The magic of mushrooms

Here is Paul Stamets presenting "6 ways mushrooms can save the world". The presentation seems terribly rushed. I had trouble understanding some of it, but found these links useful: Prototaxites, medicinal uses of fungi, mycoremediation, mycofiltration. He even suggests using mycellium to convert cellulose into fungal sugars which can be turned into ethanol.

Peak Soil

George Monbiot makes some good points about fuel sources.

He cites a recent report that Peak Oil is upon us, and although environmentalists and geologists have being warning of this for some time, this new report is written by capitalists, so perhaps now governments may start to pay attention.

Growing biofuels to replace fossil fuel seems to getting a lot of criticism, and Monbiot says that land clearance for biofuels causes a massive increase in emissions, and creates a carbon debt that takes between 17 and 840 years to recoup.

An alternative is to use agricultural 'waste', but Alice Friedemann points out that this will likely result in Peak Soil.

Rethinking biofuels

I am pleased that the EU are rethinking their policy of encouraging biofuels.

The Royal Society has just published a report (Adobe PDF File, 788kb), which Professor John Pickett, Chair of the study discusses in this video:



Wikipedia has a lengthy article about Biofuel, and lots of links to references on the subject, so I won't go into all the details. But do beware of claims that biofuels are 'green'. The only real problems they solve are those of fuel security and peak oil. Their carbon neutrality is debatable, and certainly not all biofuels are created equal. Their other environmental consequences are very real, and a full field to forecourt analysis needs to be done for each fuel type.