The BBC reported today on a news item that’s both heartening and deeply unsettling at the same time. Scientists at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank have created a special vault deep inside a mountain on Spitzbergen, one of Norway’s four Svalbard Islands to safely house seeds of important crops and plantlife against the possibility of a global catastrophe.

The facility’s location makes it quite safe from most catastrophic events, be they climactic, nuclear or what have you. It also will keep the seeds at a relatively constant 18 degrees Celsius (0 Farhenheit) which will allow them to stay safely stashed for over 1000 years.

The vault is intended to act as insurance so that food production can be restarted anywhere on Earth after a regional or global catastrophe.

Built deep inside a mountain, the structure will eventually house a vast collection of seeds; safeguarding world crops against possible future disasters including nuclear wars and dangerous climate change.
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The collection and maintenance of the seeds is being co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the “conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity”.

So, while I think this is very forward thinking and rational, I gotta wonder….cowpeas? What is a cowpea? Is it food? Sounds made up to me, kind of like “dirtweed” or “tater tot”. And what do they know that I don’t? Global warming climate crises aside, are we preparing for the 2012 Mayan apocalypse here? A Jerry Lewis Film Festival? Alien invasion? Will ET even like wheat?

Full story at the BBC

A new startup has announced that it can produce Ethanol for roughly $1 a gallon, anywhere in the world.Coskata claims that creating ecologically responsible biofuels is possible with it’s patented process. No irresponsible feed-stocks are necessary, meaning we could finally curtail the wrong-headed corn ethanol panacea model the US is so gung-ho about. Instead, Coskata’s enzymatic process can use municipal waste, crop residues and all manner of biomass as the raw material to be converted into 99% pure ethanol. Whoa! Technology that serves more than a single purpose?? Science gets crunchy…what’s a thoughtless consumerist proleroid to think?

Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock, including biomass, municipal solid waste, bagasse and other agricultural waste into ethanol, making production a possibility in almost any geography. Coskata’s process technology is ethanol-specific and enzyme independent, requiring no additional chemicals or pre-treatments; environmentally superior, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84% compared to conventional gasoline; and has the ability to generate 7.7 times as much energy as is required to produce the ethanol, compared to corn ethanol which generates approximately 1.3 times as much energy according to Argonne National Labs.

So, we hit a milestone, albeit a minor one, over this past weekend: we’ve gone fully CFL in our home. That’s Compact Flourescent Lighting for those of you living under a rock of late. I replaced the last of the incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents and am feeling pretty good about it. Yah yah, it cost us some coin up front to replace them, but they use roughly 1/4 the power of incandescents so our carbon footprint is now that much less. I did a little calculation, thanks to this handy spreadsheet, and I come up with the following estimated savings for our household:
Approximately 45 bulbs, 60w equivalent, used for an average of 4 hours daily, with a .10/kw hour cost of electricity nets us:

~ $500 savings per year based on our average usage
~ 3500 Kw hours of electricity saved

On top of that, we recently signed up to use only “clean” energy to power our house with our local power company, Ameren. We pay more per KWhr, I think it’s ~$.02cents more and Ameren increasese its intake of power from clean, renewable sources like wind and hydro.

That’s pretty sweet. Now to put solar panels all over our roof, reclaim all rainwater, buy an airpowered car and wear nothing but hempen cloth. Oh, and convince 30 or 40 million of our neighbors to do the same.

Gold? Who needs it? You can’t drink it unless you ‘re partial to molten liquids and then, well, you’ll have cauterized your mouth, throat, stomach and intestinal tract…not so good. Water will be the new black as it were over the next 25 years.

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