How about a thread...................

[indygal]

I don't think babies should ever be thrown out with bath water. I'm encouraged by other kinds of biofuels, such as those made with cornstalks, and the tests being done with switchgrass. I recently read of watermelons being processed as a fuel source -- it would make good use of melons that don't pass the "appearance" test for food consumption. How sweet is that?

I don't know a lot about fuel research, but I remember when Japanese imports were called rice burners. Does anyone know if the rice stalk has ever been processed as a fuel source? (Other than sake, I'm not aware of any!)

[frawin]

Indygal, Switch Grass is my favorite ethanol fuel possibility. One it can be harvested more than once a growing season, two you don't have the cost to plant it for every crop. The tillage costs are very high for Corn, Sugar Beets etc, but with Switch Grass once it is planted it can be harvested over and over. I think we need to explore every possibility. We have to depend on to many other goverments for our energy needs and many of them are our enemies.  I would like to see us get started developing more of our own reserves, unfortunately if we drilled full out and tried to depend fully on our reserves we would run out pretty fast. Our energy consumption runs in the neighborhood of 7.5 Billion barrels a year, when they talk about gigantic oil reserve discoveries of 1-2 Billion, it is not as big as it seems.

[pamsback]

Well, seems like this algae thing would solve several problems.......no planting, no using food for fuel, clearing up some pollution problems......

[srkruzich]

Well, seems like this algae thing would solve several problems.......no planting, no using food for fuel, clearing up some pollution problems......

You know algae might clear up polluted waters by absorbing the pollutant. I don't know for sure about that.  I DO know that cattails filter the water and clean up polluted water.

IF you take one of these lagoons and have a cattail bed in one end of it, and reeds along with that, the lagoon water will be clean. 
You can test the water and find life in it as well as the run off will be clean enough to use uv light on and kill off any miscreant bacterias. 

I have researched a lot of septic ideas and the cattail solution is one of the best i have seen outside of the one that is a surface system that filters the water so well that you can drink it coming out of the other end. 

I know when i had my greenhouse up, i used to buy CO2 and release it into the greenhouse.  The plants eat it up and grow like crazy. 

[Tobina+1]

I just don't think we should put all our eggs in one basket.  Not JUST oil, not JUST corn, not JUST algae, not JUST sugar... how about all of them?  (What?  A competitive market? To keep prices down?)  The biggest thing would be to make cars that can run on any/all of these fuel sources.

[Tobina+1]

Whoever comes up with the "magic exlicer" will be gazillionaires.

That's my point; why does there have to be just one "magic elixer"?  (or maybe your point was that there could be more than one and they all will be gazillionaires?)

[jarhead]

Let's see--if they become gazillionaires---then to "spread the wealth'",Uncle Sam takes a bazillion from each one ?? How long would it take to pay off the national debt ?? Tobina, you're a college kid, what's the answer ?

[Tobina+1]

Math wasn't my thing, but my best estimate would be... "not very long"!   
Unless they all moved to a different country, or had some off-shore accounts (now I'm brining in my experience from watching too many TV shows).

[pamsback]

See......there is good news out there...........................

Malawian boy uses wind to power hope,

By Faith Karimi
CNN
     
(CNN) -- William Kamkwamba dreamed of powering his village with the only resource that was freely available to him.

His native Malawi had gone through one of its worst droughts seven years ago, killing thousands. His family and others were surviving on one meal a day. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched, leaving his father, a farmer, without any income.

But amid all the shortages, one thing was still abundant.

Wind.

"I wanted to do something to help and change things," he said. "Then I said to myself, 'If they can make electricity out of wind, I can try, too.'"

Kamkwamba was kicked out of school when he couldn't pay $80 in school fees, and he spent his days at the library, where a book with photographs of windmills caught his eye.

"I thought, this thing exists in this book, it means someone else managed to build this machine," he said.

Armed with the book, the then-14-year-old taught himself to build windmills. He scoured through junkyards for items, including bicycle parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans and car batteries. For the tower, he collected wood from blue-gum trees.

"Everyone laughed at me when I told them I was building a windmill. They thought I was crazy," he said. "Then I started telling them I was just playing with the parts. That sounded more normal.
That was 2002. Now, he has five windmills, the tallest at 37 feet. He built one at an area school that he used to teach classes on windmill-building.

The windmills generate electricity and pump water in his hometown, north of the capital, Lilongwe. Neighbors regularly trek across the dusty footpaths to his house to charge their cellphones. Others stop by to listen to Malawian reggae music blaring from a radio.

When he started building the first windmill in 2002, word that he was "crazy" spread all over his village. Some people said he was bewitched -- a common description for people with perplexing behavior in some African cultures.

"All of us, even my mother, thought that he had gone mad," said his sister Doris Kamkwamba.

Villagers would surround him to snicker and point, Kamkwamba said. Ignoring them, he would quietly bolt pieces using a screwdriver made of a heated nail attached to a corncob. The heat -- from both the crowd and the melted, flattened pipes he used as blades -- did not deter him.

Three months later, his first windmill churned to life as relief swept over him. As the blades whirled, a bulb attached to the windmill flickered on.

"I wanted to finish it just to prove them wrong," he said. "I knew people would then stop thinking I was crazy."

Kamkwamba, now 22, is a student at the African Leadership Academy, an elite South African school for young leaders. Donors pay for his education.

His story has turned him into a globetrotter. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, an avid advocate of green living, has applauded his work. Kamkwamba is invited to events worldwide to share his experience with entrepreneurs. During a recent trip to Palm Springs, California, he saw a real windmill for the first time -- lofty and majestic -- a far cry from the wobbly, wooden structures that spin in his backyard.

Former Associated Press correspondent Bryan Mealer, who covered Africa, wrote a book, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," after hearing Kamkwamba's story. The book was released in the United States last week.

Mealer, a native of San Antonio, Texas, said he lived with Kamkwamba in his village for months to write the book. The story was a refreshing change after years of covering bloody conflicts in the region, Mealer said.

Kamkwamba is part of a generation of Africans who are not waiting for their governments or aid groups to come to their rescue, according to the author.

"They are seizing opportunities and technology, and finding solutions to their own problems," Mealer said. "One of the keys of his success is ... he's never wanted to rest on his laurels."

[sixdogsmom]

Good one Pam!