A couple of quick points, tree trimmers in our area go nuts looking for
people who will take the wood chips they have made, which will convert
easily into alcohol and what is left is good for certain soil amendments.
And, I have heard several times that there is enough air to keep one alive
in outer space. Now the problem is how do you make the astronaught a
consumer so the corporations can get his suit fulla 100 dollar bills.
Then again, one type of Hemp, apparently completely unsmokable, back in the
day when it was a commodity, was a 'wet fuel' unlike the 'dry' fuels that we
get at the pump which help wear the engines out faster than the wet or
lubricated fuels do. Hemp will grow most anywhere and on depleted soils, it
would be a good choice to help the chemical destroyed farmlands recover, and
it doesn't have to be heavily watered, it'll grow with regular rain.
It just doesn't produce a mega profit like Oil though, anyone with a plot of
land and a way to press the oil out of it might be able to power their basic
vehicles and tools, so I suppose we won't go there until we no longer need
to control the world economy through Oil and water ownership.
Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Steinman" <Jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <olympus@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2007 8:35 PM
Subject: [OM] Re: climate issues [was: some other OT things]
>
>> From: Dan Mitchell <danmitchell@xxxxxxxx>
>>
>> Check out "Plan B 2.0" (Lester Brown; print edition or downloadable
>> from earth-policy.org if you can stand reading from a screen) for a
>> very
>> lengthy excursion into how biodiesel affects food prices, but also
>> a lot
>> of discussion about water issues, birth rate issues, etc -- everything
>> is much more inter-related than I thought.
>
> Don't be too sure. To paraphrase Kenneth Deffeyes, you can't put more
> oil in the ground by showing up at God's cashier with a bunch of
> printed money!
>
> What classical, Adam Smithian economics misses completely, and neo-
> classical, Friedmanian economics simply ignores out of greed, is that
> you don't pay for oil with fiat currency -- you must pay for it in
> energy.
>
> This is most often expressed as "ERoEI", or "Energy Recovered over
> Energy Invested" -- a basic efficiency equation. If you spend more to
> get something that that something is worth, you're going to go broke.
> So if ERoEI is less than unity, you're running out even faster than
> before. If it is greater than unity, you're merely running out!
>
> David Pimentel (et. al.) conclude that ethanol from corn has an ERoEI
> of about 0.6. So for every unit of energy you put into ethanol
> production, you get six-tenths as much back.
>
> In the initial days of gushers, petroleum had an ERoEI of over 100.
> Currently, it's about 5-6. The tar sands in Canada yield synthetic
> crude at an ERoEI estimated to be about 1.3 for the current, most
> accessible deposits.
> So I can agree with your "not going to happen for a while," depending
> on how you define "a while." 50 years? No way! 20 years? Improbable.
> Many folks think oil will quickly go out of reach of all but the
> richest in ten years or less.
>
> Here's another way of looking at it: you're in a space-suit stuffed
> with $100 bills, and ten minutes of air left. How much will an
> additional ten minutes of air cost you?
>
>
> :::: The amount of ethanol needed to fill a big four-wheel-drive SUV
> just once uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. --
> Gwynne Dyer ::::
> :::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality http://
> www.EcoReality.org ::::
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