The French and the rest of Europe are up in arms over soaring gas and food prices. Truckers, taxi drivers, farmers and fishermen across the continent are blocking roads and raising hell.

As Americans (and I include myself) sit on our collective asses!

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4217016.html These vehicles will be availible in India, Australia, and Europe shortly.

The funny part is, our current problems are all about Americans screwing fellow Americans as much and as often as possible. Is that what McCain and his FOX propagandists mean by "we're the greatest nation on Earth, and the greatest nation ever to have been on Earth?"

We're number one, we're number one, we're number one...we're NUMB.

RE: Air cars from India, mass protesting in Europe, etc.

Noteworthy that NOTHING is actively being done in the USA, the land from whence all of this upcoming tragedy came.

The US has some brilliant minds...(mine not being one of them)..yet I saw this coming..so how was it that people who were incompetent gained so much power in the US and did so much damage to the economy?

My guess is many thought they could weather the Bush years and do well in the long run...Maybe now those brilliant minds will gain some power. There should be some consequences for making these kinds of errors...the neocons should lose power...permanently.

Obama may be taking a stance on Israel and Iran now to try to defuse any situation that could lead to war because his presidency could lead to a policy change and that fear of change might encourage some groups to be more aggresive.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/making-renewabl.html

Making Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Oil — From Algae
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailMay 29, 2008 | 5:45:25 PMCategories: Biofuel

Hirescrude_2

A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

That's a fraction of the 20 million or so barrels of petroleum the United States consumes each day, but Sapphire Energy says "green crude" production could ramp up to a level sufficient to ease our dependence on foreign oil, if not end it altogether.

Company CEO Jason Pyle says the algal oil is chemically identical to light sweet crude and compatible with America's $1.5 trillion petroleum infrastructure, making it a direct replacement for oil. Although the algal fuels refined from it emit as much carbon dioxide as conventional fuels, the company says the emissions are offset by the photosynthetic process that uses sunlight, water and C02 to create algal crude.

"At the very worst, it's carbon neutral," Pyle says, calling the fuels a "benchmark for an entire new industry" and "a paradigm change."

Energy experts and air quality regulators say they'll withhold judgment on those claims until they've seen a production-to-combustion analysis of the fuel's emissions. But they say Sapphire could be on to something.

Making fuel from algae is nothing new, and a lot of organizations, from the smallest start-up to the biggest oil companies, are trying to find the best way to do it. But most of the effort has been on replacing diesel fuel or kerosene. Sapphire wants to replace petroleum.

"We designed it to be a completely fungible product with crude oil," Pyle says. He says the company has refined its algal crude into 91-octane gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene chemically identical to conventional fuels. He wouldn't disclose how the process works or what it costs but said it is competitive with deep-water oil drilling and extracting petroleum from tar sands.

Sapphire also avoids the food-for-fuel debate that has plagued crop-based biofuels because it uses algae and works on non-arable land with non-potable water. Pyle wouldn't say where Sapphire plans to build the demonstration plant it will have running later this year, but it's reportedly working in Oklahoma and may locate its facilities in the South and Southwest. It hopes to have a full-scale plant up and running within five years, producing 10,000 barrels of green crude a day. The company has lined up more than $50 million in funding from investors like ARCH Venture Partners.

Ramping up to that level of production without killing the algae can be tricky, one expert said, and the environmental impact of green crude remain to be seen. Even if it is carbon neutral, the algal fuels will emit pollutants that contribute to smog and ozone, says Don Anair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"You're still going to get combustion emissions. You aren't eliminating those with algal fuels," he says, echoing a point the California Air Resources Board made. Still, Anair is cautiously optimistic.

"The fact that there is a lot of interest in finding a better way to fuel our transportation system is encouraging," he says. "This is one avenue to pursue that has very good potential."

Photo by Sapphire Energy.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece

June 14, 2008

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'

Chris Ayres

"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.
Related Links

* Biofuel: a tankful of weed juice

* The arithmetic of crude oil

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer 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.

LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm's president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. "How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?" he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being "prerevenue".

Inside LS9's cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9's bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. "Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars," he says. "Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000."

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-publicised 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.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America's weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

"Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we'll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011," says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? "It's not the same as with food," Mr Pal says. "We're putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we're done with them, they're destroyed."

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

Hey Eric, my wife and I have always enjoyed watching you on TVO.

I notice that people in Canada don't talk about dumping the Loonie for the Greenback as our currency, like they did a few years back.

I once had a dream that an American tank column was making its way down main street Canada. How do you spell friendship......A N E X.

What is so special about the U.S.A. that it gets to use one fourth of the world's oil when it has just one twenty-fifth of the world's population? With a huge debt to repay it would be appropriate for the U.S.A. to cut back to using just one thirtieth of the world's oil while it repays its' obligations and then move up to its' fair share of 4% if world oil use. But if China uses oil to manufacture goods for people in the U.S.A. then that oil should count as being used by the U.S.A. As for the answer to the question that was posed above, the special thing about the U.S.A. is weapons. That is all the U.S.A. has going for it right now and so they are doing everything they can to stay way ahead of every other country in weapons development and deployment.

huntz, that was in fact the opening scene of a short story I wrote in seventh grade back in the 1980s.

American society has been so atomized, that it cannot effectively resist what it's own elite class is doing to it. The American Dream of owning your own house and car is in fact eating itself to death.

. . . finance has become America's leading industry while manufacturing has shrunk to only 12%.

Want to know why (though not necessarily how) the U.S. economy is going to suffer a 360 degree collapse? Above is the answer. With the splattered internet and housing bubbles, as well as the catastrophe in Iraq to guide you, you can be certain that both supersonic greed and the most short-sighted kind of eye-popping stupidity that America produces in abundance will triumph in the "finance industry", an industry where no actual product is produced. The Emerils and Iron Chefs of this "industry" will cook the books until we'll all be rubbing nickels together, because that's all we'll have left. We can thank the Pilgrims for this - those penurious, prissy, tight-assed flim flammers who landed on Plymouth Rock and began scamming the natives while their shoes were still wet from wading ashore.

What the 'esteemed' Mr. Margolis leaves out is the fact that oil and gas is a government monopoly in China. Of course the prices are lower. Otherwise the average Chinese citizen would not be able to power his 'great leap forward' in his Ford knockoff.

It's not the oil speculators fault. They are a symptom, not the cause. The Saudi's and OPEC are not at fault. They too are a symptom. Th fall of the US dollar is not the cause. It's Just another symptom.

Those are all *signs* of what is happening.

The *cause* is simple.

The oil is running out. Refining capacity is encountering a rising demand as physical production is starting to fall off. It is a confluence of factors that even the oil companies themselves will not deny if directly confronted with the evidence.

Peak oil is here. Now.

And before the 'abiotic oil' crowd gets started, if there is all this oil just dribbling into existence all over the world without a source, why has there been no major worldwide announcement of such a thing, that just happens to violate several physical and natural laws, hmm? Why has every single oil deposit tested shown signs of having once been LIVING ORGANISMS? Abiotic oil is a hoax perpetrated upon a gullible and desperate mob that refuse to look at the reality that the oil our society depends on is running out. Those who fervently defend abiotic oil routinely refuse to even consider making a profound change of lifestyle that would mean the end of their SUV driving, McFood eating, shopaholic ways, defending the voratious, rapacious 'American Dream' of rampant over-consumption.

"What is so special about the U.S.A. that it gets to use one fourth of the world's oil when it has just one twenty-fifth of the world's population?"

That it's GDP is much closer to one fourth than one twenty fifth of the world as a whole. Energy use is a rough proxy for GDP.

"That it's GDP is much closer to one fourth than one twenty fifth of the world as a whole. "

In fact, depending on the source, US GDP is just above or just below one fourth of world GDP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

"Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in 2007 that the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was about seizing oil. The Bush-Cheney strategy was aimed at seizing Iraq's oil, then boosting production to break up the oil cartel, OPEC. The result was a disaster."

Uh, yeah, and a bunch of us tried to warn everyone else 5 years ago that an invasion of Iraq to seize their oil WOULD be a disaster, but did Washington listen? Nooooooooooooooooo! This is exactly what happens when you put rich oil men in the White House to run things. They screw everything up and then shift the blame elsewhere to make themselves look like they had nothing to do with it.

And STILL, no impeachment is forthcoming. Bush lied, people died. Clinton lied about a sexual pecadillio and got impeached for it. It boggles me that this administration has gotten away with so much criminal activity, and yet NO ONE wants to hold them responsible OR accountable for it. If they are never impeached, indicted or anything else, what will ultimately happen is that it will set a dangerous precedent for future administrations to do as they please and suffer no consequences for it.

In essence, weapons of mass destruction will be left behind for others to use. And there won't be anything that anyone can do about it. If any future presidents are impeached for similar offenses to what the Bush administration has done now, it will leave me wondering why the Bush administration got away with it. But doubtless any future impeachments will be of Democratic presidents by Republican Congresses, just the way that Clinton was impeached by the upstart Republicans who had just taken over Congress in the midterm elections during the Clinton administration.

Or maybe impeachment, as a result of the Clinton mess, has been rendered powerless and no longer of any real consequence, since Clinton wasn't removed from office by his impeachment. It would be a real shame if it had suddenly become a kind of moot point to bother to impeach anyone. That would take away a critical element of power from Congress that our Founding Fathers put in the Constitution for a very good reason. But then again, the Bush administration considers the Constitution just a "G-D piece of paper" that's not worth wiping your arse with. This, from a president who vows to uphold, protect and defend the very piece of paper he's condemning as worthless. For that alone, he ought to be impeached.

Well, the Iraq invasion mess is going to fall on to our next President to solve, whoever he is. Bush won't bother to clean up the mess he made, just like the juvenile frat boy he really is inside. Uncle Dick certainly won't do it for him, gal pal Condi won't, either. No, he'll leave his mess for the next person to clean up, and won't have to claim any responsibility for it if it all goes awry and becomes a hopeless morass that will take decades to clean up.

And in the meantime, our dollar has sunk to levels of the currencies of third world countries. Hell, we may as well be using Mexican Pesos, for all the dollar is worth. Another fine mess Bush has gotten us into that he will disavow any responsibility for cleaning up. What a bunch of buffoons we have in Washington. Throw the lot of them out and send in people who really WANT to fix things and won't demand exhorbitant wages or perks or lobbyists or anything else, for that matter. Just honest citizens fed up with how professional pols have run things for far too long now. (Oh, we can keep Kucinich, Wexler, Feingold and a few other progressives, but aside from them, throw them all out on their arses!)

The only comfort I can take is that history will most certainly NOT treat this administration kindly. It may well label it the absolute worst administration in American history. That would make sticking around long enough really worth it to see happen! May I live a long enough life to live to read the history books a few generations from now and see what they have to say about the Bush years! (And that may well happen, as I am but a youthful 51 years of age right now!)

ooops...A N N E X.

while I'm here, does anyone think that UFO's will ride into town at the last minute to save our greedy monkey souls?
Ya, I didn't think so.

Goodnight, all you dreamers of a better world.

I really had to laugh when reading this article - ha!

The US has been riding so high for all these years after WWII when the rest of the world was left for rubble, that it got it into its collective consciousness that it was given an entitlement to 25% plus of the world consumption of petroleum products by God himself/herself. The general boneheadedness of the US consumers (I wont say "American Consumer" because it's not fair to drag the Costa Ricans, Mexicans, Canadians, etc into this mix - even if they might deserve it) has precluded them/us form accepting the fact that an economy which is constructed exclusively on the availability and use of cheap oil is doomed to collapse when saaid oil is gone. It had been predicted as far back as the '50s ( Club of Rome - based on projected population growth verses known and projected new sources of oil) that the stuff would be gone between 2050 ans 2100. Today we're looking at ~2060.

Infrastructure - what a joke. While Europe may be smaller, one can travel from anywhere there to anywhere via train+bus, we've got Amtrak and Greyhound/Trailway. While we were investing in McMansions, they were investing in railways and smaller, highly insulated homes, and more recently in alternate energy. That nitwit Hollywood flyboy had the solar panels the peanut farmer had mounted on the Whitehouse torn out. The boneheads cheered. "The guy in the cardigan is a wimp, get rid of that crap".

US travelers go to Italy, France, or wherever to eat well. There, tomatoes come from down the road and string beans from up that hill and wine from grapes from across that valley. Here in the US, well the tomatoes are from near Tallahassee, FL and the strawberries form Oxnard, CA (and the asparagus from Peru), and I may as well be eating Saran Wrap as this plastic shit being passed off as food.

Now, the day of reckoning is fast approaching and the Imperial US is being handed its comeuppance. We are fast devolving into a third world banana republic. My friends, you keep asking when the price of gas will start coming back down and I say, "never, you poor fool".

Richsmith2 - Hey, go ahead, drag us Canucks into the whole 'doing-our-damnedest-to squander-our-children's-legacy' pile.

After all, Stephen Harper is our PM and Alberta is slinging out Tarsands based petro-sludge disguised as oil.

$ was backed by gold, now it is backed by military. Financial finagling is the largest sector of the economy. Salvation by algae/bugs.

Hey there Galen

I don't think we can be quiet so dismissive of the abiotic oil hypothesis just yet. I say this as someone who has been 'long' oil futures (yes, I am a dreaded speculator) pretty much non-stop since 2002 (when WTI was $19 a barrel). So I am no oil bear, believe me (although I am utterly bearish on the US's long term future, and have been since 1999 - the US is now, where Britain was in 1919).

The presence of biological residue in extracted oil is not terribly surprising - there is biological residue pretty much everywhere. Inferring biological origin basedo n biological residue is like saying bears are made from poo because when you examine a bear you can bet there will be traces of poo on it. Now if someone was to say that poo (at least, the poo found on bears) is made from bears I would be more in agreement...

As I say - I am agnostic about the AOH; in the ordinary course of events my natural cynicism would be ringing alarm bells about anything that seems to offer *relative* abundance of ANY resource (ten years of training as a conservative economist makes one somewhat prone to dismiss anything as probably pie-in-the-sky).

I am not a geologist, but I have read stuff by people who are, and it genuinely seems that the jury is still out.

In any case, the abiotic generation of oil does NOT imply that it can withstand any extraction rate we choose to impose upon it; we will get to the bottom of the barrel if it is extracted faster than it is produced. The AOH does not declare that oil can be extracted ad libitum - just that, once it is extracted, the reserves will refill faster than is assumed under the conventional (Getty) hypothesis... i.e., under the AOH we don't have to wait for a bunch of dinosaurs and trees to melt.

I don't know why it is, but North Americans seem to have this strange 'binary' view of things... i.e., if one hypothesis means that oil is relatively scarce, ANY cmpeting hypothesis MUST mean that oil is absolutely abundant. Not so.

Anyhow - the next big move for oil (by which I mean a move that lasts 2-3 weeks and moves the price 15-20 bucks a barrel) will be DOWN.

Once all the nuffnuffs (small, thinly funded speculators who are prone to enter trends just as they are finishing) are on the same side of the boat, the Big Boyz will gut them like fish.

That said, I will not 'short' oil (nor gold, nor the Euro)... the reason for that is simple - there is a reasonable probability that the Israeli government or the Cheney Administration are going to start blowing up other bits of the Cradle of Civilisation - at which time the Iranians will sink a couple of US aircrat carriers in the Straits of Hormuz and oil will hit $350-400 a barrel in a week (to see why, read up on the SS-NX-22 Yahkonts anti-shipping missile, and the lack of effective countermeasures in the US defensive arsenal).

And if Darth 'dick' Cheney and his lunatic offsiders bomb Isfahan and Natanz, that price spike will happen regardless as to whether oil is abiotic or not.

Cheerio

GT
France

Matthew Simmons, author of 'Twilight in the Desert' recently speculated that oil could possibly go as high as $600/bbl., especially with the very real probability that there will be an attack on Iran.

Considering that a US style economy will implode at $200/ bbl, the implication of $600/bbl are dire indeed.

GT- Abiotic oil is pie in the sky dreaming. It is wishing for something for nothing. The processes that gave rise to oil in the first place are still taking place. It's just that we will have to wait, oh, let's say 2-5 million years to get any measurable results.

As for the outcome of a US or US/Israeli attack on Iran, the possibility was war-gamed back in 2005 by the US Navy. The result was 2/3 of the US pacific fleet sunk or severely damaged to the point of replacement. The Navy's response?

Reset, forbid the commander of the 'Iranians' from using asymmetrical warfare tactics, and to announce all of his attacks in advance and bring his forces to the attack in predictable straight lines, and disregard the use of the available anti capital ship weapons technology (i.e. Sunburn and other 'shipkiller' missiles).

"BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq said on Monday it has failed to sign technical support agreements with global oil majors which were aimed at helping boost the war-torn country's oil production."

There is only one enemy of the people of this world and that is the capitalist elites. All political and military challenges to the people arise from these elites. The politicians and their terrorist thugs - the military - are paid to carry out the agenda set by these elites.

The ONLY way to defend the interests of the people of this world is to overthrow capitalist hegemony in the world through socialist revolutions.

People are starting to conserve energy in Texas, Truckers are lowering their speed to conseve fuel, many folks are buying more fuel efficient cars, hybrids are selling over invoice (though I read this morning that my government is at work again, planning to phase out the tax susidies on hybrids...brilliant timing!), dually pickups sitting at the dealers, SUV sales down, individual solar sales picking up.....I think Americans are doing more than is suggested here.

And I doubt Texas is alone in this. If you are in the North I'll bet you are trying to find ways to heat with less fuel oil. People here are replacing working A/C units with more efficient units because it saves tham money.

If gas goes to $5.00 a gallon, we might cut 10 years off becoming more fuel efficient.

Remember from the 79/80 gas crisis to now, we are over 50% more fuel efficient than we were in 1980.

And General Motors is going down the tubes because somehow, they didn't see this gas crisis coming. In business they say some get it between the eyes and some get it in the temple. Our auto industry is getting it in the temple-they didn't even see it coming. And these CEO's make salaries of 2 to 3 million a year! I think a high school business club could run the American auto industry much better than these clowns.

I think a high school business club could run the American auto industry much better than these clowns.

I hope you aren't waiting for someone to disagree with you

The world would be much better off if USA hadn't re-elected Wee Bushy

Dear Lord Anthony,

Here's a bit of news for you. The USA did not re-elect bush. It never elected him in the first place.

Peace out.

sLiMsHaDy
So... how little I understand about USA

He wasn't elected, he wasn't re-elected..... but Dems and Republicans just gave him another truckload of Iraq-money?

Who or what is he? If he's a disgraced lame-duck why is he getting any war-dosh at all?

Is there a simple explanation for those outside USA?

Peace back.