14 DAY TRIAL // Doing something about global warming and the rapid depletion of the world's non-renewable energy resources has recently become an important topic on some governments' agendas, and hopefully not only because elections are coming.
The first concrete measures have been to introduce extra taxes for purchasing or importing a car of which designers couldn't care less about the environment.
US now have the "Gas Guzzler Tax", and some countries in the European Union are adding up to 100% of a guzzling second hand car's value, in import taxes. The Middle East situation is not looking bright, and don't forget that most of the world's oil is there. So, many car manufacturers began, though yet a bit shy, researching alternative fuels for your car.
Your car could soon become a vegetarian thanks to a process for cost-effectively converting cellulosic biomass, such as grass, wood, wheat and rice straw, into ethanol that can be used for fuel, due to inventors such as Lee Lynd, professor of engineering and adjunct professor of biology at Dartmouth College.
Lynd and his colleagues' inventions are at the forefront of advanced technologies for converting biomass feedstocks into motor vehicle fuels.
Once, while being on a farm, he thought: "My goodness, that pile of grass and whatnot is four-feet high, and if you put a thermometer down into the bottom of that, it's 150 degrees Fahrenheit."
He realized that cellulose-utilizing bacteria that produced ethanol were known, and that production and utilization of cellulosic biofuels could involve a sustainable carbon cycle with no net emissions of carbon dioxide.
In the United States today, fuel ethanol is derived from corn, which is available in limited quantities and consumes substantial amounts of fossil energy as currently produced.
On the other hand, cellulose is the most abundant organic compound on the face of the Earth and production of fuel from cellulosic biomass displaces far more fossil fuel than is required to produce.
"Developing a microbe that can convert cellulosic biomass to ethanol can be approached in one of two ways," said Lynd. "Either start with organisms that are able to grow well on biomass and modify them to produce ethanol better, or start with organisms that produce ethanol well and modify them so that they can grow on biomass."
Lynd's group is investigating both approaches and has recently engineered thermophilic bacteria to produce ethanol as the only fermentation product, and yeast to grow on cellulose.
No need to mention the countless applications and benefits that such research would present for a better future for all of us, I will just say that over a century of polluting the soil, the water and the air will get back at us, someday, if we don't try to repair what's left to repair, since undoing all of it is impossible.