Alcohol can be a gas!

Another book added to my to read list. The author, David Blume, was interviewed on npr and had some interesting thoughts on how to make ethanol actually carbon and environmentally friendly, such as the fact that ethanol competes with food for corn.

From his website:
"But 87% of the U.S. corn crop is fed to animals. In most years, the U.S. sends close to 20% of its corn to other countries. While it is assumed that these exports could feed most of the hungry in the world, the corn is actually sold to wealthy nations to fatten their livestock. Plus, virtually no impoverished nation will accept our corn, even when it is offered as charity, due to its being genetically modified and therefore unfit for human consumption."

Also, fermenting the corn to alcohol results in more meat than if you fed the corn directly to the cattle. We can actually increase the meat supply by first processing corn into alcohol, which only takes 28% of the starch, leaving all the protein and fat, creating a higher-quality animal feed than the original corn."

In theory it could even reduce the "methane emissions" i.e. farts and belches of the cattle by feeding them something that more closely resembles what they are adapted to eat..

Also, cattails are apparently a plant that would be very efficient for making ethanol, so he's proposing using cattail marshes to treat sewage waste and then harvesting them for ethanol, plus they reseed themselves so practically no maintenance, and helping solve coastal eutrophication problems at the same time.

It sounds pretty fantastic, though I'd need to read it to see how convincing it really is.

Renewable Petroleum?

More microbes to save the world?

Beetles are going to cause the apocalypse

Well, maybe not but they may contribute to carbon emissions by killing western pine forests with a fungus they carry, making them a source rather than a sink.
"Researchers estimated that from 2000 to 2020, a 374,000-square kilometre area of B.C. forest (an area larger than Labrador) would produce 270 megatonnes of carbon." about the same amount that Canada has pledged to cut by 2020.

Mark and I saw this type of damage on the Western side of RMNP last year. I took the picture above of a dead tree showing all the beetle burrows.

"Bloody Enormous" Wind Turbines

England: "Our windmills are bloody enormous!
Oh, and I’m ever so sorry, but they’re upside down as well."

We are alone

Australia has ratified the Kyoto protocol, leaving the US alone among industrialised nations in not signing. It won't actually make much difference in Australia's emissions since so many concessions were made that they can actually increase their emissions rather than cut them, though by less than expected if they were to do nothing.