Joseph Martelle wrote: >http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html > >Vegetable oil yields tables: Journey to Forever > > > >>>What about that Jerusalem artichoke I've read about? Fairly high yielding?
Not even on the table - loads of carbohydrates (not starch), but not a lot of oil. Good for ethanol though. >What we need is for those genetic engineers to to start looking at soybean, >rapeseed, peanut, or other oil producing plant and modifying the genome to >produce more oil than fruit.Can you imagine doubling or tripling the oil yeild >from rapeseed or soybeans? Has anyone even considered research in this area? Dunno, maybe. But most of it so far seems tied either to securing a market sector or to securing sales of associated products (eg herbicides). One looks hard for success stories. RR (Roundup-Ready) herbicide-resistant soybeans are losing their resistance (leading to increased use of herbicides, up to 30% more than with non-GE soy, instead of the decreased use we were promised) as well as their yields - yields are sagging badly. One doesn't have to look too hard for outright failures (Starlink), and for side-effects we were promised and assured were impossible but they're now happening anyway. And of course the whole technology as it applies to food has lost its consumer acceptance - I don't think it's the technology itself people don't trust, it's the companies doing it. These folks don't have a good record with this kind of stuff, nor with anything else much. So I'm sure what you suggest is possible (what isn't these days?) but would it work out right? And with what unforeseen costs? Anyway, if you look through the amazing history of crop development over the last four millenia or so, you end up very impressed with the capabilities of traditional plant breeding through selection. It works, it's safe, and the benefits are widespread and permanent. "Modern plant-breeding has produced nothing to equal the banana," said a modern plant-breeder. The banana is a man-made hybrid, produced a couple of thousand years ago, by all accounts. It can't reproduce itself, all bananas are propagated by hand and always have been. Wherever Europeans went "discovering" new (to them) parts of the world, the banana was there before them. It's of immense benefit to billions of people. Really first-class science. I'm not knocking GE, it's an immensely promising field, it's a huge pity (?) that its development is in the hands of these wisdomless dumbos who've given us so much else to be less than thankful for. A frequent question on the list (but recently, regarding newspapers) is ethanol production from cellulose, a technology that it seems just isn't there yet, despite all sorts of promising start-ups and so on. More info here: Ethanol resources on the Web - see Ethanol from cellulose: http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol_link.html It seems the perfect case for a GE organism. Well, it was tried. Do a message archive search for message #2887 at the list website to see the results - Alcohol-producing GM bacteria "could destroy all life on earth", 22 Feb 2001. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/messages "Wisdomless dumbos" isn't an exaggeration. The precautionary principle is sacrosanct, but it's been widely ignored, and instead of the fruits of GE's great promise we seem to be getting instead a whole new and worse kind of pollution. If only it were being used for real benefit in such fields as biofuels. Or to make something as useful as a banana. By the way, RAFI and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation have published a booklet called "The ETC Century", on the technological challenges of the 21st Century. It's very good, covers GE, nanotech and more - pdf here: http://rafi.org/web/allpub-display.shtml?pfl=others-list-en.param RAFI - Rural Advancement Foundation International Best Keith Addison Journey to Forever Handmade Projects Tokyo http://journeytoforever.org/ > Just my wild musings. > Joe. Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
