But don’t get too excited just yet:

Apart from the time factor, this bus won’t be able to move much without the presence of 15 people onboard or at least one of you should be a participant of the “Tour de France.”

Okay, so maybe not a practical transportation solution quite yet. But it looks like fun. And speaking of the TDF, wouldn’t it be interesting to watch two (or more) of these racing? That would have to be a real team sport.

Countries that aren’t blessed with a native kangaroo population are being encouraged to take other steps:

Fortunately for those of us living outside of Australia, other countries are embarking on similar projects to reduce methane by farming low-emissions animals. Examples include springbok in South Africa, red deer in the UK, and bison in the United States. With CO2 emissions from other industries showing no signs of slowing down, eating a red deer burger doesn’t sound so bad.

Compared to a kanga-burger, it sounds downright appetizing. Actually, eating bison is no hardship. As many of you probably know, it is as good as beef, if a little more robust in flavor.

Still, that kangaroo idea might be a little over the top. If we really want to cut methane emissions from livestock,we need to eliminate farms altogether rather than changing what we raise there. The unappetizing-sounding solution is vat meat. It will provide us nutritionally enhanced meat that doesn’t come at the price of animal suffering and that doesn’t cause massive environmental damage.

And it will only taste like chicken when it really is chicken.

Wow, first finger moneys and now this. The world is truly an amazing place, isn’t it?

PETA Offers $1 Million Reward to First to Make In Vitro Meat

Scientists around the world are researching or seeking the funds to research ways to produce meat in the laboratory—without killing any animals. In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we’re still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public.

PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat.

Why is PETA supporting this new technology? More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs, and cows are killed every year for food in the United States in horrific ways. Chickens are drugged to grow so large they often become crippled, mother pigs are confined to metal cages so small they can’t move, and fish are hacked apart while still conscious—all to feed America’s meat addiction. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. In addition, in vitro meat would dramatically reduce the devastating effects the meat industry has on the environment.

Via InstaPundit, here’s a Popular Mechanics piece with more details on this emerging technology.

Whatever you might think about PETA (and I personally have never thought much), they are to be applauded for taking this step. All their accumulated shock messages, sanctimonious political posturing, and obnoxious, not to mention frequently dangerous, behavior over the years have probably had a net effect of making most people less sympathetic to the cause of animal rights (or at least animal well-being) than they would have been. But this is a positive step — a financial incentive to bring about a new technology that can eliminate animal suffering and end a lot of environmental damage associated with livestock farming.

There’s an interesting parallel between recycling and “reclaiming energy.” Recycling allows you to use the same raw materials over and over. Reclaiming energy allows us to use carbon over and over.

Fossil fuels release carbon that’s been sequestered since the fossils they were made from were living. Ethanol releases carbon too, but it’s the product of plants that sequester carbon while they grow (paper and organic waste sequestered carbon recently). Instead of a one-way release of carbon, we’d get to take advantage of a carbon cycle. This makes it closer to being carbon neutral.

But NPR reported today on a study that apparently shows that ethanol is worse for the climate than gasoline. Their reasoning: when we devote more of our corn crops to ethanol, world food production is shifted to places like Brazil where rain forests are slashed and burned for farm land. And burning of rain forest releases a lot of carbon.

This highlights the importance of using things other than food to make ethanol. Making cellulosic ethanol from biological waste (like corn stalks) or switch grass could be carbon neutral. Using land that’s not being used for crops wouldn’t be a problem. Algae for diesel and ethanol can be grown in the desert.

Unfortunately that’s not the message that most people will take away from that study. “Ethanol is worse than gas.” Well, no. Ethanol can be much better than gasoline for the environment. We just have to be careful about unintended consequences. Perhaps it’s time to end corn ethanol subsidies.

…[E]verybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state’s monopolist garbage-collection “service” no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn’t that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment.

What is interesting about this Soviet-style planned recycling is that it is officially profitable. It is supposed to be resource efficient, since recycling of the materials is less energy-consuming than, for instance, mining or the production of paper from wood. It is also economically profitable, since the government actually generates revenues from selling recycled materials and products made in the recycling process. The final recycling process costs less than is earned from selling the recycled products.

However, this is common government logic: it is “energy saving” simply because government does not count the time and energy used by nine million people cleaning and sorting their trash. Government authorities and researchers have reached the conclusion that the cost of (a) the water and electricity used for cleaning household trash, (b) transportation from trash collection centers, and (c) the final recycling process is actually less than would be necessary to produce these materials from scratch. Of course, they don’t count the literally millions of times people drive to the recycling centers to empty their trash bins; neither do they count, for instance, energy and costs for the extra housing space required for a dozen extra trash bins in every home.

Not to get into the politics of whether the Swedish government should or should not enforce such a vigorous model of recycling, I wonder how reclaiming refuse for biofuel production might fit into such an environment? All the wood, paper, and organic waste which is currently going for recycling or trash disposal might be converted into energy instead. I’m not sure this would make things any easier, but I would venture to guess that (at least) folks wouldn’t have to sort paper into different varieties or wash out their milk cartons before disposing of them.

There has been quite a bit of interest in cellulosic ethanol lately; I wonder how enthusiastically its widespread production from waste materials would be received by environmentalists? While you would no longer have paper ending up in landfills, you would have it being “used up” in the form of energy production. Whereas, with recycling, the paper will last a lot longer — although certainly not forever.

So are we better off strictly recycling, or with a mix of recycling for metals and plastic, while reclaiming energy from paper and other organic waste?

Research scientists at the University of Michigan have identified antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) on the skin of frogs–but the AMPs that work so well on the skin’s surface have a couple of nasty habits inside a host. They break down when exposed to enzymes, and they have a tendency to stick to and damage host cells.

Dr. Neil Marsh has found an ingenious solution to both problems–coating the AMPs with nonreactive fluorine coating –aka teflon.

According to the story at Discover.com, the “same technology that keeps your eggs (or frog legs) from sticking to the pan may someday be a key part of a new family of antibiotics.” Marsh’s Teflon-tipped AMPs show promise–the story says they may even work a bit better than natural, untreated AMPs, at least against some bacteria.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

Well, okay, sure, but driving a Prius feels like a good thing to do for the environment, and that’s what really matters, right?

Via GeekPress.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

Well, okay, sure, but driving a Prius feels like a good thing to do for the environment, and that’s what really matters, right?

Via GeekPress.

Fire from ice. Intriguing. What do we know about this strange strange substance that goes by the name methane clathrate? Wikipedia tells us:

Methane clathrate, also called methane hydrate or methane ice, is a form of water ice that contains a large amount of methane within its crystal structure (a clathrate hydrate). Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the solar system where temperatures are low and water ice is common, extremely large deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth.

“Extremely large deposits?” So is that, like, good news or bad? Not surprisingly, it can be either, depending on who you ask. Let’s talk about the bad news first. As shown in the picture, this ice can catch fire and burn or, like regular ice, it can simply warm up and melt. When methane clathrate burns, it’s the methane that ‘s burning. From an environmental standpoint, burning the stuff is not so bad. Burning methane does release some CO2 (a greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere, but quite a bit less than any other fossil fuel. On the other hand, if you melt methane clathrate rather than burning it, you release methane gas itself into the atmosphere. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, but it’s about 20 times as efficient as CO2 at heating up the atmosphere.

In other words, if you want global warming, methane will get you there a lot faster than CO2 emissions. (Not to disparage CO2 in this regard; it can be highly effective.

So, what happens if these “extremely large deposits” of methane clathrate frozen on the ocean floor begin to melt? There are two possible answers:

1. Nothing.
2. Potentially cataclysmic change in climate

The first scenario represents the normal course of things. Methane clathrate melts all the time, usually in small quantities that bubble up towards the ocean’s surface. Before the bubbles can reach the surface, the methane is re-dissolved into the ocean where it benignly floats around until (presumably) it freezes back into clathrate.

The second scenario is obviously more dramatic; indirect evidence potentially supporting such a scenario has only recently been confirmed to occur.

Remarkable and unexpected support for this idea occurred when divers and scientists from UC Santa Barbara observed and videotaped a massive blowout of methane from the ocean floor. It happened in an area of gas and oil seepage coming out of small volcanoes in the ocean floor of the Santa Barbara channel — called Shane Seep — near an area known as the Coal Oil Point seep field. The blowout sounded like a freight train, according to the divers.

Aside from underwater measurements, a nearby meteorological station measured the methane “cloud” that emerged as being approximately 5,000 cubic feet, or equal to the volume of the entire first floor of a two-bedroom house. The research team also had a small plane in place, flown by the California Department of Conservation, shooting video of the event from the air.

[Marine Science Institute researcher Ira] Leifer explained that when this type of blowout event occurs, virtually all the gas from the seeps escapes into the atmosphere, unlike the emission of small bubbles from the ocean floor, which partially, or mostly, dissolve in the ocean water.

Large quantities of methane suddenly released into the atmosphere could have quite an impact on global climate. Granted, we would need to be talking about a much larger quantity of the gas than was observed in this particular blow-out, but there could be bigger blowouts or more of them could occur, or the methane might come from sources other than volcanic, leading us back to our fire-ice:

Over geologic time scales, global climate has cycled between warmer, interglacial periods and cooler, glacial periods. Many aspects of the forces underlying these dramatic changes remain unknown. Looking at past changes is highly relevant to understanding future climate changes, particularly given the large increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere due to historically recent human activities such as burning fossil fuels.

One hypothesis, called the “Clathrate Gun” hypothesis, developed by James Kennett, professor of geological sciences at UCSB, proposes that past shifts from glacial to interglacial periods were caused by a massive decomposition of the marine methane hydrate deposits.

So if our planet is currently warmer than normal either because of human acitivty or because of where we happen to be in the climate cycle or through some unholy combination of those two factors, this would seem to be a particularly bad time for any massive decomposition of methane clathrate to occur. Unfortunately, the warmer the planet gets, the greater the risk may become.

Sounds pretty scary, potentially. It would seem that we’re sitting on a time bomb. Or maybe there’s another way of looking at it…

Part 2, Fire and Ice — The Promise

Here’s the picture:

(It goes with the headline.)

Here’s the prediction.

Discuss.

Japanese consumers increasingly snubbing whale meat

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese consumers are increasingly snubbing whale meat despite their government’s campaign to overturn an international ban on commercial whaling, a Japanese environmentalist has said.

Japan has enraged its Western allies by hunting whales, using a loophole that allows a catch for research purposes, and hopes an International Whaling Commission meeting later this week will lift a whaling ban.

Good for the Japanese consumers. What, exactly, is it that the Japanese government is trying to protect here? There can’t be that big a revenue stream associated with whale meat…compared to other industries, anyway. Is it a precious cultural heritage — slaughtering whales? Let it go already.

Meanwhile, one of the estimated 13 rhinos living on Borneo just got photographed. Here’s hoping the 13 find a way to turn into many more, and that the publicity surrounding the photo doesn’t put that rhinoceros and his 12 companions in danger of being harvested for their horns — another precious cultural heritage.

New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change

Neptune and Uranus are next. And then? Once the Oort cloud starts to be affected, we can expect a huge influx of angry comets buzzing our planet if not smashing right into it. But let’s at least be thankful that the wave of destruction we’ve started is heading in the right direction. Can you imagine the devastation if the sun itself were to start heating up? (We must take what comfort we can in the knowledge that some people are taking seriously the idea of keeping the solar system green.)

On a somehwat less rabidly sarcastic note, the discovery of the new storm system on Jupiter is quite exciting:

“Red Spot Jr.” as it is being called, formed after three white oval-shaped storms—two of which were at least 90 years old—merged between 1998 and 2000.

A similar merger took place centuries ago and formed the bigger and legendary Great Red Spot, a storm twice as big as Earth and almost 300 years old.

I would take issue with that “almost.” My understanding is that the original storm was first “spotted” (thanks, I’ll be here all week) by the astronomer Cassini in the 17th century. A quick Wikipedia search confirms that I am at least not alone in that opinion. Cassini first observed the red spot somewhere around 1665, meaning that it is at least 340 years old. Probably quite a bit older, seeing as it’s unlikely that he just happened upon it a day or two after it formed.

All of which is to say that these things don’t come around every day; we’re lucky to have the chance to watch this unfold.

Via GeekPress

Technorati: planets Jupiter Kyoto Global Warming

New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change

Neptune and Uranus are next. And then? Once the Oort cloud starts to be affected, we can expect a huge influx of angry comets buzzing our planet if not smashing right into it. But let’s at least be thankful that the wave of destruction we’ve started is heading in the right direction. Can you imagine the devastation if the sun itself were to start heating up? (We must take what comfort we can in the knowledge that some people are taking seriously the idea of keeping the solar system green.)

On a somehwat less rabidly sarcastic note, the discovery of the new storm system on Jupiter is quite exciting:

“Red Spot Jr.” as it is being called, formed after three white oval-shaped storms—two of which were at least 90 years old—merged between 1998 and 2000.

A similar merger took place centuries ago and formed the bigger and legendary Great Red Spot, a storm twice as big as Earth and almost 300 years old.

I would take issue with that “almost.” My understanding is that the original storm was first “spotted” (thanks, I’ll be here all week) by the astronomer Cassini in the 17th century. A quick Wikipedia search confirms that I am at least not alone in that opinion. Cassini first observed the red spot somewhere around 1665, meaning that it is at least 340 years old. Probably quite a bit older, seeing as it’s unlikely that he just happened upon it a day or two after it formed.

All of which is to say that these things don’t come around every day; we’re lucky to have the chance to watch this unfold.

Via GeekPress

Technorati: planets Jupiter Kyoto Global Warming