Wind Power

The recent blogging about the Gulf oil leak (both here, and around the web) reminded me of this great commercial for alternative energy.

Eating is Bad For the Environment

I was just patrolling TheGoogle for statistics on some official Bayblab-sanctioned research when I came across an interesting stat cited in a CNN article. As Rob recently pointed out in his comments to a previous post, industrial food production relies heavily on energy input from fossil fuels; this number kind of puts things in perspective: production of a 2kg box of cereal requires the equivalent 1.9L of gasoline. That's probably what one person would easily eat in a week, and according to my calculations it's equivalent to the gasoline needed to drive a 2008 Honda civic 33km or so on the highway.

On one hand, this doesn't seem like a lot - at least it's fairly insignificant compared to what the average North American puts into her car. The average commuter might reasonably burn 10 times as much gasoline than this in her car each week. On the other hand, when you think about how much heavier and therefore harder to move cars are than people, 33km is looking pretty good. It's clear that cars are making much better use of fossil fuels than humans are. So maybe we should stop "eating" fossil fuel energy and just feed it to our cars and other machines. That would make living difficult though, wouldn't it? And besides, aren't the machines just there to make life better/easier for us in the first place?

(Follow-up Bayblab bonus homework: With the manufacturing processes in use right now, how much ethanol fuel can you get out of the grain in a box of 2kg cereal? How far could you drive that 2008 Honda civic on this ethanol? How much additional fossil fuel input is needed to convert the cereal grain into ethanol? How far could you drive a Honda civic on that extra fossil fuel?)

All Hail Venter, Emperor of Planet Earth!

Caesar Craig Venter tells us how DNA can solve all the world's problems, real or perceived: infectious disease, hunger, poverty, natural disasters, fuel shortage, global warming, etc, etc. in this lecture. It's not as bad as I expected - he certainly does a great job selling biology to the wider audience. The world could probably use an all-powerful benevolent dictator at the helm right now; Venter would probably be a good choice.

A lot of the ideas are grandiose but doable, although I'd like to hear more about how he thinks synthetic organisms can possibly replace fossil fuels to support the energy demands of industrialized civilization. I don't buy it. I'd love to see the world's oil-based economy converted to a bio-economy, but as long as there's black gold spewing out of the ground I don't see it happening. And when the oil does run out, I don't see how any biological energy production system can support civilization as we currently know it. Remember the Roman Empire? That was probably the last serious bio-economy of human history. How much better can we do?

Anyway have a watch and see if you can come up with better ideas for saving civilization.



(HTs: Palazzo, Hsien-Hsien)

Plasma Gasification

According to the excellent news source for celebrity gossip, the metro (ottawa edition), Ottawa (the capital city of Canada), is considering a waste-to-energy technology to deal with the MHW (municiple household waste). The technology sounds too good to be true, basically incinerate MHW, (emitting no pollutants into the atmosphere) use the energy produced to make some electricity to run the plant and sell some back to the grid. Check out this article that explains how theoretically this should work and how it's going to save us all. I have yet to find any one in operation in the world and many examples of seriously problematic similar schemes. Some websites point to westinghouse as a leader in this as they have some pretty serious plasma torches already in successful operation in industry, however their website says only "it is widely hoped plasma gasification can be practically applied." Here is a company selling a plasma gasification system that lays out the issue pretty well, and at the end starts talking about 'what ifs' such as "Lets say, however, that the gasification plant doesn't work at all." That doesn't sound like a proven technology that should be employed on a large scale to solve a large problem.
I would love to hear something from someone who knows more about this than me but where does the garbage go then? Assuming conversation of matter, if there are no emissions into the atmosphere and this system gets rid of the mass that used to be garbage where does it go? Don't get me wrong I have high hopes for tech to solve some environmental problems, I just hope that city council has an independent review of this whole idea.