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  • Palin Against Abortion even if Rape or Incest October 7, 2008
    Palin debating the abortion issue in 2006. She's against abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Would approve of legislation outlawing all abortions except for health of the mother only.
  • Keating Economics: Brought to you by John McCain October 6, 2008
    New Barack Obama ad about how John "the maverick" McCain still hasn't learned his since 1989.
  • Bank Loans Have Not 'Dried Up' - Forbes.com October 2, 2008
    A view you won't hear on TV.
  • George Lakoff: A Brief Guide to the Debates October 2, 2008
    In the first debate, Obama did what he needed to do: convince a majority that he has what it takes. But there is room for improvement... The reason the list is short is that Obama did so well. Biden doesn't have to prove himself in this debate. Palin does have to prove herself. That means Biden can hold back, give short but powerful responses, and
  • Sam Stein: McCain Gets Testy With Des Moines Register October 1, 2008
    ...McCain got near anger when it was suggested that the Straight Talk Express had taken a detour, challenging the questioner to provide examples. Asked specifically about the kindergarten sex-ed ad, McCain defended it wholeheartedly....
  • Daily Kos: Seize the Day September 30, 2008
    The temptation now is going to be to coddle the poor right. Give them some minor tweak in the bill to salve their fragile egos and gain the dozen votes that are needed to pass yesterday's bill. Don't. Don't do it, damn it.
  • Economist: Why Bankruptcy is Better than Wall Street Bailout September 30, 2008
    Congress has balked at the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Under this plan, the Treasury would have bought the "troubled assets" of financial institutions in an attempt to avoid economic meltdown. This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.
  • Humiliated September 28, 2008
    Jonathan Weisman has a fascinating, even riveting narrative of what went down in Washington on Thursday as John McCain made his play to commandeer the high-level negotiations over the bailout bill. And TPM Reader TW called my attention to a...
  • America’s bail-out plan [Economist] September 26, 2008
    A good article detailing out the happenings of the last year with a focus on the last couple of weeks. Not the Huffington Post.
  • Art Of Time Ensemble with Steven Page · CBC Radio 2 - Concer September 24, 2008
    Internationally renowned Steven Page, lead singer of the band Barenaked Ladies, performing his favourite songs live at the Enwave Theatre, at the Harbourfront Centre. He teams up with members of the Art Of Time Ensemble, led by pianist Andrew Burashko.
  • Jun
    16

    A Non-Flood-Related Diversion

    Now that things are starting to look up a bit in Iowa City, maybe the timing is right to post some potentially excellent news about oil.  Apparently, there’s a new company that’s figured out a way to turn agricultural waste (wood chips, wheat straw, or whatever leftover plant material is available in large quantities in an area) into crude petroleum in a carbon-negative way.  Surprisingly, they’ve convinced yeast and E. coli to literally shit oil. 

    Apparently, bacteria shit is already very close to oil, so the DNA fiddling required for the final step is relatively minor.  The company says that the plants used to make the oil take more carbon out of the atmosphere than the oil itself will release.  Furthermore, since the end-product is still oil,  there’s no need to buy a new vehicle or convert your current vehicle to a new technology, or to invest in a huge infrastructure replacement project.  And, at the technology’s current level, it takes just a week for one 40-square-foot machine to produce a barrel of oil.  The linked article points out that it would take a machine array the size of Chicago to produce enough oil to keep up with America’s weekly oil usage, but surely the space requirements will decrease as the technology develops. 

    Frankly, this seems to be too good to be true.  It sounds like something out of a Greg Bear novel (or maybe Vonnegut, since some are comparing these altered microorganisms to Ice-9), which may be why I have a vague feeling of unease about this.  Surely something this promising must have a horrible trade-off, right?  Still, I’m feeling a little less doomed than I was a few days ago.  Here’s to bug poop!

4 Responses to “A Non-Flood-Related Diversion”

  1. mark said on June 17th, 2008 at 5:41 am

    “Surely something this promising must have a horrible trade-off, right?”

    It’s not wheat chafe — it’s people!

  2. charlie said on June 17th, 2008 at 6:24 am

    In the end we’re still combusting oil. That’s the real issue. Someone came up a with a process for turning turkey innards into crude not that long ago. 600 Barrels a day from what might otherwise go unused. Here’s why that was a double-edged sword.

  3. josh said on June 17th, 2008 at 9:03 am

    funny you mention greg bear — my first thought was grey goo.

    i agree with charlie on this one. the only good thing about the energy crisis is the potential that it might force us to develop truly sustainable technologies, rather than keeping the petro economy on indefinite life support. if this thing is really carbon-negative, that’s something to consider. but it sounds a lot like oil shale, coal gasification, ethanol, and all those other stopgap projects that are embraced in the name of “reducing dependence on foreign oil” without actually trying to break the addiction to oil itself.

    all the same, it’s pretty fucking cool. as you know, one of bruce sterling’s big ideas is that the next generation of revolutionary new technologies won’t be things we make, but things we persuaded microbes to make for us.

  4. gray said on June 17th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    The problem of oil is twofold: it does horrible things to the planet (mostly spewing CO2 everywhere, but, as Charlie points out, there are other, less voluminous pollutants to worry about), and the supply of it is dwindling (leading to increases in fuel and food prices, as we’re already seeing, and global economic and cultural collapse shortly after we hit peak oil). The first problem is an ecological one, and the second is one of politics, economics, and social justice.

    The problem with the stopgap methods we’ve tried so far is that they only attempt to address the second problem, usually while making the first problem worse. They don’t actually solve anything, but they restore us to our complacency. That’s why oil shale, coal, ethanol, and even turkey guts aren’t going to work.

    But this bugshit oil actually takes a stab at the first problem while solving the second. If the company’s figures are right and this stuff is actually carbon-negative, that’s a pretty colossal breakthrough, especially since the plants the oil is made from were, up to a few days before they became oil, scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2 (unlike fossil fuels). There’s still the other pollutants that come from burning oil, but maybe the bugs will get around those too.

    I’d like to see us move beyond petroleum too, for all sorts of reasons. It’s not sustainable, it’s incredibly damaging to the world, it fuels a lot of geopolitical badness, the oil companies are pure evil, etc. The amazing thing about this bugshit oil is that it IS sustainable, it’s MUCH less damaging to the world, it makes fuel production into a local concern instead of a global one, and the oil companies don’t have their filthy paws in it. Indeed, it seems like a fairly simple procedure that municipal governments could easily manage: whatever excess plant material you have handy can be thrown in the bacteria vat and left to brew for a week. Unlike fossil fuels, this stuff doesn’t need the weight and resources of a multinational corporation just to get access to it. There probably ought to be regulations to keep the bacteria out of the hands of everybody but governments so a grey goo situation doesn’t happen, but it seems far more likely that this will work much like water treatment than traditional oil: each municipality has a fuel-production array (which also cuts way, way down on the combustion of oil, since there’s no need for tankers and trucks to schlep oil over oceans and across continents).

    Josh, you may be right that it’ll take a global crisis (complete with mass starvation, the collapse of most national economies, the obliteration of the healthcare system, etc.) to finally shake us out of our oil complacency. But I’m not entirely convinced that’s the only way to get to a permanent solution to oil, and it would sure be nice if we could get there without millions of people dying in the process. It seems to me that this is the first stopgap solution that actually stops the gap.

    Another advantage of this stuff is that it’s a LOT cheaper than petroleum. There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how hard fuel prices are hitting airline and shipping companies, but far less attention is paid to how expensive gas hits low-income people, especially in a country like this where there’s no mass transportation to speak of. Frankly, we need a stopgap solution for these people.

    And, of course, the real reason why this stuff gets me so excited: plastics. I’m in total agreement that burning fossil fuels is something we need to stop doing ASAP. But what’s really got me worried about peak oil isn’t the folding of the airlines and the fact that my car will be a very large and very useless hunk of steel. It’s that there’ll be no more plastic. Plastic pollution is a big deal, of course, and we still need to make a lot of progress when it comes to recycling and otherwise dealing responsibly with discarded plastic. But plastic is absolutely indispensable for a lot of the public health systems we currently enjoy. Without plastic, most sterile things won’t be sterile and most sealed things won’t be sealed. And, of course, we can’t have teh interwebz without plastic.

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