A wood lot can generate mountains of sawdust. I can remember riding in the backseat at night passing the wood lots along US 84 in South Georgia and seeing the huge pyramid shaped incenerators burning the sawdust.

At some wood yards, they would use the heat to boil water to power turbines for electricity to power the saws. Other yards just burned it to get it out of the way.

As for the carbon footprinters out there, the system is closed cycle. Pulpwood pine tree absorbs light Co2 and water and creates biomass. We turn biomass into fuel. Burn fuel, release CO2 and repeat.

No cows were injured in the production of this post.

The problem with biofuel is it reduces food production and it removes organic matter from fields which needs to be there for many reasons.

Even a thousand years back this kind of crap was known to encourage soil erosion, reduce water retention which made the land dry out worse, and reduce long range productivety of the land for several differnt reasons.

That so many modern people don’t know what was once common knowledge doesn’t say much for humans.

Of course many people did it anyway which is why many lands which were once bountiful and held powerful civilizations now don’t.

So, personal attacks on other users are OK as long as there is topic contribution? Inquiring minds…

#13 – The problem with horses was what to do with the horse shit. I was thinking perhaps we could feed it to cigar smokers as breath freshener.

Also, where the fuck is the sense of humor around here? These aren’t personal attacks. We aren’t that thin skinned are we? This is the Internet FFS.

[There's a difference between making a clever retort and being an asshole. - ed.]

I wonder if this technology will scale? Bobbo makes a good point about this but I suspect that those plants are prototypes.

I also wonder about the ecological impact. Would I want one of those plants in my neighborhood? What are the by-products? Would it smell like wrong end of a horse? I am not really qualified to judge that but someone around here may be.

>>[Comment deleted - Violation of
>>Posting Guidelines. - ed.]

Ketchup, you really need to grow the fuck up. You’re giving a bad name to condiments. Can’t you post anything without it being so puerile that Ed. deletes it?

He should work on getting chlorplasts into skin cells so we could all manufacture our own basic carbon chains? Might take some other minor biological modifications==shouldn’t be any big deal.

“Google Craig Ventner and…”

While the trigger topic was cows, stretch to horses and say don’t bet it all on one.

There are more than a few potential alternative energy sources as well as wealth of practical conservation methods. Combined with creativity and capitalism, America should be able to employ many diverse approaches to solve the ‘energy crisis’. The challenge is to get people to grasp the government can’t do it. Stop looking to the administration, the Senate and the House
for a popular political panacea.

1) Ride cow to work
2) Cow serves as “packed lunch”
3) Eat cow for lunch
4) Cow skin is tomorrow’s work clothes and boots
5) Jog home = get some exercise
6) Next cow eats grass, saves on lawn mower expense
7) Cow dung serves as furnace fuel; no home heating oil required.
Repeat!

Perfect cow-centric economy! Economic boon! And advantage over desert countries that just can’t compete with our superior cow-oriented infrastructure.