I’m currently (honestly, and coincidentally) reading “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, which is an excellent antidote to environmental sensationalism, laying out the historical precedents of civilizations that have faced and either adapted to or succumbed to environmental change or the limits of available resources.

(gotta give you one every now and then)

I’m reading “Guerilla’s in the Mist” by Bob Newman now, all about the history and tactics of guerilla warfare, kind of fun.

I am doing my part for the war on greedy oil tyrants (both arab n texan). How ’bout you?

You read a book once? Finally you say something that I can believe.

Nagging questions remain:

How many gallons of oil would you get if you harvested the pond scum in Washington DC and the area around Crawford?

What if every homeowner had a little pond and each year they collected the algae and mailed it to the IRS instead of paying taxes, would that help?

On a serious note, maybe the pond scum is a good use for the environmental disaster in areas where the Tar Sands have been mined in N. Alberta. By the time it’s all mined (c. 2150 at current rates?) I bet you could fit several connecticuts into the holes left behind. That’s crude reckoning.

I promise never to pun again.

“would have thought shcb would know more about pond scume, considering… ”

… he supports McNasty

http://www.rense.com/general81/mcnasty.htm

it is pretty simple: you put lifeform into sterile water, add carbon (even power plant waste - great way to sequester carbon btw!), perhaps some trace minerals and then add sunlight. Wait for algae to store the sunlight energy as lipid energy and then harvest. Start with even one of these things in a sterile environment and you can eliminate disease in the system. It is pond scum. The stuff is pretty hardy.

1 to 3 trillion dollars (and 4000+ lives so far) on the Iraq Mistake. We could have used that money much more wisely. Now you’ll say something rwnj-ish like “but that is where we are today, so stop talking about past mistakes!” And I’ll have to respond with “if we don’t recognize our mistakes, we are bound to repeat them”

There, I just saved us the energy of two further posts. Go enjoy a cold frosty one on me.

Even if we got all our oil from domestic sources we would still be at war with the Arabs, this is a religious war after all. At least from their perspective.

I think Cheney told Leahey to do an unnatural act in the cloakroom, not on the floor.

maybe if we had invested that $3 trillion in alternative energy programs we could have saved 4000 American lives, 100s of thousands of Iraqi lives AND told the Saudi King to go fuck himself (please excuse my language, just quoting dear misleader Cheney screaming at Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor).

The energy input is the SUN, you know, the big bright thing in the sky? From the video it looks like the water is circulated (you could use wind or solar energy to power pumps, I bet they don’t need to circulate as much during the night time since their energy input is gone - guessing here).

wiki states that the inputs algae require are sunlight and carbon (that is a twofer: eats carbon, produces oxygen). I imagine that some trace minerals are also required. This stuff lives everywhere there is water (from the poles to the tropics). There are some very interesting uses for algae - including hydrogen production. Go to wiki, type in algae and scroll down to Uses… bonus? I bet the cast off/processed algae makes great crop fertilizer. With 65,000 known species and possibly hundreds of thousands of additional species yet to be identified, I bet we can find a few that are really good at algae oil production or hydrogen generation. If we have the audacity to change.

(snark)
What?!?! No need to change! Thousand points of light! Stay the course!
Iraq for a hundred years! No make it a thousand! wooowooo!
McInsane!
(/snark)

But you are right, as oil prices go up these alternatives start looking better, that is capitalism.

btw - corn or soybeans aren’t the only biofuel feedstocks: this via CNN

Kertz said he can produce about 100,000 gallons of algae oil a year per acre, compared to about 30 gallons per acre from corn; 50 gallons from soybeans.

Using algae as an alternative fuel is not a new idea. The U.S. Department of Energy studied it for about 18 years, from 1978 to 1996. But according to Al Darzins of the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, in 1996 the feds decided that algae oil could never compete economically with fossil fuels.

The price of a barrel of oil in 1996? About 20 bucks!”

Moral of the story: the economy was strong and oil was cheap under Democratic leadership in the ’90s. Note that this research started under Carter btw. Must be tough trying to invent more convoluted logic to turn that inside out.

Gee now that crude oil is $100 to $110 a barrel it might actually be worth it to try to innovate our way out of a big mess… nah, just kidding! We keep spilling our blood into the sands of the middle east so the rwnjs and oil tycoons can bilk us ever faster. Bonus prize: we are propping up the Saudi Monarchy. Talk about your ‘unitary executive’

Nope everything is just great! No need to change!
Stay the course for a hundred years!

I’m not going to debate this with you again as you are too ignorant of basic facts:

For instance these statements were not made seven years after the fact as you stupidly claim, rather they were made early in fall 2001. He claimed to have witnessed the first plane crashing into the tower, rather than investigate how that could be so you would rather bend over backwards twisting words and making excuses so that you can continue to live in your imaginary world created by your media masters.

Simpleton.

Letterman: 4,000 American men and women soldiers dead since we went into Iraq. Another 30,000 wounded. Untold Iraqis dead. We rarely hear that number. What would that number be? A quarter of a million? Half a million?

McCain: It’s hard to make these estimates, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands, obviously.

‘obviously’ he meant to say “hundreds OR thousands” not “hundreds OF thousands” eh rwnj? Just a slip of the tongue, right?

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this since it is silly even by your standards. Worst case he is lying, oh well. Second worst case, he remembers seeing a video but didn’t, he’s confused, it was 7 years ago, he’s been a little busy since then. The second plane hit the building fifteen, twenty minutes after the first. I’m thinking there were probably news crews on scene in that time and it is very possible Bush saw a clip of the first plane in the building. I’m not going to look any harder because if you Google anything on 911 you get about 5 pages of kooky conspiracy types before you get to anything of substance. So now we are at the point of debating the word “had”. If Bush said something like “I saw the first plane hit the building in a video in the hallway…” he would be wrong, if he said I saw the first plane had hit the building in a video in the hallway…” he would have been right. People don’t always speak with the clarity they write, in fact they rarely do look at a transcript of an interview sometime, see how many disjointed sentences and “um’s” and “ah’s” there are. That’s all I have to say about that.

now shcb, all you need to do is find ANY video of plane #1 impact that was available for the President to see when he claims he saw it. But you won’t, because others have tried and found that there was no video of the first plane impact available until much, much later. I think he forgot the script for that day and started add libbying. - A lie indicative of a greater malfeasance.