The Frustrated Gardener’s Recent Comments

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  It's ain't just the CO2

  if you go to the official US statistics on carbon emmissions, and look at the diagram on page 15, it will be quite clear that oil, gas and coal generate the vast bulk of GHG's.  I agree that factory farming of cows, pigs, and chickens is disgusting and horribly inefficient and should be shut down, but the facts just aren't there for the ridiculous statement about meat causing global warming.
  

  While I'm not going to wade into the debate over the ethics of eating meat, I will contribute this:

  Raising farm animals can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but not necessarily just because of CO2 emissions.  Large scale factory farms do generate mountains (and lakes) of manure, which can produce nitrous oxides and methane emissions (both much more potent greenhouse gases than CO2).  Ruminants also exhale methane, courtesy of the bugs that live in their guts.

  The IPCC has even developed methodologies for estimating greenhouse gas emissions (particularly NOx and CH4) that result from farming and animal husbandry activities.  Apparently they thought it a potentially important enough emissions source to mention it.

  Not to bang the drum:  Industrial farming seems at least as dangerous as pissing away fossil fuels to produce electricity or run Hummers.
  On Animal-rights group makes the stupid claim that enviros must be vegetarians posted 2 years, 2 months ago 208 Responses

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  = "Yay!"

  "w00t" is taken from the super-Gen-Y-ish realm of "Leet-speak".

  It apparently comes from an expression of joy when your team in a multiplayer shoot-em-up is faring well against the other:  "We Own Other Team!"

  It's what all the hip young people are saying instead of "Huzzah!"  Lousy kids and their music...
  On The word from today's hearing of Markey's climate committee posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses

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  Some biodiesels are more equal than others

  King County (Seattle Metro area) has a program running now that recycles municipal biosolids (digested seweage sludge) as fertilizer on Yakima Valley canola crops.  Yes -- poop for oil; fertilizer wise, it works just as good (or better) than the usual chemical brew.  The harvested canola oil then gets transported back to the Seattle area where a processing plant makes biodiesel.  Seattle metro buses then burn the biodiesel; everyone smiles gamely.

  Now, using "organic" fertilizers in an industrial ag process like this one might not have a huge impact on the overall carbon balance of this particular biodiesel stream.  Given the transport energy costs of moving the (heavy!) mounds of biosolids down to Yakima and then moving the resulting canola oil back up to Seattle, it may be that the carbon emissions per unit of fuel is probably not much better than mined-and-refined diesel.

  BUT: 1) at least the precious fixed nitrogen in the poop has already been energetically "paid for" by the upstream processes (ie. the fertilizers that made the food crops that ultimately became the poop); 2) at least the canola oil comes from more-local sources than mid-western soy or (god forbid) Indonesian plantation palm oil.  

  Main point is:  Has anyone else noticed that the discussion of the "carbon neutrality" of biofuels makes little reference to the massive energy expenditure made annually in producing the synthetic fertilizers necessary to do ANY of the farming that we do?  There's an awful lot of atmospheric carbon up there that owes is existence to our soil use practices, not to anybody's bloated SUV.On 'Biodiesel' is looking worse and worse posted 2 years, 3 months ago 21 Responses