It should be clear that trusting an oil man whose company went belly up and who ain't exactly the brightest candle in the cake to set energy policy is not exactly the smartest thing to do. Switchgrass? Corn? What are you saying, Junior?
Now, I tend to trust what the good folks at Science Magazine have to say - and they say: "Studies Deem Biofuels a Greenhouse Threat"
I might could buy that issue, but a summary is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html?_r=1&or...
There is one exception - I do hate to harp on a single point, but this "revolution" is at least 30 years old - yours truly had never owned anything that was not purely ethanol powered until I moved to the US, and even now my family's cars are flex fuel. Think of that next time you have a brain fart that tells you that we need to protect American farmers.
Here is a gem, in my eyes:
"Dr. Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which take relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel. He added that governments should quickly turn their attention to developing biofuels that did not require cropping, such as those from agricultural waste products."
cellulosic ethanol production
The company's proprietary technology -- known as the K2 system -- eliminates the use of enzymes, which have been an expensive component of traditional cellulosic ethanol production, and transforms otherwise useless products such as wood chips, agricultural wastes, grasses, and cornstalks as well as hog manure, municipal garbage, sawdust and paper pulp into ethanol through a thermo-chemical conversion process.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47371
Or maybe we all need to get on the bus.
Biofuel production is quite
Biofuel production is quite simple really:
Slash & burn dense (read soaks up lots of carbon) rainforest to produce palm oil (or any other crop-based fuel)
=Bad
Produce ethanol from corn (that would otherwise be used as food producing land)
=Bad
Produce biodiesel from restaurant and food processing waste
=Good
Produce cellulosic ethanol from agricultural waste
=Good
Produce biofuels from algae grown in reactors in the desert, fed with scrubbed power plant emissions
=Awesome
Hmmm....
The taiga forest and algae spreads (in the ocean) soak up magnitudes higher amount of CO2 than all the rain forests combined... and then produce over 90% of the oxygen we breathe... j/s.
That is very true, but these
That is very true, but these aren't areas we've considered "deforesting" for biofuel production.
rainforest > no rainforest
Re: rainforest > no rainforest
How so? (In terms of using stretches to produce crops used for human consumption).
What I'm getting at here is nothing, absolutely nothing, is "quite simple really" when it comes to finding solutions to global problems.
but really? why's rainforest
but really? why's rainforest good? just sayin.. (The whole "species diversity" thing never has been explained to me with any convincing argument for it's importance. In 10 years when drugs can be created in pharm labs custom tailored to your genes and specific ailment, who cares about some kind of bean that does half the job if you squish it the right way?)
Biodiversity is the only
Biodiversity is the only thing the rain forest has going for it in my mind (I'm talking about the S. American one... the other ones are gross and full of rebels who like to cut your arms off or full of tigers who like to bite your arms off... the Congo and Burma, respectively).
Still though, biodiversity is a stretch when you talk about one specific type of frog that lives on one particular type of plant that only grows in one particular hectare of rain forest. Add to that, the only reason the particular frog is a unique species is because it has a purple ass instead of a green one... yada, yada, blah, blah.
All that and the rain forest on it's best days is carbon neutral, and on it's worst is a carbon producer.
actually
biodiversity=good reason
oxygen=bad reason
carbon sink=THE FUCKING REASON WHY YOU SHOULD CARE.
Ok, sorry to yell. The misconception about the forest producing oxygen is wrong--a cornfield the size of the Amazon produces as much oxygen as the rainforest (or algae, etc).
HOWEVER, the large forests around the world (Amazon, taiga forests, etc) are the biggest carbon sinks on the planet. Cut down all the trees, lose the carbon sink, you've got a problem.
And as far as biodiversity goes, does it have to be for your own good? You know that people live there who have lived there for thousands of years living off the forest, not overharvesting anything, etc and we take it all from them to produce drugs, eliminate their supply of said plant, and they receive nothing in return. Even things like thatch--you can't get thatch in many parts of the Amazon anymore (in more populated areas). And yes, the Amazon is the most diverse region in the world. The most plant species can be found per hectare there, over 10 million insects live in the Amazon, etc etc. It's amazing.
Anyways, before you make statements about what a rain forest, or any forest, or any area on the planet, has going for it--visit it. Have any of you been to the Amazon? hmm hmm? Oh, wait, no, you haven't.
/end of rant
algae blooms that die and
algae blooms that die and take their carbon to the bottom of the ocean are pretty good at that too. So is piping CO2 into the gigantic empty places in the earth's crust after we pump out all the oil and natural gas.
Are there numbers or facts on how great of a carbon sink the rainforest actually is? How many days worth of [every body in America driving to work]'s worth of carbon does it sequester?
(As for going there. I do not wish to be killed by things in the rain forest not limited to Tsetse flies, Cassowaries, or Ibans. But oh wait, i know a handful of people on this website that have been to the rain forest recently. And I know I have, I'm just not done scanning the pictures because I went before I had a digital camera.)
Jes is out of retirement.
How do you know I haven't been to a rain forest? I have, and they're hot... and when you're hot, you sweat... and too much sweat makes your flesh rot in funny (funny bad) places. And the bugs, don't get me started on the damn bugs. Add lizards and other things that crawl through the damn window into your bed at night to that list. The mangoes were nice though, and due to a trade agreement with the US, I will (probably) get eat them again, granted we (the US) had to sell India nuclear technology to get the mangoes, but in my mind... it was GOOD trade. The end (on that).
For more info on the Indian Mangos and recent developments in receiving them on US soil:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a3b6ea...
For more information on how you too can sleep with the geckos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa#Flora_and_fauna
food for thought
no one has made artificial honey. ALL honey you've ever tasted has come from bees.
In 10 years when drugs can be created in pharm labs custom tailored to your genes and specific ailment...
I believe this sentiment is overly-optimistic.
Honey is bee vomit.
Honey is bee vomit.
i do consider myself an
i do consider myself an optimist.
Blinded by science
Natural product chemists and phytochemists recognize that plant species contain a bewildering diversity of secondary metabolites. Individual plant species often contain over 1,000 unique chemical entities (or the enzymatic machinery needed to produce compounds upon the proper stimulus). One of the most compelling explanations for this vast array of chemical diversity, which resides within the biological diversity of tropical plant species, is the science of chemical ecology. Plants living in tropical forest habitats have had to develop and survive under intense competition for resources and nutrients. They have also had to develop an extraordinary array of defenses, most of them chemical, to protect themselves from viral diseases, fungal pathogens, insects and mammalian predators. The biodiversity of tropical forest plant species, coupled with the chemical diversity found within each plant, leads one to the conclusion that tropical plants are perhaps the most valuable source of new bioactive chemical entities.
http://www.netsci.org/Science/Special/feature11.html
It is not what you know that counts
It is what you don't know that is going to catch you with your pants around your ankles.
I don't know about all that,
I don't know about all that, but netsci.org needs to contract out with a graphic designer.
Edit - ...and a webmaster.
i think one of the reasons people care about rainforest
is that even if the rainforest can't justify its existence to you, either through species diversity, useful products, habitat for forest peoples, carbon sink, etc., it still serves as a sanity check for human activity.
it's the same thing with extinction of a species, or destruction of the polar ice caps: "we as humans must be doing something pretty fucked up to have gotten this far"
just playing devils advocate
just playing devils advocate here:
1. species come and go all the time. Sure, we have some effect on it, but so do other things. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event : "Over 99% of species that ever lived are now extinct, but extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because they are more plentiful and cover a longer time span than fossils of land organisms."
2. climates change over time too. ice caps melt and re form. Heck, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Arctic "About 55 million years ago it is thought that parts of the Arctic supported subtropical ecosystems (Serreze and Barry 2005) and that Arctic sea-surface temperatures rose to about 23 °C (73 °F) during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum" Scientist say the earth is ~4.5 billion years ago so if that happend with any regularity, it's been a balmy 73 °F at the north pole almost 100 times already in the history of the earth.
I think the key to the numbers
in 1 and 2 is the time scale. If we make a dent on polar ice caps or in species diversity in a couple of centuries the assumption of extinction and environmental change being natural phenomena (and therefore not necessarily cause for alarm) seems to lose its legs. That kind of argument is a bit like saying "I've had syphilis for 3 years and I haven't gone crazy, so that shit don't happen." Sometimes timing and the time scale make a difference.
Let's face it...
We're way better at destroying stuff (and making stuff) than 'mother nature' ever will be.
I think we deserve a cake.
mother nature wins at both
mother nature wins at both destruction and creation. Major volcanic eruptions (for example) are frequently compared to some # of nuclear warheads. See honey example.
we do deserve some cake, in any case.
:)
Did mother nature make lasers? Nope. Cake wins.
*ahem*
Natural lasing in the 10um bands of CO2 in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus was observed by Johnson et al. (1976)
Scientists Discover First Natural Laser in Space
:(
Cake loses.
Speaking of which, can anyone find a picture of a birthday cake online that has laser pointers instead of candles?
.
CK gets points for knowing to put a space between the temperature and the degree symbol
those data go both ways
taking those past trends in to account, it would be troubling to see a sudden acceleration in rate of extinction or increase in temperatures not on par with typical fluctuations (with of course that whole debate playing out right now)
exactly :) All I ask is
exactly :)
All I ask is that people remember that there is a debate playing out right now and that the facts can be used to support both sides of the story. Those of you so moved by Al's documentary should watch the BBC's one and vice versa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle