Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
On Friday 19 January 2007 13:30, Jed Rothwell wrote: The lead story in today's Yomiuri newspaper (in Japanese) says that Bush will announce new steps to address global warming in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 23. He will emphasize ethanol and other alternative fuels. Sigh . . . Well, at least there has been some anti-ethanol press lately. I saw articles in Sci. Am., Consumer Reports, and the Atlanta Journal calling into question the use of ethanol. One of them reported a horrifying statistic: filling up a 25 gallon tank with ethanol fuel uses up as much potential nutrition from corn as a human being consumes in a year. That seems over the top but . . . Yikes, it is as bad as that. Ethanol has 89 MJ/gallon. 25 gallons * 89 MJ = 2,225 MJ. That converts to 531,788 kilocalories. Divide by 2,000 recommended daily allowance and you get 266 days. (I am ignoring fossil fuel and electric power input, which are ~1.7 times the total energy output of the ethanol.) Perhaps the ethanol factories extract more energy per kilogram of corn that human digestion does, but I doubt it. - Jed I wonder about the efficiency of digestion systems. Seems some perform better than others. Now a roughI mean really rough measure of this efficiency would probably be to look at the byproducts of the human digestion. No I do not mean portraits of certain prominent figures in the grand old (offal...I mean awful) party. How much the _ _ _ _ smells would be a measure of the volatility of it. This in itself is more than: good _ _ _ _ stinks like _ _ _ should!. Pure physics! say that this aroma will contain methane, ammonia, and other gasses that retain some chemical energy capable of extraction. Every wastewater treatment plant worthy of calling itself that will have a 'digester' on the premises somewhere. Here is where the solids after treatment go to be fermented for methane and other aliphatics and aromatics, mostly flammable, are generated for energy recovery. In the wild, many critters like dung beatles make a living from eating _ _ _ _. Now this may be humerous for some, but try to stay focused. More focused than the writer who is ROTFLthis writer. Who can now qualify as a republican speechwriter cuz I can be a redneck and know my _ _ _ _. On the other hand, chemical processes can be quite efficient inasmuch as all reactant products can be retained and utilized. Much more than common animal processes. In truth much of this natural inefficiency is beneficial to nature as a means of spreading the wealth. Standing Bear...or trying to
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
On Friday 19 January 2007 14:53, Jed Rothwell wrote: leaking pen wrote: Well, besides the issues that have been shown with too much corn syrup . . . As I said, one third of the people who will do not get enough to eat. Too much corn syrup would be far better than starvation. shipping foods grown here overseas not really all the econmocal. Most US food is shipped overseas. I fail to see how it uses more fossil fuels than fuels it produces, please share. See: Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Revised Edition. 1996: University Press of Colorado, chapter 19. (Or Google Pimentel) And it will also help push new techniques and higher efficiency growing, so that will help. Not good. High-efficiency agriculture in the US means the rape and permanent destruction of the land. See Pimentel, and chapter 16 of my book. Essentially, U.S. corn production is a form of strip-mining, where we destroy the topsoil and the water table. If we keep doing it for a few hundred more years Iowa will look like present-day Iraq. The arid US Great Plains are already in environmental peril. See: http://www.gprc.org/index.htm As I said in my book, agriculture is the most destructive industry on earth and the sooner we get rid of it the better. We need to grow food indoors. For one thing, this would use up thousands of times less space, and with recycled water and nutrients from sewage, that would consume no land or water. We need to get human beings out of the ecosystem loop. Nature should only have to support wild animals, not people or domesticated animals. Fishing and growing meat in live animals is also backwards, dangerous, cruel and grossly inefficient. This kind of primitive technology is long overdue for replacement, like the internal combustion engine. Fortunately, the people at the New Harvest Research Organization report progress in replacing meat: http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php - Jed Yer right Jed, and a fellow redneck told ya that! Hey there is nothing wrong with bein a redneck. Some of our best citizens are rednecks. I live in the heart of seed corn country and my equally redneck wife and I know first hand what happens when good land is ruined by contract. Here is where good farmers are offered a contract by a seed corn company to grow their 'intellectual property' year after dreary year. When the soil bank was effective, fencerows were allowed to grow. With the demise of it or the use of it, fencerows are destroyed. Even roads are encroached on. The usual excuse is that the fifty ton tractor with the eighty food plow array needs 'room to turn around'. Soil under corn cultivation year after year changes color. It may start out a deep rich brown or even black in mucklands, but it gradually lightens to a dull whitish tan with a high sand content. Also a high chemical fertilizer and chemical pesticide and herbicide content. It is not for nothing that sprays are advertised as having 'low atrazine carryover and now you know I live what I am talking about. I have seen the signs, in spanish only, warning the illegal immigrants that deadly danger muy peligro..muerte lurks in the fields where they 'trabajo'. The signs there in english only say: no trespassing or we will prosecute! We have seen the farmhouses that sit empty as an unseen force vacates the countryside of all human life except for its lowest forms. The blank windows that used to frame young farm children now stare out at a wavy green desert of 'intellectual property' watered by expensive aluminum monsters that deliver water laden with poisons and biologically engineered and equally proprietary chemical fertilizers that water crops and roadways alike. It is against the law to spray over roads here in Michigan, but the law is ignored by both law giver and breaker with equal equanimity perhaps in the interest in keeping out the prying eyes of a perhaps 'overeducated' public. A way to clean up this mess may be exceedingly simple. A simple law that prohibited and criminalized the ownership of farmland in America by corporations and other foreigners. Another law that criminalized the ownership of more than a certain amount of land by one individual or partnership of individuals however tenuousely related would break down the large holdings. A third law that addressed the inhumane conditions of animal husbandry existant in our cattle and hog 'factories' and felonized this would go a long way toward concentrated waste source abatement. A fourth law that felonized the feeding of antibiotics to farm animals who were not sick, or to bioengineered new species with little or no disease resistance (germ farms), or to dairy cattle fed hormones to increase milk production at the price of lower immune systems.would start to keep the specter of antibiotic resistance among pathogens a little more at bay. And a fifth law that would felonize
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
Thanks! Excellent and informative rant! I had a question. Standing Bear wrote: The ribs are almost as flat as a sheet of paper. I know of no pig or cow that has flat rib bones that have edges sharp enough to cut a dinner roll and a thickness no more than three millimeters and a width of twenty five millimeters. So, what creature has ribs like that? Any idea? Sheep? Horse? Dog? Cat? Farmworker? (er, ET, maybe?) Our cat's ribs are not an inch wide. My ribs feel like they're probably more rounded than you describe and thicker than 3 mm (but they're inside where I can't get at them easily). I haven't got a sheep or dog here to check, but in any case it doesn't really sound like either of those. There's no large scale CAFO-type horse farming in the U.S. AFAIK so horsemeat would tend to be more expensive than the cow meat, which should keep it out of fast food places. Sheep tends to be more expensive than cow also, for that matter. I'm at a loss. I can't guess.
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
since part of the process of making ethanol is making corn syrup, which converts a lot of the partially digested starches to sugars, yes, actually, the whole process is likely more effecient to burn then to eat. also, corn is already in just about everything we eat. we grow more corn than we and our livestock can eat. especially the high yeild gm corn that isnt allowed to be sold to people at the moment. seriously, its not a cureall, but why be down on ethanol? (especially with the photosynthetic yeast programs that will massively drop the costs. ) On 1/19/07, Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The lead story in today's Yomiuri newspaper (in Japanese) says that Bush will announce new steps to address global warming in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 23. He will emphasize ethanol and other alternative fuels. Sigh . . . Well, at least there has been some anti-ethanol press lately. I saw articles in Sci. Am., Consumer Reports, and the Atlanta Journal calling into question the use of ethanol. One of them reported a horrifying statistic: filling up a 25 gallon tank with ethanol fuel uses up as much potential nutrition from corn as a human being consumes in a year. That seems over the top but . . . Yikes, it is as bad as that. Ethanol has 89 MJ/gallon. 25 gallons * 89 MJ = 2,225 MJ. That converts to 531,788 kilocalories. Divide by 2,000 recommended daily allowance and you get 266 days. (I am ignoring fossil fuel and electric power input, which are ~1.7 times the total energy output of the ethanol.) Perhaps the ethanol factories extract more energy per kilogram of corn that human digestion does, but I doubt it. - Jed -- That which yields isn't always weak.
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
leaking pen wrote: since part of the process of making ethanol is making corn syrup, which converts a lot of the partially digested starches to sugars, yes, actually, the whole process is likely more effecient to burn then to eat. Well, that's good. . . . also, corn is already in just about everything we eat. we grow more corn than we and our livestock can eat. Who's we? Two billion people in the world are malnourished or starving. They can digest corn syrup, by the way. seriously, its not a cureall, but why be down on ethanol? I am down on ethanol because because it takes food out of people's mouths, because it consumes far more fossil fuel that it produces, and because even if we converted all of the food in the United States into ethanol, we would still not have more than a tiny fraction of what we need to run our automobiles. (especially with the photosynthetic yeast programs that will massively drop the costs. ) After these programs pan out (if they do), THEN we should start building ethanol factories. Not before. I have no complaints about the bio-diesel from algae schemes, as long as they do not use up much productive land. In desert land near large cities such as Los Angeles or Las Vegas I think it would be better to set mechanical solar to electric power devices, but there is plenty of other desert land or marginal land that could be devoted to algae production. - Jed
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
Well, besides the issues that have been shown with too much corn syrup, shipping foods grown here overseas not really all the econmocal. better to get growing programs going, personally. I fail to see how it uses more fossil fuels than fuels it produces, please share. And it will also help push new techniques and higher efficiency growing, so that will help. and immagine if all the money being spent on drilling, pumping, and refining, werent? the good that could be done with the numerical savings. On 1/19/07, Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: leaking pen wrote: since part of the process of making ethanol is making corn syrup, which converts a lot of the partially digested starches to sugars, yes, actually, the whole process is likely more effecient to burn then to eat. Well, that's good. . . . also, corn is already in just about everything we eat. we grow more corn than we and our livestock can eat. Who's we? Two billion people in the world are malnourished or starving. They can digest corn syrup, by the way. seriously, its not a cureall, but why be down on ethanol? I am down on ethanol because because it takes food out of people's mouths, because it consumes far more fossil fuel that it produces, and because even if we converted all of the food in the United States into ethanol, we would still not have more than a tiny fraction of what we need to run our automobiles. (especially with the photosynthetic yeast programs that will massively drop the costs. ) After these programs pan out (if they do), THEN we should start building ethanol factories. Not before. I have no complaints about the bio-diesel from algae schemes, as long as they do not use up much productive land. In desert land near large cities such as Los Angeles or Las Vegas I think it would be better to set mechanical solar to electric power devices, but there is plenty of other desert land or marginal land that could be devoted to algae production. - Jed -- That which yields isn't always weak.
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
leaking pen wrote: Well, besides the issues that have been shown with too much corn syrup . . . As I said, one third of the people who will do not get enough to eat. Too much corn syrup would be far better than starvation. shipping foods grown here overseas not really all the econmocal. Most US food is shipped overseas. I fail to see how it uses more fossil fuels than fuels it produces, please share. See: Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Revised Edition. 1996: University Press of Colorado, chapter 19. (Or Google Pimentel) And it will also help push new techniques and higher efficiency growing, so that will help. Not good. High-efficiency agriculture in the US means the rape and permanent destruction of the land. See Pimentel, and chapter 16 of my book. Essentially, U.S. corn production is a form of strip-mining, where we destroy the topsoil and the water table. If we keep doing it for a few hundred more years Iowa will look like present-day Iraq. The arid US Great Plains are already in environmental peril. See: http://www.gprc.org/index.htm As I said in my book, agriculture is the most destructive industry on earth and the sooner we get rid of it the better. We need to grow food indoors. For one thing, this would use up thousands of times less space, and with recycled water and nutrients from sewage, that would consume no land or water. We need to get human beings out of the ecosystem loop. Nature should only have to support wild animals, not people or domesticated animals. Fishing and growing meat in live animals is also backwards, dangerous, cruel and grossly inefficient. This kind of primitive technology is long overdue for replacement, like the internal combustion engine. Fortunately, the people at the New Harvest Research Organization report progress in replacing meat: http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php - Jed
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
That type of growing would be what i meant by more efficient. agreed. a single multistory building with perfect climate and soil control would be great. hell, run pigs and cattle on the top floor, and drop fertilizer down. On 1/19/07, Jed Rothwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: leaking pen wrote: Well, besides the issues that have been shown with too much corn syrup . . . As I said, one third of the people who will do not get enough to eat. Too much corn syrup would be far better than starvation. shipping foods grown here overseas not really all the econmocal. Most US food is shipped overseas. I fail to see how it uses more fossil fuels than fuels it produces, please share. See: Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Revised Edition. 1996: University Press of Colorado, chapter 19. (Or Google Pimentel) And it will also help push new techniques and higher efficiency growing, so that will help. Not good. High-efficiency agriculture in the US means the rape and permanent destruction of the land. See Pimentel, and chapter 16 of my book. Essentially, U.S. corn production is a form of strip-mining, where we destroy the topsoil and the water table. If we keep doing it for a few hundred more years Iowa will look like present-day Iraq. The arid US Great Plains are already in environmental peril. See: http://www.gprc.org/index.htm As I said in my book, agriculture is the most destructive industry on earth and the sooner we get rid of it the better. We need to grow food indoors. For one thing, this would use up thousands of times less space, and with recycled water and nutrients from sewage, that would consume no land or water. We need to get human beings out of the ecosystem loop. Nature should only have to support wild animals, not people or domesticated animals. Fishing and growing meat in live animals is also backwards, dangerous, cruel and grossly inefficient. This kind of primitive technology is long overdue for replacement, like the internal combustion engine. Fortunately, the people at the New Harvest Research Organization report progress in replacing meat: http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php - Jed -- That which yields isn't always weak.
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
leaking pen wrote: That type of growing would be what i meant by more efficient. agreed. a single multistory building with perfect climate and soil control would be great. Except that you cannot produce ethanol from that because the light from indoor agriculture has to be artificial. There is not enough sunlight, especially with the multistory building. In the food factory I described in chapter 16, they use high-efficiency LEDs. (See the photos.) As I showed in Chapter 16, overall, on a per capita basis, indoor farming uses about 2.5 times more energy than total average US energy consumption per capita, and that is just for vegetable production. Clearly this method cannot be used with conventional energy sources such as coal or even solar or wind power. It has to be fission or cold fusion. (The book I am talking about, by the way, is here: http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm) hell, run pigs and cattle on the top floor, and drop fertilizer down. Seriously, that would use an incredible amount of energy, and keeping animals crowded together in large buildings is cruel. I hope that we can soon grow meat in vitro, instead. - Jed
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
Jed Rothwell wrote: I hope that we can soon grow meat in vitro, instead. - Jed ...or Star Trek style replicators to make any kind of food you want. Harry
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
Harry Veeder wrote: ...or Star Trek style replicators to make any kind of food you want. In the far distant future -- thousands of years from now -- I expect that something like replicators will exist, and they will make anything we want. Any object, not just food. However, I am talking about the present day, and the near future. Food factories exist already in Japan. Fish aquaculture exists, and it produces a significant fraction of sea food. In vitro production of meat may be perfected in the next few years. If in vitro or cultured meat pans out, and the product tastes about as good as natural meat, or better, that I for one would be happy to eat nonaturally grown meat ever again. I am not a vegetarian, but I sympathize with their concerns. I am a hypocrite about this. So as Arthur C. Clarke. For decades, he has been saying that meat production is cruel, but I know for a fact that he loves to eat meat. - Jed
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
Jed sez: ... If in vitro or cultured meat pans out, and the product tastes about as good as natural meat, or better, that I for one would be happy to eat nonaturally grown meat ever again. I am not a vegetarian, but I sympathize with their concerns. I am a hypocrite about this. So as Arthur C. Clarke. For decades, he has been saying that meat production is cruel, but I know for a fact that he loves to eat meat. - Jed I believe the esteemed Mr. Clark also suggested we should stop burning petroleum and learn how to eat it as well. ;-) I don't want to work at Maggie's meat farm no more... -- With apologies to B. Dylan. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]: Yomiuri: Bush to promote ethanol in State of the Union
OrionWorks wrote: I believe the esteemed Mr. Clark also suggested we should stop burning petroleum and learn how to eat it as well. ;-) He did, and it is a darned good idea. Actually, for the most part we do this already, since we use petroleum-based fertilizer. Oil consumed as food also ends up as carbon dioxide, of course, but overall oil consumption would fall if we eat the stuff because cars eat 10 times more fuel than people do. Eventually we need cold fusion-based recycling of sewage, that produces sterile, bacteria free, odor free fertilizer and plastic, with something like a thermal depolymerization plant. Regarding futuristic replicators that produce any kind of food you want, I touched on them briefly in chapter 16. In the upcoming Japanese edition of the book I added some interesting details, including image #1 from IBM's STM Image Gallery, Atom: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html I do not know whether the publisher can use that image or not, but anyway, in the text I say that this kind of technology may be the first primitive step toward atomic level manufacturing, in which a single machine can assemble any object, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. The input will be from an array of elements. Or, if small-scale nucleosynthesis can be perfected so that we can make any element we want, perhaps the raw material will be one large chunk of a single element. It would be something inert and dense that does not take up much space or cause a health hazard. My guess is: either water or gold. Needless to say, Clarke and others predicted this decades ago, and Clarke described it in detail in Profiles of the Future. For a food synthesizer, basically all you need are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and pinch of salts (sodium and potassium). The hoppers for other elements would run out infrequently, like a little-used color in a multi-cartridge high-end inkjet printer. (A professional artwork inkjet printer such as the Epson 2200 has seven color cartridges.) I should probably translate that section from Japanese into English and issue a new version of the book, but I am heartily sick of translating. Sergio Bacchi is translating the book into Portuguese, and I promised him I would replace the Introduction with a less prolix version based on the Japanese edition, but I do not have the moxie to deal with it now. - Jed
