Corn for fuel, a story I tell my students

I opened Biofuel crops can be good for the environment and other biofuels research with my opinion of using corn for fuel.

Normally, I'm skeptical about biofuels, but that's primarily because the main biofuel in the U.S. is corn ethanol, which I have characterized for years as an energy independence strategy, not a sustainability strategy.  It doesn't help that pretty much all the increased corn production during the past decade has gone into gas tanks.

Here's an updated version of the graph I show my students that displays how much corn goes to each purpose, including how all the growth in the crop and then some has gone into our gas tanks.


The point I make is even more clear in this graph.


The other point I make about corn ethanol is about its wastefulness.

In one of the first entries on this blog, I described "converting corn into ethanol" as "a big energy loser."

This is the figure from The Oil Drum I show my students to support my statement.


Only in the counties shaded in solid gray did corn ethanol yield more energy than it took to produce it.  In all the rest, it was a net energy loser.

Both of the above are why I think using corn grain for for ethanol fuel is a bad idea and why I am enthused about growing other crops with uses that don't compete for food and feed for biofuels.

On the subject of corn, I showed "Food, Inc." to my students this week.  Stay tuned for a post about the questions about corn from my worksheet for that movie.

Pandemics and collapse

Although the author of Peak Civilization, the article at The Oil Drum about the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, might disagree, it looks like disease might have contributed to the end of the expansion of the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian.  Charles Choi of LiveScience explains in Plague Helped Bring Down Roman Empire, Graveyard Suggests.

Plague may have helped finish off the Roman Empire, researchers now reveal.
...
The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. Another, the Modern Plague, struck around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia.

Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes, much controversy existed as to whether it also caused the Justinianic Plague of the sixth to eighth centuries. This pandemic, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, killed more than 100 million people. Some historians have suggested it contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

To help solve this mystery, scientists investigated ancient DNA from the teeth of 19 different sixth-century skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Bavaria, Germany, of people who apparently succumbed to the Justinianic Plague.

They unambiguously found the plague bacterium Y. pestis there.

The same source who sent me the above article also sent me the next, which I placed together in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Carbon Dioxide 400 ppm) on Daily Kos as a reminder that, to paraphrase Samuel Clemens, history may not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme and also that resource depletion and environmental degradation aren't the only threats to civilization.

Discover Magazine: Pandemic Chatter
By Keith Kloor
May 10, 2013 12:22 pm

I’m not on the pandemic beat, but some of the best science journalists are, and they are busy these days. Today, David Quammen, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed book, Spillover: Animal infections and the next human pandemic, has an op-ed in the New York Times. It begins:

Terrible new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia.

The worrisome Chinese bird flu strain that has gotten a lot of attention is not, in its present form, going to cause a pandemic, says Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control (CDC). But if you want to learn about the potential for its lethal mutation, and why you should be worried about it, read this piece in Foreign Policy by veteran science journalist Laurie Garrett.

Follow over the jump for the latest on the other pandemic threat coming out of Saudi Arabia.

Blast from the past: Cartoon on oil dependence

I decided to do some more recycling from my LiveJournal.

Short version:


Long version:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Finally, commentary on John Stewart's segment from The Oil Drum.

For Dusty: Woodward Dream Cruise is dopamine returned on gasoline invested

In the comments to Final day and night of 2011 Woodward Dream Cruise, Dusty and I had a pretty lively discussion about how we both enjoy classic American cars, even though they really aren't good for the environment. At the end of that conversation, I told Dusty that I recalled a post from The Oil Drum that describes the justification for events like the Woodward Dream Cruise.

Dopamine Returned on Energy Invested (DREI)?

Dopamine, as my wife the psychologist can tell you, is involved in the perception of pleasure. For a lot of people, including me, classic cars in general and the Woodward Dream Cruise in particular give a high return of pleasure for the energy invested.