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Craig Venter and biofuels

Monday, October 15th, 2012

Biofuels have gotten somewhat of a bad rep with conservatives because they are linked to Obama’s green energy boondoggles. Steve Hayward, at Powerline, thinks that success will be enough to turn the greenies against them. First they will be genetically engineered and will be developed by “Big Oil” partnering with entrepreneurs like Craig Venter who deciphered the human genome with private resources. He was in competition with the government funded “Human Genome Project.” My book review of Venter’s autobiography is here.

Venter does well in explaining his research and the article follows it well.

Venter said in an interview, “It’s pretty obvious that there’s nothing in the natural world to make the levels that are needed,” and he pointed to algae oil yield volumes needing approximately 20,000 gallons per acre equivalent of algae.

Venter and his research team, of course, in spring 2010, successfully created the first synthetic bacterial cell, which was controlled completely by a synthetic genome. Or as Venter explained it in his recent interview, as the first cell “to have a computer for a parent,” or “designed DNA on a living system.” Venter now says he has increasingly realized that a fully synthetic cell is the way to go to create competitive algae fuel. When it comes to tweaking naturally occurring algae cells, he says, “you’ll never get there with that. We need a fundamental change to how we approach all this.”

This will be enough to antagonize the Luddite Greenies who are ideologically hostile to genetic engineering. Some writers are already predicting problems.

Venter, the first mapper of the human genome and creator of the first synthetic cell (pictured above), said his scientific team and ExxonMobil have failed to find naturally occurring algae strains that can be converted into a commercial-scale biofuel. ExxonMobil and Venter’s La Jolla, Ca.-based Synthetic Genomics Inc., or SGI, continue to attempt to manipulate natural algae, but he said he already sees the answer elsewhere — in the creation of a man-made strain. “I believe that a fully synthetic cell approach will be the best way to get to a truly disruptive change,” Venter told me in an email exchange.

Venter made his remarks before a conference this week on the future of energy at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and in subsequent emailed replies to questions.

When announced in July 2009, the Venter-ExxonMobil alliance of colossals attracted wide publicity. It called for ExxonMobil to spend up to $600 million if publicly undisclosed milestones were reached in the lab. The Wall Street Journal said the partnership might signal “a coming of age” for algae biofuel. Greenbang fretted that the alliance might actually prove “unholy,” but not Gigaom, which said it could be “algae’s big break.”

The terms of the alliance omit the fully synthetic approach that Venter is now advocating, so he is conducting “an ongoing dialog” with Exxon about a new agreement, he said. He appeared to suggest that such a new compact would require more Exxon investment.

If I were in charge of investing in alternate energy research, I would take what Venter says very seriously.

I assume that our skill set in this area has been one of the attractions for Exxon to work with us. Our success at building the first synthetic cell is only from last year and had not been achieved when we formed the agreement between SGI and Exxon. So I would say it is an ongoing dialog.

The future lies with algae and modifications of coal. Ethanol is a dead end. Venter is not the only one interested.

One of the dangers of using the synthetic algae cells is the fear that the cells could somehow be let loose on the outside world, which Venter admits could wreak havoc like turning the oceans into a sea of lipids. But Venter says that designing an organism that has self-destructive properties (it can’t live outside a lab, or it dies with a certain time period) could contain such an organism.

Algae oil company Solazyme, went public this year, and plans to commercialize its algae fuel in the coming years. Solazyme tweaks existing efficient algal strains and grows its designer algae in fermentation tanks without sunlight by feeding it sugar and then using existing industrial equipment extracts the oil. Solazyme’s stock is trading a bit under $10, way down from its IPO price of $18.

I would bet on Venter, first of all because he thinks in terms of private, profit making business. His record is pretty impressive and he has hired a lot of the world’s experienced scientists. I have previously written a number of blog posts on related topics, here, and here, and here, and here.

It’s interesting that the Titanic is being eaten by “Rusticles” that that are eating the iron in the hull. Bacteria that eat iron in an oxygen-free environment are only one of the marvels that are being discovered in the depths of the ocean and in hot vents in volcanic pools.

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Why opposition to the XL pipeline is insane.

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

We are on the cusp of a new era in energy production in North America. Soon, assuming the Obama administration is defeated next year, we will be independent of the increasingly unstable middle east for oil. We need nuclear energy for electricity production. That is the most efficient source for base electrical generation. For transportation, we need oil or natural gas. For home heating, natural gas is the most efficient as it can be supplied by pipelines embedded in the streets and serving each house in urban neighborhoods. Rural customers can be served by CNG or propane tanks on the property. Even solar panels may contribute in tropical settings like southern California (where I live) or Arizona.

The present political climate, especially that in California, is enamored of irrational environmentalist theories that are holding up efficient solution to problems. The ban on incandescent light bulbs is an example of irrational legislation that will, hopefully, be reversed, at least outside of California which is hopelessly infected with environmentalist nonsense.

We are facing a foreign policy catastrophe in the middle east where even Israel, our single ally, may go under, albeit in the gotterdammerung of nuclear war. The Obama people have tossed aside our ally in Egypt, Mubarak, as Jimmy Carter did the Shah. The results will be similar. We have no friendly governments in the middle east except Israel and the increasingly fearful Jordan. Turkey is gone as the government, now largely Islamist, is edging toward Iran in policy.

I am not an isolationist but we need to anticipate a world where we are surrounded by hostile regimes. Self sufficiency must be our policy and the delusions of environmentalism are dangerous. Those opposed to our use of energy resources should consider suicide to make room for those of us who want to enjoy the promise of American life. Drilling for oil in the Gulf has been seriously damaged by Obama as many of these expensive drill rigs have left the Gulf for other parts of the world and will not return any time soon. In fact, there is evidence that George Soros has invested in some of these rigs that are now positioning themselves off Brazil for the same deep water drilling techniques that were criticized by Obama acolytes when they were located in the Gulf of Mexico where they were shut down by Soros-beneficiary Obama.

The technique of “fracking” has been criticized by the same environmentalists who oppose all sources of energy independence. They, of course, oppose all forms of oil production. Wind and Solar, which they do support, are capable of producing less than 10% of all energy needed by our huge economy. That way lies economic suicide and one wonders at times if that is the purpose. Tom Clancy, who has done a very good job of predicting the technological future, including the use of a jetliner as a flying bomb, has a novel, called Rainbow Six that considers an environmentalist group so radical that they plan to kill most of the earth’s population, excepting themselves, of course. I sometimes wonder if he was too extreme in what he attributed to the radicals around Obama.

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Posted in energy, global warming, middle east | 3 Comments »

Global Warming and acupuncture

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

It looks as though the sun is entering a new dormant period, similar to the Maunder Minimum which led to the Little Ice Age.

This will almost certainly end the global warming hysteria in a few years. The people who continue to cling to this sort of hoax, will be looking for the Next Big Thing. I don’t mean to imply that the earth did not warm over the past century. The Little Ice Age ended about 1850 so a warming trend is expected following such an event. The hoax is the contrived evidence that humans are responsible. I was skeptical about that from the first. The forces involved are too large. If humans affected climate, it probably began with the development of agriculture. Perhaps we have had no ice age in the past 10,000 years because of the effects of agriculture and forest changes. I have previously discussed this and nothing has changed my mind.

The next question is what will replace global warming as the religion of the bored classes ? There are signs that it may be “New Age” medicine. This sort of thing is common in certain circles and has considerable similarity to the global warming arguments.

The Center for Integrative Medicine, Berman’s clinic, is focused on alternative medicine, sometimes known as “complementary” or “holistic” medicine. There’s no official list of what alternative medicine actually comprises, but treatments falling under the umbrella typically include acupuncture, homeopathy (the administration of a glass of water supposedly containing the undetectable remnants of various semi-toxic substances), chiropractic, herbal medicine, Reiki (“laying on of hands,” or “energy therapy”), meditation (now often called “mindfulness”), massage, aromatherapy, hypnosis, Ayurveda (a traditional medical practice originating in India), and several other treatments not normally prescribed by mainstream doctors. The term integrative medicine refers to the conjunction of these practices with mainstream medical care.

Here we have what may become the replacement for AGW in the minds of the exquisite privileged class. It has all the requirements.
1. America is corrupt and inferior ? Yes.
2. Capitalism is corrupt and inferior ? Yes
3. Only the truly intelligent and sensitive can appreciate it ? Well.

You might think the weight of the clinical evidence would close the case on alternative medicine, at least in the eyes of mainstream physicians and scientists who aren’t in a position to make a buck on it. Yet many extremely well-credentialed scientists and physicians with no skin in the game take issue with the black-and-white view espoused by Salzberg and other critics. And on balance, the medical community seems to be growing more open to alternative medicine’s possibilities, not less.

That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could find out what the agent was in a sick patient and attack the agent medically.” To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against even the most challenging of these agents—as the taming of the AIDS virus attests.

But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent. Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. “We face an entirely different set of big medical challenges today,” says Blackburn. “But we haven’t rethought the way we fight illness.” That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery.

A science blog states the case for scientific medicine.

Speaking of bad ideas, in contrast to his previous article, in which he managed at least to get the gist of what Ioannidis teaches but merely spun it in what I considered to be an annoying fashion, the entire idea behind Freedman’s new article channels the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. The whole idea behind the article appears to be that, even if most of alternative medicine is quackery (which it is, by the way), it’s making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to patients and doctors do not. In other words, it’s a massive “What’s the harm?” argument. Yes, that’s basically the entire idea of the article boiled down into a couple of sentences. Deepak Chopra couldn’t have said it better. Tacked on to that bad idea is a massive argumentum ad populum that portrays alternative medicine (or, as purveyors of quackademic medicine like to call it, “complementary and alternative medicine” or “integrative medicine”) as the wave of the future, a wave that’s washing over medicine and teaching us cold, reductionistic doctors to care again about patients and thus make them better. Freedman even contrasts this to what he calls the “failure” of scientific medicine. I kid you not. Worse, Freedman makes this argument after having actually interviewed some prominent skeptics, including Steve Salzberg and Steve Novella, in essence, missing the point.

I expect to see more and more of “alternative medicine” because it appeals to the science illiterate and it damns another traditional source of authority, scientific medicine. Global warming hysteria attacks capitalism and prosperity. Alternative medicine is also going to be useful to Obamacare as a way of cutting reimbursement for traditional care. That will be a powerful wind behind it.

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Posted in climate, global warming, health reform, medicine, science | 3 Comments »

The coming energy crisis

Friday, January 14th, 2011

The Obama administration is still in the throes of global warming mentality. They have cancelled leases for oil and gas in the huge deposits in western states like Montana. The vast boom going on just to the north in Alberta has not impressed Interior Secretary Salazar. They want to take millions of acres out of the energy search by naming them wilderness, just as Bill Clinton created a huge wilderness area out of good potential energy fields at the end of his administration. They have not made nuclear power plants any easier to build. The Gulf oil leases are still blocked and the moratorium, while allegedly ended, continues in a slow down. The only energy and his acolytes are interested in is “renewable” such as wind and sun. These are boutique power sources and even these are being blocked by Democratic politicians.

But the project is hardly shovel ready. Several regulatory hurdles remain, and opponents of the wind farm have vowed to go to court, potentially stalling Cape Wind for several more years.

For years the Cape Wind project has been the focusof pitched battles splitting politicians and environmental groups. While some environmentalists are prepared to go to court to stop the project, other major groups, including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, support it.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose family compound overlooks Nantucket Sound and who died last year, had opposed the project, saying it was a giveaway to a private developer.

It has taken nine years to get this far. In California, another lefty state, a big solar project is being fought by enviros and Democrats. I wonder if the left wants any energy developed. It seems insane but we are getting very close to a tipping point when there will not be time to build new projects and find more oil and gas.

The Democrats, and the vast array of “activists” whom they enable, have demonstrated hostility to all practical forms of energy production and distribution. This is not just a matter of oil & gas drilling: as we have discussed many times on this blog, the U.S. electrical system faces a problematic future. There is every likelihood that, under a Democratic administration/Congress:

a)The building of new coal plants would go from “difficult” to “impossible”
b)The building of nuclear plants would continue to be virtually impossible
c)Even the building of new natural-gas-fired plants would be severely delayed by environmental lawsuits and regulatory maneuvering based on the CO2-is-a-pollutant theory.

Solar and wind, beloved of Democrats, have their uses, but they also have their limitations. I see no evidence that either Obama or the Dem Congressional leadership has any interest in understanding the technical and economic factors that govern the extent to which these technologies can be practically employed. The intermittent nature of wind and usable sun, the difficulty of storing electricity, the supply-chain constraints which govern the large-scale introduction of any new technology–there is much less interest in these things than in the glib repetition of catch-phrases. And even the use of environmentally-blessed technologies will be greatly inhibited by environmentalist protests against the transmission lines required to connect these systems to the cities that need their power. These activists would, of course, gain great impetus from a Democratic administration.

Obama talks a lot about the middle class. The existence of a large and affluent middle class is enabled by widely available and reasonably priced energy, especially electricity. If electric rates are driven up by a factor of 2X or 3X, as is entirely possible with Democratic policies, there will be not only a direct effect on consumers, but an effect on virtually all workers as U.S. businesses–especially manufacturing businesses but also things like data centers–become less competitive.

Lenin once remarked that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Our present “progressives” seem more interested in de-electrification. Where the New Deal (and the Soviets) wanted to build hydroelectric dams, today’s “progressives” are, for the most part, more interested in destroying them.

Remember, electrical infrastructure is a long-leadtime item, and if we dig outselves into a deep hole in this matter, it will take a long, long time to dig ourselves out..

That was written in 2008. Read the whole thing. It did a pretty good job of predicting the Obama administration’s policies.

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Changing The Sign On The Global Warming Equation

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

By Bradley J. Fikes

According to climate change scientists:

— An earth warmed by man-released CO2 will experience great climate disruptions such as warmer winters in the Northern Hemisphere.

— An earth warmed by man-released CO2 will experience great climate disruptions such as colder winters in the Northern Hemisphere.

This isn’t an either-or choice. Peer-reviewed scientific papers by those believing in man-caused climate change make both cases.

Here’s a press release from a 2001 paper by NASA scientists saying that warmer winters are on the way.

“NASA scientists input all of these factors in a climate model and concluded that greenhouse gases are the primary factor driving warmer winter climates in North America, Europe and Asia over the last 30 years. They found that greenhouse gases, more than any of the other factors, increase the strength of the polar winds that regulate northern hemisphere climate in winter.

“Using a computer model that simulates climate through interactions of ocean and atmosphere, scientists input current and past levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor and nitrous oxide. They found that greenhouse gases such as those increase the strength of polar wind circulation around the North Pole.

“The polar winds play a large role in the wintertime climate of the northern hemisphere. The winds blow from high up in the stratosphere down to the troposphere and eventually the Earth’s surface. When they strengthen, as they do from increases in greenhouse gases, they blow stronger over the warm, moist oceans picking up and transporting warmer air to the continents. Thus, warm air from the Pacific Ocean warms western North America, and the Atlantic Ocean warmth is shared with Eurasia. When winds are stronger, winters are warmer because air picks up heat as the winds blow over the oceans. When winds become weak winters become colder.”

According to that particular NASA computer model, anyway. NASA also published similar research predicting warmer winters in 1999.

But according to research released in 2010 by at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, we’re due for colder winters from climate change.

“Cold and snowy winters will be the rule, rather than the exception,” says Dr James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States. Dr Overland is at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference (IPY-OSC) to chair a session on polar climate feedbacks, amplification and teleconnections, including impacts on mid-latitudes …

“While the emerging impact of greenhouse gases is an important factor in the changing Arctic, what was not fully recognised until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage and changing wind patterns working together has disrupted the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system, resulting in greater ice loss than earlier climate models predicted,” says Dr Overland.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” he says.

This purported effect of climate change is getting a lot of press now, with the intense winter weather we’re experiencing. Bryan Walsh, a loyal supporter of climate change theory at Time magazine, this month wrote the obligatory story informing the masses that yes, the frigid weather is consistent with global warming.

“The theory seems counterintuitive, but as Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes the great Wunder Blog at Weather Underground, put it in a recent post, it makes sense: ‘This pattern is kind of like leaving the refrigerator door ajar — the refrigerator warms up, but all the cold air spills out into the house.’ The planet overall is still warming — and the Arctic fastest of all — but the cold air from the far north can result in biting winter weather and major storms, for a while at least.

That’s not the only theory. Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at the environmental research firm AER, has written that increasing seasonal snow cover in Siberia may drive extreme winter weather. Even as the planet has continued to warm and the Arctic has melted, seasonal snow cover has increased in Siberia, especially north of high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalayas. (As the climate warms overall, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can lead to more precipitation — falling as snow in places like Siberia that remain relatively cold.) All that Siberian snow creates a dome of cold air near the mountains, which bends the passing jet stream. Instead of flowing west to east, the jet stream moves in a more north to south fashion, carrying cold air south from the Arctic in the eastern U.S. and in Europe.”

Warmer winters or colder winters — those advocating global warming theory have certainly covered their bases.

In another version of this post, I said Time’s Bryan Walsh deserved an award for climatological contortionism, for earlier reciting the premise that climate change would be bringing warmer winters. Here’s one of his posts saying so, in 2009. Excerpts:

“Warming will make skiing, ice-skating and snowmobiling pastimes of the past in many areas of the Northeast, decimating the multibillion-dollar winter-sports industry. The center of maple-syrup production will shift from New England to Canada, and production of apples and other produce that depend on cooler winters will decline.”

“The predictions, based on unchecked growth in carbon emissions over the next several decades, are scary. Equally scary is what has already happened. The assessment shows that over the past few decades, winters in the Midwest have warmed by a few degrees, and the number of winter days without frost has increased by about a week.”

Posted in climate, global warming, media | 1 Comment »

Is an ice age coming ?

Monday, December 20th, 2010

There is a great deal of argument about the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Al Gore is on one side and the weather seems to be on the other. People are even talking about the “Gore Effect.” This is unexpected cold weather that seems to follow Al Gore around. If he comes to town to give a speech about how the world is warming, expect a cold snap or even snow.

Right now, Britain, and much of Europe, are enduring a terrible winter. This has been called the worst winter in Britain in 100 years. The British Met Office predicted a warm winter. London, however, was prepared for snow. A lot of snow. The result has been that London has kept up quite well with the weather except for Heathrow Airport which has been closed for two days. Why did London city do better than Heathrow and most of the rest of Britain ?

The Mayor explains. He uses a private weather forecaster who is getting more and more respect from people who have to know about the weather, like farmers and business people. And the Mayor of London.

Is it really true that no one saw this coming?

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

Many of us climate skeptics believe that the sun controls our weather and Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.”

Are we now in a Dalton Minimum ?

Well, it doesn’t look good. How long before the climate science people open their eyes ?

it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.

Read the whole thing.

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