June 29, 2009

How to Think Differently

Sometimes the treasures are deeply buried. The quote is a segment of a comment to a blog post by BS01 at James H. Kunstler's site Clusterfuck Nation. Today's story, The Man in the Mirror, has about 50 responses after the first three hours. (Another Michael Jackson piece - congress passed the cap and trade bill with nobody looking in the commotion last Friday)

"Have you been to your bookstore lately and looked around at all the gloom and doom? A mass extinction is a real possibility. The resources of this planet are getting used up and tapped out by a race too greedy and stupid to care. Resources that will take geological time to replenish, if ever. Whatever life comes after the human race will hopefully do a better job, after Mother Nature and Father Time hopefully have restored this planet to its primeval state."

Chemistry being what it is - there is a conservation of matter and energy law that applies here. All of the atoms (99.99%+) that are here now, have been here and will be here. The atoms change their bonding partners and gain or release energy from the system by forming stable molecules that store energy in the chemical bonds. The fact that we are using up reserves established on Gaia long ago has more to do with how we value our resources than anything else.

I have no doubt (node howdt) that our organic chemists have the skill to make any organic molecule that we desire. Petroleum is a feedstock that can be cracked and fractionally distilled to make a myriad of products that service our vanity. If we takes the time to look at the byproducts of natural processes, we find that Gaia uses just about everything she has in one capacity or another. The niche that we fall into is that we use combustion to produce energy that takes complex chemical bonds and simplifies them to an extreme. The key is the relative rate of storage - several million years - compared to the usage - 150 year industrial age. Time to look at our available catalysts to affect the rate constant of the process.

Ah, but there's a rub. The current monetary/education/research systems are rigged. What passes for research at higher educational institutes is at the discretion of the funding agents, not the scientists. Once a proposal is accepted, the focus of doing the science is restricted to the justifications spelled out in writing. You must presuppose conventional scientific wisdom. This doesn't work.

James Lovelock wrote an essay called Small Science in the late 80's that i have in an Anthology called Doing Science: The Reality Club. He suggests that we all individually take an interest in something and figure out how it works. Lots of small tests work a lot faster than large grandiose tests. Figure out how the parameters affect the system. If we take our by-products and reform them into starting materials for producing chemical energy storage, i am certain that we can come up with a cyclic fuel source to replace petroleum in a post peak oil world. Basically an agricultural weeds to fuel program, with analogical applications in other areas.

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