CBS's Lara Logan on Media and Iraq/Afghanistan Coverage

Bugs Eat Wast and Produce Petrol

Look at what's new in Silicon Valley. Could this be part of our energy future?



LINK to article

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
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What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to re engineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-z problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

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Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”

Power points

— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources

— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs

— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels

The Good News by Rob Brezsny

Excerpts from Rob Brezsny's book *PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings*

Here's an excerpt:

Welcome to the PRONOIA NEWS NETWORK. Here's the news.

The world has become dramatically more peaceful since 1992, according to the non-partisan Human Security Report. Wars, coup d'etats, and acts of genocide have declined by 40 percent. Weapons sales have dropped 33 percent during the same time, and the number of refugees has decreased by 45 percent. The cause of these developments is the unprecedented upsurge of international activism since the end of the Cold War, spearheaded by the United Nations.
Elsewhere, life extension researchers now believe that there is no absolute limit to the human life span. The average life expectancy is 30 years more than it was a century ago, and is steadily climbing.

Literacy and education levels are rising steadily all over the globe. Since 1970, the percentage of students going to secondary school has more than doubled.
The World Health Organization reports that in the next 24 hours, 200 million people will make love on this planet, as they do every day of every year. Experts estimate that the orgasmic energy generated during a single rotation of the planet could, if harnessed, provide enough power to light a
medium-sized city for a month.
Briefly, here's a look at the rest of the top stories.

Accelerating rates of intermarriage are helping to dissipate ethnic and religious strife worldwide.

Acreage devoted to organic farming is rapidly increasing.

Death rates from cancer are shrinking.

Child abduction by strangers has dropped precipitously.

In 60 years, there hasn't been a lower birth rate among teenage girls than there is now.

The number of America's black elected officials has sextupled since 1970.

In recent years, the rivers and bays of New York City have been almost completely cleansed of raw sewage and industrial pollution.

Vast supplies of frozen natural gas lie beneath the oceans, harboring more potential energy for human use than all of the world's oil reserves, and could be mined with the right technology.

If forced to decide between having a bigger penis and living in a world where there was no war, 90 percent of all men would pick universal peace.

You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any farther removed than your 50th cousin.

The world's largest private bank, Citigroup, has agreed to stop financing projects that damage sensitive ecosystems.

The giant timber company, Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, voluntarily agreed to stop cutting down trees in a virgin rain forest in the Congo.

Every second the sun generously transforms four million tons of itself into energy and bestows it on us free of charge.

With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

Most HMO executives now believe prayer and meditation can expedite the healing process.

Each of the 50 trillion cells in your body can be considered a sentient being in its own right, and they all act together as a community, performing an ongoing act of prodigious collaboration.

A survey of a thousand poets suggests that the five most beautiful words in the English language are "epiphany," "undulates," "luminous," "crucible," and "melody."

Finally in the news, biologists have proved that with each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and—owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation—over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules that have been exhaled by everyone who has ever lived, including Joan of Arc, Gengis Khan, Cleopatra, and Malcolm X.

You have been tuned to PNN, the Pronoia News Network. Our report has been brought to you by the state of mind that the poet John Keats enjoyed when he said, "If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true."

For 1,109 more items of good news, read the book.

Bill Moyers Ambush

An Historic Night - John Stewart

EPA Chief Grilled on being a White House Puppet

WASHINGTON, DC, May 21, 2008 (ENS) - The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stonewalled Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, refusing to provide information about the role the White House played in recent agency decisions involving the regulation of greenhouse gases and the finalization of a new federal smog standard. The defiance of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson drew a sharp rebuke from the Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, who said the EPA chief has repeatedly bowed to pressure from the White House and become "essentially a figurehead."

"My concern is decisions at EPA are not being made on the science and they are not being made on the law," said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat. "They are being made at the White House and they are being made for political reasons."
Congressman Henry Waxman chairs the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)

Waxman said senior EPA staff had told Congressional investigators that Johnson reversed course on the smog standard, abandoning a plan to set a secondary standard designed to protect natural ecosystems from ground-level ozone, the key ingredient in smog.

The investigation by Waxman's committee found that the president weighed in with his opposition to a secondary ozone standard only hours before EPA finalized the new rule on March 12.

The EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, CASAC, had recommended setting such a standard to better protect natural ecosystems from the hazards of smog. Documents show Johnson initially agreed with that recommendation. The final rule did not set a secondary standard.

Waxman also pointed to depositions from agency staff that said Johnson caved to the White House in deciding to reject California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

He criticized the EPA chief for a second global warming decision, pointing to agency documents and testimony that indicate Johnson was prepared to push forward last December with an agency effort to begin exploring how to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, only to abandon the plan due to White House pressure.

"Three times in the last six months you have recommended to the White House that EPA take steps to address climate change and protect the environment," Waxman told Johnson. "In each case, your positions were right on the science and the law but in each case you backed down."

Waxman added that Johnson and other administration officials have failed to fill in gaps about how the process for each of the decisions was completed and questioned the legality of the White House's involvement.

"The president apparently insisted on his judgment and overrode the unanimous recommendations of EPA scientific and legal experts," he said "Our investigation has not been able to find any evidence that the president based his decisions on the science, the record, or the law. Indeed, there's virtually no credible record of any kind in support of the decisions."

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Link to Full Article

Coverup Charged in DC Salmon Hearing

West Coast lawmakers blast federal fishery officials over salmon losses
By David Whitney

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats on Thursday angrily accused federal fishery officials of using scientific reports to cover up the depth of the risks to salmon populations from the diversion of river water to farming on the West Coast.

The result, they said during a hostile hearing, was that salmon stocks collapsed, forcing state and federal authorities to ban salmon fishing earlier this year.

"We're devastated, and our communities are devastated," said Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif. "They haven't been using good science. It's sophomoric. People are losing their livelihoods."

Capps' comments came during a break in a House Natural Resources fisheries subcommittee hearing at which a dozen or so West Coast Democrats showed up to grill Rodney McInnis, administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service's regional office in Long Beach, Calif.

The hearing came a day after the House approved a huge farm bill containing $170 million in economic disaster funding for commercial fishermen and fishing communities as a result of the recent closure of the salmon season because of perilously low numbers of fish returning to the Sacramento River to spawn.

The closure followed a sharp reduction in the season two years ago because of low returns to the Klamath River and continuing problems with Columbia River salmon.

Common to all three river systems are NMFS biological opinions some of which federal courts later rejected as failing to use the best available science or otherwise failing to look broadly at the health of the fish in deciding the impacts of diverting river water for farming.

One such report supported a Bureau of Reclamation plan to divert water to farming interests from the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border. But the plan allowed the river's level to drop so low and its water to become so warm that more than 30,000 salmon died in 2002, the largest fish die-off in U.S. history. The full result of that die-off wasn't felt for years, however, when fisheries had to be closed because the fish that had died had not laid eggs and reproduced.

Democrats charged that the failure to predict the impact of such water diversions was part of a pattern of abuse of science by the Bush administration.

"Along with a fishing failure, this is the failure of an agency," declared Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif.

"I worry that science is used to justify a decision," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.

"I assure you, this is not the situation," said McInnis.

Idaho Rep. Bill Sali, one of the few Republicans attending, charged that Democrats were "using the closure of the Pacific fishery to further a (political) agenda."

But McInnis acknowledged that there had been problems with his agency's work and insisted that steps are being taken to correct them.

Outside, independent scientists are now reviewing the agency's opinions, he said. The agency also is looking more deeply at what it takes to recover endangered stocks.

McInnis said the first results of this broader consultation should appear in September, when the agency releases its draft opinion on California's Central Valley Project and the vast irrigation system's impact on salmon.

"How will they know we've fixed the problems?" McInnis said during a brief interview. "An intermediate step is what the courts will say about us doing our job. But ultimately we've got to get the fish to come back."

The cause of the Sacramento River salmon collapse is still a matter of dispute, with some thinking it relates to water quality and agriculture diversions from the San Francisco Bay Delta. McInnis said his scientists believe the cause is related to poor ocean conditions for the fish.

Source: LInk