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Permalink Reply by Jay Rosenberg on October 30, 2009 at 4:50pm

It behooves us to understand what has a higher probability to work. Good old coal is dirty, so extracting methane, or creating a liquid fuel (as the Nazis did during WWII) is a viable path. Albeit history has shown expensive. With modern chemical processes, understanding we can tweak the process and keep a lot of professors employed, and fires burning up the funds. However, along comes a simpler concept, a mircrobe to digest coal, and produce a cleaner, simpler by product. It takes big bucks (or some clever approaches) to do it, ie, can be done with brute force (NB: Genetic engineering is the opposite of engineering, in that you discard all the failed results, and keep the one that works. Its like throwing things against a wall, hoping one stick. Its stochastic, and something will stick. The odds increase if you know how the mechanisms work, promoters, plasmids. Now once you have shown that (which has been done) digesting coal, leaving a clean burning residue, you scale up. Again, with big buck, it will happen. At $4,000 per troy ounce some catalysts such as Rhodium (you know about platinum) fail economically from the get-go. Microbes, on the other hand, are plenty cheap. Thus, making coal into microbe food or microbes to eat coal is a far superior approach, and will cross the finish line because of the hundreds of millions of bucks directly invested, plus, billions of bucks in collateral research understanding, genomic break down to the atomic level. Cheers JR Sannerwind@gmail.com; PS - it also opens the opportunity for a "wilcatter" to beat the bigs, just like the diamond wildcatters.in Canada applied general knowledge and was able to constrict their search. That BTW is what science is, a Search. thats what Google realized, and is making billions on, but in a marketing domain.

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Permalink Reply by Lou De Frog on November 15, 2009 at 5:31am

Thank you Jay.

Yesterday I thought that the Banks had become the new world Government because they control the money/power that drives the fossil fuel economy. While reading your post I had a few insights (I guess that is the word) and realized that the new Google tube videos include full length movies. Google has passed over into the new age where information and not money is the medium of exchange. Their power comes from their social network. We the market, are the purchasers of their product and if they charged $10 a person to use their service they would have an income that would dwarf most Governments.

Well, we are speaking about small things solving big problems. Government can not solve our problems because they have become too large and disconnected from their source of power. They are unplugged. The ball is in our court and if we don't pick it up and run with it we are not going to get the puck in the net.

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