by dragon feathers Jack » Tue Dec 20, 2005 10:46 am
the GM thing hasn't got anything to do with organic agriculture at all, nevermind crops-for-fuel - which it has even less to do with.<br><br>GM or GMO is about geneticly engineering existing lifeforms to exploit some trait in them,<br><br>its stupid and completely insane -<br><br>mostly because the whole thing about when farming went wrong is at most about 60 years old, it was mostly fine before that -<br><br>it went wrong because of overuse of artificial fertilisers, and then - after radionics was proven to work as pest-control - dependance upon biologically-poisonous pesticides and various related -icides.<br><br>lot of people forgot about things like seasonal planting (ie - you can tell what time of year it is by the stars, hence how star-planting in biodynamics works) and that lunar phases affect water uptake in crops as they affect tides.<br><br><br>so organics and related practices like permaculture and biodynamics are addressing those problems.<br><br><br>its also really stupid to be making rules about what crops can and can't be grown - if you don't know about that look up the many heritage vegetable sites and webpages, there's an abundance of existing crops already availible that are being ruled out of production for - again - insane reasons, so even there there's no need to be making a case to be needing to design new crops, as if the existing ones aren't good enough.<br><br><br>you don't really need to know much about any of this to work out that growing crops to make into methanol or biodiesels is obviously going to be more efficient that taking stuff out of the ground then cracking it into various different fuels, for a start - the growing process is better for the environment right there, we already know how to make vegetable oil and alcohol, engine conversions to run them are not difficult to do and not all engines even need converted. <br><br>then - alcohol fuels burn clean, they don't add to carbon emissions. i think the vegetable oils do to an extent but they are still grown from crops - which lessens carbon dioxide cause the plants need it to grow - and they produce oxygen. <br><br>look at Cubas example of turning around how their agriculture was being done there, and don't tell me that anywhere else can't do the same thing - there's hundreds of scope for planting crops and processing them. <br><br>consider how much extra good soil can be got from existing rock dust (seen the size of crops grown in this medium? they're giant - cause theres so much minerals in it) and better composting of so much as-yet-waste, and put that together with the amount of land that could be doing with some return-to-nature.<br><br>there's loads of ideas and things done like that that already are known to work - many of them were always known to work. <br><br><br>another thing about fuels - in terms of powering internal combustion engines, all they really need to do is heat fast and be ignitable to produce a controllable gas pressure (to turn the pistons, etc). and obviously not burn thru the gas tank. and its of course preferable if they don't emit poisonous fumes - so if you plan on building a Hg-Rev engine then the mercury would need to be contained and recycled w/o any escape of it. <p></p><i></i>
