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While I think cellulosic ethanol or any kind of gasoline/kerosene fuel derived from cellulose could be a "good" thing, I'm quite fearful of the potential consequences of giving the American populace another reason to deforest the land, either to clear it to grow crops, or to harvest trees to turn them into ethanol for SUVs.
Trees may be renewable, but tell that to the people who lived on Easter Island when building those cool stone heads. Most humans don't have the sense to stop over-consuming anything. Deforestation, over-fishing, species extinction, aquifier depletion, the list goes on. As a species, we simply don't learn from history.
~Durandal (http://www.wtdwtshtf.com)
Quite right to be concerned. Unsurprisingly, the article has the usual 10 years-to-commercialization disclaimer. I want to see an EROI analysis of this process (and no, it doesn't need to go back to the big bang to offer useful information).
I have no doubt that we are going to see more bio-fuel in the future, once natural gas resumes its cost/price climb. But the bio-fuels will be solid, burnt for heat and electricity in high efficiency furnaces. The pressure on agriculture land and the problems associated with mono-culture will continue to manifest. Perhaps the ethanol boondoggle will force better land use policies (regulations), in time for a truly economically-driven expansion of (solid) bio-fuels.
Perhaps I am being simplistic, but doesn't it make more sense in the short term to adapt our engines to the biofuels, rather than the other way around? It seems that we are seeking to force square pegs into round holes.
Yeah, I would agree. Adoption of electrified rail is the round peg for the round hole. Some of that electricity may come from large bio-mass fed generators. Still, I expect most of the bio-fuel will feed household furnaces, and in the case of more socially and intellectually advanced regions, small co-generation plants providing district or industrial heating and electricity.
OlePossom, that may be a long term strategy but it could not possibly be a short term strategy as you suggest. It takes about 15 years to completely replace our automobile fleet. So unless you expect all automobile companies to completely change their fleet next year, and everyone to buy a new car next year,... Well, you get the picture.
On the other hand if we had a biofuel that everyone could run their car on today, all they would have to do is pull up to the pump and fill her up.
Ron Patterson
Most fuel injection cars can be retrofitted for not too much money to burn E85. I seem to recall figures like $150/car. Essentially a few fuel lines may need to be replaced and the computer's fuel tables must be altered to allow the burning of E85, along with a sensor to allow the computer to determine how much of an ethanol blend is in the fuel.
I'm personally more interested in retrofits with motorcycle engines or electric motors, but those are MUCH more expensive. :)
Doesn't E85 rot seals and fuel lines and such?
I guess one nice thing about being out here in the Red State Asteroid Belt is, no E85. And when/if I return to the Bay Area, it's bicycle for me and that can run on pure ethanol. Especially in cold weather. This type of bicycle fuel is also very contamination-tolerant, such as the worm in good tequila, or whatever it is they put in Jager.
15 years to turn over the fleet is still more than 6% per year- more than all but the most pessimistic estimates of the decline rate of oil (elm has upwards of 20% in the last few years though)
Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island
New evidence points to an alternative explanation for a civilization's collapse
Terry L. Hunt
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/53200?full...
Summary: rats and Europeans.
Rats and Europeans caused a 90% dieoff of the Hawaiians. Easter Island being very small, the even greater dieoff and devastation* may be simply a product of the island being so small and having less "inertia". There are also psychic effects, the average Hawaiian found her world turned upside-down, even with the restrictive kapus and capricious chiefs, it was THEIR world, and its rapid destruction brought on suicide, infanticide, revenge killings, and people just plain sitting down and refusing to live any more. The Hawaiian's (and other Pacific peoples') ability to just lie down and stop living, to be dead in 2-3 days crops up in the literature of the European invaders of the time quite often.
*Hawaii, even Oahu, has huge areas with no one living there. There are huge areas where people lived 100+ years ago and not now.
They still cut the last one down, no?
I'm confused about the continual obsession with the Easter Island Collapse.
Whether the Rapanui settled Easter Island in 1200 AD or 900 AD what difference does it make? Whether they collapsed because of European germs and rats or the human habitation denuded the local environment or a combination of the two is rhetorical. Most anthropologists would agree that the Rapanui were by no means a flowering society by the time Captain Cook and his thugs arrived to visit the remanants of this flawed environment in the 1800's.
Here are the basic facts as I understand them:
1. The island was geographically isolated.
2. The Rapanui obsession with Moai construction would have no doubt distracted from the necessary work of survival on a small finite island.
3. The construction of Moai was not in practice by the time the Europeans arrived. Many of the statues had already been destroyed. This makes common sense. When people are starving they would have retaliated against the local Big-Men. I say men because it has been documented that it was not a political monopoly. The local groups competed for status by the size of Moai that individual chiefs built.
4. The destruction of local fauna was history by the 1800's.
5. The remanants of Rapanui natives were already in starvation by the time of the European arrival. No doubt they would have been able to put up little resistance to either germs or steel.
6. Whether the rats overwhelemed the few remaining trees (if there were any left by this time) or not is irrelevant.
There is a long held notion that indigenous peoples are somehow noble and are far wiser stewards of the environment than evil Europeans. This notion is patently false.
The historical precedent is simple: Humans, without exception, are an invasive species and are largely destructive to local environments.[**sustainable societies are hunter gatherers. The introduction of farming spurred modern civilizations 10 to 12 thousand years ago.]
The warning of the Easter Island collapse for earthlings is this:
We are a small, isolated and finite planet with no neighbors and the local big-men (nations) compete for finite resources and hegemony.
Will we overwhelm our local environment, the earth? Probably.