sugar cane baggase is an example. So, cellulose to ethanol has some future and we can actually probably get quite a lot of fuel from this source. Algae to ethanol and bio-diesel also has a great deal of potential. Perhaps we should look at innoculating large areas of presently dessert ocean with selected strains of algae and iron (because this is in part why these areas of the ocean don't support much life). Factory ships coul
You make a very good point and I agree 100% with you.
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
If we start building the IRF reactor system which was designed by Argonne Labs (and shut down by clinton's administration in 1994!) then we have over 60,000 years of uranium supply on hand already mined... this for a fleet of about 110 reactors. North American can produce 100% of its power from nuclear - but we need about 1200 reactors to do it. We havn't started to build any. Any new reactors are years away.
Then we have the biofuels people. If we take ethanol for instance, it can be produced from pretty much any plant material. Plants are sugar polymers for the most part. We can break these polymers down. This is what fungus do and this is what yeast does... its just yeast needs to start wtih pretty simple sugars whereas a fungus like Trichoderma reeshii can break down celulose and this is why its used to make stone washed bluejeans. How effective T. reeshii will be in celulose to ethanol production is open and then we have that about 50% of plant material is not cellulose but instead is ligins and pentosans - which fungus like Pleurotus and Lentinula spp (and many other species can digest). Whether they will produce alcohol is an open question.
Ethanol from grain is viable. To do this cost effectively is equaivalent to brewing beer at $2.50 per keg. To produce all the liquid fuel North America needs we would need to consume more than the worlds production of grains. Please note: One tonne of dry plant biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil and this is if we can convert it for free.
So, I'm not particularly worried about CO2 levels. CO2 is a fertilizer and encourages plant growth. I am however quite worried about fuel supplies in the not too distant future and I think we are already starting to see supply constraints.
People should start by doing what they can... like insulate their houses for instance. Instead people run around and point their fingers at CO2 levels (and understand practically nothing about it). Heating houses creates CO2 - so why won't they do something that they can do and save themselves money in the mean time? Are they bound and determined to freeze in the dark?
My father who has now passed on is an example. He refused to properly insulate his house. When I grew up and it was 40 below outside there was frost on the walls of the bedroom. He put in an oil furnace about this time and was burning a tank up every 3 weeks. He'd been told oil was cheap and insulation was expensive I guess. I was pretty little but still old enough to remember the 1 1/2" of rock wool he was putting in the walls and I asked him why he didn't fill the whole wall up? He said it was not "cost effective". That xmas my mother and father were looking at their oil bills wondering how they were going to heat their house.
At this point, that house is going through 18 cords of wood per year. It is still not insulated.
A similar size eco-designed house is using 3/4 of a cord per year.
This is what insulation and good design can do. It doesn't cost much extra to build it right in the first place. For instance, R50 fiberglass in the walls will cost about $1 buk per square foot during the construction phase. After the house is finished you need to tear walls down.
If houses in North America were properly insulated they would be much cheaper to heat and much more comfortable to live in. So why won't people do it? It will greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
What really worries me is what the next generation is going to do. Gas hit $17 bux on the Henry Hub a little over a year ago. Next year it might hit $20 bux. While we have a short reprieve, I am personally close enough to the Oil and Gas business t
Thankyou!
Finally someone who checks some facts and does some math.
Bull. The CO2 levels in comparison to the most important green house gas is so minor its like comparing toilet paper to a tree stump.
DO some numbers ok! try comparing 20,000 ppm (H2O @2%) to the total estimated CO2 levels which are now abotu 370 and were estimated (rightly or wrongly) to be about 280 at the dawn of the industrial age. A really good excerize is to use a caliper to show the ratios.
Note that over much of the planet, H2O levels are considerably higher than 20,000 ppm. Next - we have no way currently to tell whether H2O is rizing, decling or staying the same. Water Vapour fluxuates alot. We can have anywhere from practically 1% to over 4% and we certainly cannot measure it within even 1000 ppm.
IE - it swamps CO2 by manyorders of magnitude.
Next, while you are correct that CO2 levels are increasing and that billions of tons are added to the atmosphere, you do not even consider the size of the carbon cycle and whether this will have any significant or cumulative effect.
CO2 originates from several sources including volcanic action and the breakdown of organic matter usually by fungus. It is well documented that plant growth is accelerated by CO2. Ie. It is a fertilizer and it is not harming the planet. The point is that if the growth of plants is accelerated then some of that CO2 ends up trapped for a while in the biomass. But eventually that biomass dies and the CO2 is recycled. So it is clear that the size of the carbon cycle will increase - but we really don't have a good handle by how much. We certainly do know the biomass can handle CO2 levels many times greater than now and the planet can stay at these greatly increased CO2 levels for millions of years. The planets temperature can also go up and down into and out of ice ages with CO2 levels as much as 13x greater than now. The Ordovician is an example and the ice age which occured back can be correlated to the Taconic Orogeny. It does not seem to correlate with CO2 levels.
May I suggest rather than rationalizing, do some research and get some facts.
I tried on another post to enter brackets and gave up. How are they entered?
This reminds me of an argument I had with a stats prof (PhD) who claimed that a 4 byte floating point number in a computer could clearly carry more than 2^32 values. He went so far as to tell me what the range of the exponent was.
No - I was not one of his students, I worked with him.
I gave up. If he wants to believe in virtual bits then let him! He also didn't seem to know how I could stuff floats into an integer array and later pull them back out as floats and all this without losing any precision. You see, ints don't have a decimal right?
Your point is well taken. There are a lot of experts who really don't know all that much.
--------------
I also proofed a PhD thesis in mathematical geology where the author assumed at the outset that the rate of erosion would be porportional to the height of the mountains. Next he determined the amount of sediment buildup would be porportional to the rate of erosion. Later he did an integration and concluded that the rate of mountain building was exponential (this was his thesis!). Of course, he missed the fact that the definition of exp() is a function that grows at a rate porportional to its size... and I leave out many details.
The PhD was awarded. The person in question was a very good geologist mind you and had a spectacular career and has now passed away. I prefer not to name names.
But this does illustrate that there is a great deal of misunderstandings on the part of experts.
Ad hominem.
I don't think his wife is Random and I doubt she thinks she is random either. What he wrote is correct. Furthermore his wife is an oceanographer, at least according to him. Are you going to question his knowledge of this too?
Damn that is a funny comment!
Yup. Yet another trolling moderator on the loose. Is this open fly season?
What is this... they can't address the issue so they attack the poster? Ad hominem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument.
The issue is how they can know the ocean bottom is actually warming? Where did tehy get their benchmark data from and if they have good data then how is this new data from the sub surprising?
Yup. Yet another trolling moderator on the loose. Is this open fly season?
While I happen to know Compact Fluorescents Lamps are not rated over 50,000 hours, I do get over 50,000 hours.
The trick is to not turn them on and off.
In my office I let them burn 24x7. Here is why... I have 3x13watts. That is 39 watts total. 39*24 = 936 watt hours per day which costs me under 5 cents. This is $1.50 per month.
I need the lights on when I am in the office and I'm in and out at least 12 hours a day. So the max I could save might be 8-12 hours when I'm not in but when I'm not in is not all that predicatable.
Next, since I live in Canada I'm in a heating area and this house has inadequate insulation. The waste energy from the bulbs helps offset some of the gas bill.
This offset is greater than 50% in fact. So I would save maybe 25 cents per month by turning the bulbs on and off.
So... I am energy inefficient ( a little ) and splurge the light. I offset this by not using a screen saver on my computers because screen savers don't save screens - they drive the electronics at probably pretty close to full tilt and wear out the screens. Instead my screens go blank after 5 mins. I get similar life on my screens... over 50,000 hours. As for my computers - well - they are probably getting close to or over 100,000 hours and I don't turn them off ether. But then I don't use silly hot processors like the P4's either.
My point... an incandecent will get maybe 1000 hours. I'm getting more than 50 times this on the CFL's.
If each incandenct costs $1 buk then it would cost me in capital about $50 bux for a single incandecent bulb over 50,000 hours and then I need to consider the energy use.
Capital costs for 3 incandecents is going to run $150 over 5 years and 50,000 hours. However they can be flipped on and off without reducing life so maybe its only $100 bux total costs. (and maybe more too since my incandences never seem to last 1000 hours!)
With the CFLs over 5 years = 60 months so the electricty cost is $1.50 per month for the 3 bulbs in my office for a total (not discounted) cost of $90 bux. Energy costs for 3x40 watt (new high efficiency) would be expected to be 3x greater than the CFL's which is about $270 bux.
Since the CFL's cost me under $30 bux to buy - it looks to me they are about 1/3 the cost or less.
To be very honest a nickle a day is a bit under the radar so I didn't do the calcs in a great deal of detail.
I wouldn't be so fast to say that one idjot tossing a battery and some oil in the bush nullifies it all.
There are several species of fungus that can happily digest petroleum spills. Some of these are quite common and even good to eat. As for the batteries, the H2SO4 will be dealt with quite rapidly. In fact much of the soils in at least the Western part of North America are sulphur poor. So a little carbonate gets weathered away by the battery acid. It'll get weathered away by carbonic acid in rainwater anyways.
The lead mind you might be an issue. If we have a lot of batteries tossed into a small amount of bush then the lead might be a problem. However in this case we might actually have a small lead mine and someone can go pick up the batteries for salvage.
I've observed batteries tossed in the bush and from what I could see the bush really didn't mind very much . This doesn't mean I'm in favour of tossing batteries in the bush, or waste oil either for that matter. Its just that I'm not terribly alarmed about it.
Knee jerk reaction has just been proven again.
Gawd the moderation around here stinks. But then I guess I'm partly to blame because I often don't meta-moderate and waste moderator points more often than not.
------------
So the moderator calls these comments a troll however doesn't address the comparative nature of the statments in the story. If they were already able to measure in a reliable fashion the temperatures of the region in question, then they probably didn't need the new measurements from the sub to determine if there is a change. IE, they would typically already know what is going on so data from the new sub would not be unexpected (but could still be more complete and nice to have).
If they DO need the measurements from the sub then they cannot have reliable data from before and hense cannot really determine if we have change.
I stand by my former comment that it is fine to say the temperature measurements are unexpected, however to say the temperature measurements indicate a warming is really pushing it. Even if the measurements do indicate a warming, then for how long has this warming been going on? Is there really a good base line already known?
And again, if there is a baseline established then the data gathering before the sub should be good enough that the subs data should be expected... not unexpected.
Why do they think they have to toss in a comment on Global Warming?
Then...
Consider that the oceanic currents have cycle times measured in 1000's of years. Depending on where they are diving, if they are finding unexpected warming then this would mean that mankind would not be responsible for any presumed planetary warming... since the temperature of the water they are measuring was determined centuries ago.
However, closer examination of such a silly statment leaves one with a question... If they had to send this new fangled sub down to measure the temperature then what did they use before and if they didn't have anything to use before then did they really measure the temperature? If not - then one could say the temperature is unexpected but one could certainly not conclude it is warmer or colder since it hasn't been measured before.
Of course, I think the idea that Global Warming should be part of the story is kinda silly to begin with.
If I get modded down because of these observations then it just proves there is a huge knee jerk reaction going on by people who don't really think about things.
Example 5: Windows vs. OS/2
These are the ones that matter. MS won the desktop war by convincing manufacturers to bundle Windows with every PC. IE won the browser wars by being bundled with Windows, and therefore most PCs. Bundling the virtualization with Windows will be a major advantage for MS, but it's still no guarantee. They don't even own the server market like they do with desktops
Bull! IBM shot themselves in the foot so many times I am suprised they could still find feet to shoot.
I used OS/2 for years on a dual head set up. The 1st nightmare was configuring the dual heads. Finally a chap in Boca Raton was nice enough to tell me the magic - all was undocumented of course. It worked. The 8514 card and the Svga card actually worked as advertised (by IBM in their Red Books - which I bought)
But... when I switched from a DOS window it froze and blanked the screen. If I switched from an OS/2 session it just froze the screen. I think it was some perverse manager who figured that in order to encourage running OS/2 apps and discourage running DOS apps that they should pull this dirty little trick. As a developer - it just made my life difficult and meant that I couldn't tell my clients how great OS/2 really was... and why? Because it wasn't. How would anyone feel if the moment a window lost focus the OS blanked it? Hell - you don't need to look at your code buddy when you are running the app! What do you want a 2nd monitor for anyways? But in an OS/2 session they didn't need to blank anything.
Next - the single thread problem and the OS locking up. It was never fixed that I know of. I never did upgrade past Warp. I ended up buying NT4.0 much as I hated to do so - and it ran beautifully and ran the monitors properly too.
Then, a blessing was OS/2 apps! Microsoft did it right. I used Brief under NT4.0 - the OS/2 version. It ran BETTER in NT than it ever did on OS/2 and I didn't have to put up with Frozen screens.
Oh.. tech support! I bought and paid for tech support the whole time I had OS/2. I used it many more times than I wanted too. IBM made me wait on hold - and when the level #1 intake operators came on line they INSISTED on getting every hardware configuration detail and details of my CONFIG.SYS file.. and others. This was even if I already KNEW what the problem was and wanted to simply ask for a work around. This happened OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER.
I offered to write a program for IBM which would collect all this information and send it via modem to their tech support people. My GAWD but it was horrible having to give them the same damn information every damn time. How hard would it have been for a company like IBM to set up a damn database indexed for instance by my phone number and record the conf once? Nope!
I wrote letters to them and suggested setting up an app to scan the system for pertinant config and hardware information... so it could be xmitted via modem. I never heard back from them.
Well - I bought Warp. I replaced it with NT 4.0. I have never looked back.
IBM did it all by themselves. It was their own arrogance and incompetance which destroyed the product. Even the simplest issues could not be effectively dealt with.
In spite of the fact there is criminal legislation in place for copyright infringment, I expect the prosecutors will look the other way and declare it to be civil. This will just be another example of the double standard.
As a civil issue ( the only other legal avenue ), you can only hope to obtain justice through the courts. It will cost $1000's to get a judgment, perhaps $100,000's. There is no justice. All we have is persecution it would seem with the powerful pretty much doing whatever they like with impunity.
While its not fair, the question any prosecutor is going to ask is if spending the taxpayers money on this is a good idea. Of course, spending the taxpayers money prosecuting a person charged with a traffic incident is always considered a good idea because its cheap (usually) and meant to keep the sheep in line and paying the fines.
Am I a cynic?
If another meteor the size of the one from Arizona were to hit a city, which is twice as likely to happen than a terrorist strike, it'd be akin to a nuclear detonation. If something the size of Apophis should strike the earth, well, say goodbye to whatever county (or small state) it lands in.
If this puppy is aimed at the USA then I sure hope Canada sets up a system that requires passports and all sorts of red tape for anyone from the USA who wishes to visit our country!
Of course if any Americans think they might want to visit Russia, then I hope they get treated the same as Dimitris Sklyrov. Anyone who doesn't know what the USA did to him can ask google. The short of it is that he was thrown in jail for months and criminally charged because he exposed the pitifully bad security measures employed by Adobe in its eBook products.
It would be nice if was goes around comes around.
Patents are a form of intellectual property. As such they should attract a property tax. If you don't pay the tax you lose the property.
I'd suggest say $5000 per year per patent but I'm sure it could be adjusted depending on what kind of patent it might be. For instance a "software" patent might attract a high tax load same as a highly desirable view lot attracts a higher tax load. Fair is fair eh?
In the case of a company with a patent portfolio of say 10,000 patents this might generate $50,000,000 in taxes.
I can see little reason why a company such as Microsoft for instance should ask the USA government through its patent system to create intellectual property which it might seek to create a monopoly out of, while at the same time they should expect to not have to pay a tax on this newly created property!
If $50,000,000 in taxes is too low, then the tax rates can be adjusted.
I would think it would not take long at all for companies to start looking through their patents and figuring out which ones they really want and which ones they don't want.
Then, if they turn them in this would clearly indicate that perhaps the patents question should not hae been issued in the first place.
Another idea is that I'd like to see the individual states allowed to levy a state level tax. Clearly the property in question (while virtual) is created by federal government legislation. However, the companies in question have offices in various physical locations and it would seem to make sense that the states should have some opportunity to cash in on this new revenue source.
Now... I don't want anyone trying to tax my moon property until I have representation!
I agree with you 100%.
You made the same conclusion I did and I'm probably older than you.
As I see it the short of it is there is little reason for an uraban population to use cars.
Without cars, the USA might start to look more like India.
Instead of 6 lanes of cars in lock-grid traffic - perhaps 6 lanes of rickshaws? or bicycles? Maybe we could have 60 lanes of bicylces... and healthier people?
long before the ideas I just posted come to pass... we'll be building nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium already mined to power the nuclear industry for between 6,000 and 60,000 years.
So which future? I don't know. You tell me.
The energy for ruminants like cows ( 4 stomaches) comes from micro-organisms that digest the complex sugar polymers in herbacious plant material.
Humans cannot digest this stuff. Cows can.
Fungii can digest pretty much everything. I'm talking about the whole kingdom here... the 5th kingdom and I personally think they got it wrong because its the 1st kingdom. IE. Fungii (the 5th kingdom) had to be on earth as life evolved. Without fungii, the earth would be full of garbage.
Your question: Can we make ethanol from other than grain? Ans: yes. We can do it from cellulose using fungii like T. reeshii. But T. Reeshii is a cellulose digester and makes our Stone washed blue jeans. There is some piddling going on in the genome. IE genetic modification.
My short answer? I do not see a solution other than undertaking a massive constuction project for nuclear power plants and in the alternative, the vast majority park their cars and take public transportation (ie - the bus).
Yup. Thankyou.
Freeing America from oil via ethanol.
8 41462
t s_for_growth/nitrogen/anhydrous_ammonia.jsp
Read this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=219742&cid=17
One ton of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. As I incorrectly pointed out in the prior post - this is 10 million tonnes of dry biomass per day (I had a brain fart which no one picked up on and wrote 40 tonnes).
It was nicely pointed out and correctly I might add that if we were to produce the amount of ethanol required to offset the oil being burned, then we would need more than the world's production of grain.
I did a google search on "world grain production" and was impressed with the increases since the 1960's.
Since I grew up on a grain farm I have a gut feel for this. The increased production came from dwarf grains (more grain, less stalk), irrigation and fertilizer. At this point much of the north amercian farmland has been badly raped of its nutrients. As I write this a major part of the North American fertilizer industry is shut down because of a shortage of Methane. They use methane to create anhydrous ammonia.
Check here:
http://www.agrium.com/products_services/ingredien
The thing is the irrigation is not sustainable.
The dwarf grains and genetic manipulation lead to mono culture which is questionable sustainable.
The use of methane to create nitrogen fertilizers is past peak by over 5 years in North America. Its a big problem.
The short of it is that there is no way on earth we can double our grain production. We can however produce Ethanol from other than grain.
Cellulose to ethanol is a possibility with fungii like Trichoderma reeshii. But plants also contain pentosans and lignins. T. reeshii likes cellulose.
Personally I think a fungus with more potential is in the Pleurotis genus.
But that is just my guess.
The short of it is that we have a big problem - do we want to eat (grain) or do we want to drive cars.
I hope the cars lose.
As I pointed out before.... the USA would have to convert more than the whole world's supply of grain into ethanol to keep its fleet of car toys on the road.
You sure hit the nail on the head! TO bad you weren't modded up.