[Plantagenet]

Freeman Dyson predicts that in 50 years we will have genetically engineered trees that will produce a replacement for oil.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007 ... ndex2.html

IMHO, this is a very good idea to solve Peak Oil.

We already can make diesel from Palm trees now. I saw Palm Oil plantations in northern New Guinea in August, and visited the local refineries that were making diesel fuel from the Palm nuts, and even went to a local gas station that refueled our bus using the Palm Oil diesel (a guy came out with a jerry can and poured in five gallons of diesel made from Palm Oil). Scale it up using genetic engineering to make the trees 10x-100x more efficient, and you've got a nice replacement for petroleum.

[Ludi]

50 years, huh?

[Plantagenet]

Dyson's idea that "biodiesel" production can be enhanced though genetic engineering is a good one.

[Plantagenet]

"My idea is that in 50 years, this whole problem of fossil fuels will evaporate because we'll learn how to grow trees that produce liquid fuels much more efficiently than existing trees. So we'll have an ample supply of fuel without having to dig it out of the ground. I think that's very likely to happen. Fifty years is long enough for that kind of technology to take over the world, and 50 years is short enough so that the climate won't have changed very much in the meantime."

Explain how you envision this happening through trees.

"At the moment, trees are less than 1 percent efficient in turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into wood. And wood is also not a convenient fuel. It has to be harvested. You have to chop down the tree to get the wood. That's destructive and ugly. So, first, you could program a tree to be 10 times as efficient, and so you'd need 10 times less land to produce the fuel. Secondly, you could produce the fuel in the form of a liquid that would go into an underground pipeline, so that you wouldn't need to chop down the trees to get the fuel. It seems to me a very practical solution. It's just a question of learning how to do it." --Freeman Dyson

[Nicholai]

Yeah and how much space would you need for those trees to grow to replace fossil fuels at the same rate as fossil fuel depletion (13% per year in Cantarell) as well as create growth? Are you taking into account the effects of global warming and the fact that we will surpass our 2 degree mark, thereby tossing all normal and relative rainfall/weather patters of a majority of the Earth's climate regions into the air? How will we continue to grow both more food and fuel with less predictable weather patterns and the obvious problem of finite space? We can't plant our way out of the fact that we live in a finite world.

[emersonbiggins]

If we're looking at 50 year solutions, then I submit for your review:
Cold Fusion

That is all.

[Plantagenet]

Dyson's idea that the petroleum economy will be replaced with a tree-oil economy in 50 years is intriguing. It implies we will bioengineer trees to produce tree oil in 10-20 years, and then be planting trees and rejiggering the economy to work on tree oil so the transformation is complete in 50 years.

Dyson's point is based on only a slight extrapolation from modern trends....we are on the verge of being able to genengineer living things. This raises the possibility of greatly improving the biofuel productivity of palms and others biofuel sources over modern levels.

[NoFreeSpeech]

Hilarious how Dyson bashes Richard Dawkins.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way he's going about it. I don't deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to be an atheist. That simply turns young people away from science. He's convinced a lot of young people not to be scientists because they don't want to be atheists. I'm strongly against him on that question. It's simply not true what he's saying, and it's not only not true but also harmful. The fact is that many of my friends are much more religious than I am and are first-rate scientists. There's absolutely nothing that stops you from being both.

[Bas]

it will be very hard to make plants more efficient at using solar energy, actually, plants have been around for so long that if it was possible for them to be more efficient, they would have been: photosynthesis can't be made more efficient.

My "money" is still on solar (as in panels etc)

[Plantagenet]

The Malaysian government is refocusing the use of palm oil to the production of biodiesel to cater to the huge demand from European countries; it has encouraged the building of biodiesel plants. This is due to the higher prices of fuel and increasing demand for alternative sources of energy in the Western world.
The plants will start operating middle of next year and produce 100,000 tonnes of biodiesel annually. Strong demand for biodiesel from Europe as well as Colombia, India, South Korea and Turkey has fueled the industry's growth as more countries seek to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.....

On 23 Nov 2006 Australia's first palm oil based biodiesel plant was opened in Darwin. When fully operational in 2007 this plant should produce 140 million litres of biodiesel annually.[10]

--from Wikipedia

-----------------

And, according to Dyson, the productivity of the trees can be increased significantly using genetic engineering.

There are HUGE tropical and semi-tropical areas in Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaysia, Phillippines, brazil, the carribean, etc. northern Australia etc. that are suitable for biodiesel production.

As petroleum production drops, the use of wind, solar, and biofuels will increase in the future.

[strider3700]

I wouldn't call thinking that genetically engineered trees can produce oil the same thing as solving the problem.

Changing everything to electricity and running the world off of that is just as much an solution. It's the total lack of details that means it may take awhile to see how it will even work.

Ideas are worthless unless implemented

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('strider3700', 'I')deas are worthless unless implemented

[strider3700]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('strider3700', 'I')deas are worthless unless implemented

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('strider3700', ' ')sunshine and lolipops

[PeakHoax]

On the global warming hoax:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Why did you choose to be heretical about climate change?

I'm heretical because I was in the business of studying climate change at least 30 years ago before it became fashionable. I used to go to Oak Ridge National Laboratory [in Tennessee], which was then the leading place for studying it, and they had a very good group of people there. I went there regularly and wrote a paper, which was published, essentially about the connection between climate and vegetation. It was amazing how little we knew, and that's still true. It's just very interesting that, scientifically, almost all the statements that are made publicly are wrong.

We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods. The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared. The economic conditions in the world and the technology change much more rapidly than the climate, so I don't see any reason for being in a hurry.

There's a huge movement among scientists and policymakers making the case that global warming is urgent. Have you publicly debated any of them?

It's not very helpful. True believers are not going to change their minds just because of me.

Why do you believe they feel so strong about the issue? Do you think they misconstrue the science?

I think it's a combination of things. Take Al Gore, who is sort of the chief propagandist. I think for him it really is a religion. He has this unshakable belief that it's his mission to spread the gospel of global warming according to Al. So there's nothing I can do about that. His film is a brilliant piece of work. It looks wonderful when you see it. The fact is of course that the pictures don't actually prove what he's saying is true.

Can you give an example?

A polar bear sitting on a melting piece of ice. The poor bear is going to drown, and it's a tear-jerker. But in fact, the bears are doing very well. The numbers of bears in the Arctic are increasing rather than decreasing. On the whole, they like it to be warm.

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least. So it's certainly long before human activities could have caused it.

What we also know, going back 4,000 years, is that the glaciers were actually a lot smaller. They actually grew in the meantime. So it seems to be some sort of cyclical process. They grow and shrink and there's no particular reason for being worried just because they're shrinking at the moment. I'm not saying there's no climate change. Of course there's climate change. Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came. There is also human-induced climate change. That's certainly happening too. But I don't think there's reason for worrying about it.

So climate change has been politicized?

There is this very strong organization, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's a group of officially anointed experts who produce statements every five years. This community of people is regarded as sacrosanct. And they're very intolerant. They always regard any criticism as a hostile act that has to be fought. I think they have behaved pretty badly. But that's rather an unusual case in the world of science -- that's where the politics has corrupted the science. But in general, scientists are not largely against heretics. This is something rather peculiar to climate studies. It also has to do with the way [the studies are] funded. The whole community of climate experts is funded on the basis that it's an urgent problem. So [they] can't possibly say it's not urgent or else they'll lose their thumbs.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'T')he Malaysian government is refocusing the use of palm oil to the production of biodiesel to cater to the huge demand from European countries; it has encouraged the building of biodiesel plants. This is due to the higher prices of fuel and increasing demand for alternative sources of energy in the Western world.
The plants will start operating middle of next year and produce 100,000 tonnes of biodiesel annually. Strong demand for biodiesel from Europe as well as Colombia, India, South Korea and Turkey has fueled the industry's growth as more countries seek to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.....

On 23 Nov 2006 Australia's first palm oil based biodiesel plant was opened in Darwin. When fully operational in 2007 this plant should produce 140 million litres of biodiesel annually.[10]

--from Wikipedia

[Plantagenet]

Dyson isn't saying global climate change is a hoax. He's saying it isn't going to be as catastrophic as the doom-sayers claim.

Dyson is right that warmer temps are a plus for some areas. Our recent warmer weather in Alaska, for instance, has been very pleasant.

[Plantagenet]

Its silly to blame George Bush for ecological problems associated with Palm Oil plantations, when the US doesn't import a drop of Palm Oil diesel----- all the Palm Oil diesel is sold to Europe and Asia.

Follow the money.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', ' ')the US doesn't import a drop of Palm Oil-