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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (65256)	1/10/2003 4:27:25 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Dennis O'Bell; Re: "At present we are probably consuming at a rate of several hundred millions of years of plant life per century in the form of coal and oil." In addition to being factually incorrect (unless you're going to only count proven reserves that are economically recoverable at the current very low price of coal), the argument is comparing two time scales that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Only a tiny fraction of the plant life during those several hundred million years was turned into coal or oil. Re: "I don't believe even the most optimistic genetically engineered oil seed crops can make a dent in this disparity." The important thing about genetic engineering is its similarity to semiconductor engineering. Both consist of design processes that manipulate extremely tiny things that are then produced in high volume. Semiconductor processing is still in its middle age, and already chips with many many millions of switches are commercially available at prices that would stun the average engineer of 1945. The fundamental difference between these two technologies is that the manufacturing process for semiconductors requires multi-billion dollar facilities, while the manufacturing process for a completed biotech design (for example, growing GM wheat) is so cheap that it is widely feared that it will be done accidentally. Compare: There are no semiconductor chips out there that are being accidentally produced in Zambia as a result of the US exporting discarded computers. Biotech is going to change this planet in ways that it is not now possible to even begin to imagine. It is a combination of the detailed control available in semiconductor design (which has already changed the human culture of this planet in only the last 40 years) with the inexpensive production available in crop growing (which has changed the landscape of this planet over the past 5000 years). 33% of the US's land area is already covered in forests, which before the application of GM already produces 52 cubic feet of wood per year: The U.S. has 2,263,259,000 total acres of land area. Thirty-three percent, or 736,681,000 acres, are classified as forested acres (forest lands). Federal ownership is 34 percent of total forest land. ... On a per acre basis, net annual tree growth in the U.S. is 52 cubic feet compared with 27 in Canada and 24 in Russia. bugwood.org A cubic foot of wood weighs about 22Kg or 10 pounds, and there are 2000 pounds in a ton, so the above production works out to be 1.9x10^8 tons/year. A ton of wood has maybe 13 million BTUs, so this is around 2.5x10^15 BTUs per year. Total US usage of fossil fuels is around 76 quadrillion BTus = 76,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs = 7.6x10^16 BTUs factmonster.com So already our wood production (in forests alone, which ignores all those trees growing in cities and other places) works out to be around 1/30th of our fossil fuel consumption. Now let's add in estimates for how much GM modification can improve wood production. So far, partly due to the time (once) required to grow to maturity, little work has been done at improving wood production. That is, very little of the forests in the US consist of improved varieties. By contrast, crops like corn have been steadily improved by the human race for 5000 years. Even after most of those 5000 years, and before most GM improvements, the last 75 years have seen a 7x increase in corn yield per acre: agry.purdue.edu The revolution in agriculture continues. It has had 5000 years to work on stuff like corn and wheat, but little work has yet been made at improving forest yields in terms of BTUs per acre. Note that wood is only one possible source for fossil fuel replacements. Nor have the above calculations taken into account improved conservation, the population decreases that Europe is already seeing, the further improvement in food production allowing farm or pasture to be converted to forests, or other technologies like photovoltaics. The ecologists wouldn't like seeing this country covered from one end to the other with GM plants, but in the distant future, I am pretty sure that this is what will transpire. And besides, there isn't anything more stately than a tall (GM) sequoia. -- Carl