Swimming in Ethanol's Ethos

The Arizona Chemical wood pulp mill in Panama City, Florida sits within a stone's throw of the Gulf of Mexico.

Hey there TPG readers, CHECK THIS OUT!!! This article has been translated to Hatian Creole.  I am both flattered and impressed at this unsolicited dissemination of TPG material. Quite cool :)

By Kristopher Hite

Walking on a balance beam, the idea of ethanol powering America's future took a shove from the scientific community this week. A new study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology indicates that no matter the starting material whether it be corn kernels or wood chips, switch grass, and corn stover (all forms of cellulose), the environmental impacts of more ethanol, and other so called biofuels, in the gas tanks of America will mean increased environmental damage. Specifically, this study discusses the expanding "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. Nutrient run-off from increased farm fertilizers being applied to crops throughout the Midwestern United States will drain into the gulf and cause larger algal blooms. This, in turn, will rob the water of dissolved oxygen killing fish, crustaceans, and other gulf-water inhabitants.

Here we have a case of clashing federal mandates. The EPA has required that steps be taken to reduce the size of the Gulf's dead zone while congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) in 2007 which requires the production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. These two orders just will not jive with current agricultural practices.

Multinational biofuel manufactures are sitting pretty with the current federal mandate written in the fine print of the EISA but the citizenry need access to the knowledge buried in this recent paper to hold these companies accountable for the their potential environmental impacts. To the credit of cellulose-derived ethanol the amount of nutrients running off into the gulf would be reduced by 20% if all ethanol were to be derived from cellulose vs. corn. But either scenario will undoubtedly kill more organisms living in the gulf and increase the area of the dead zone.

Ethanol as a fuel source for transportation, home heating, and industry continues to be a double edged sword. After taking flack for driving up tortilla prices in Mexico there was a shift to talking up cellulosic ethanol in lieu of corn ethanol, but with evidence like this being presented it makes the process a harder sell. But who needs to make a sale when you've already made a long term deal with the feds?

From an applied research side I am encouraged to seek out the cutting edge of cellulosic ethanol manufacturing technology so that mandated production is done in the least wasteful way. This research lays inside fungal genomes. Scientists continue improving enzymes produced by millions of years of evolution by tweaking the amino acid sequences and increasing efficiency and stability of some very useful enzymes, in the case of deriving ethanol from the woody parts of plants (cellulose) these enzymes are called cellulases. They break down the long chains of linked sugars that constitute cellulose. By manually changing the single amino acids and then testing thermal stability and conversion efficiency scientists are able to make the process of ethanol production more efficient. Recent research in the Journal of Biochemistry reports this process in action. By demonstrating that single amino acid substitutions, in the context of a chain of hundreds of amino acids, can stabilize enzymes dramatically a group from Cal-Tech proves that human manipulation of genes can, in fact, improve the efficiency of our transition to a home-grown renewable energy economy. The Carnot's and Tesla's of this age are hard at work at this biochemical frontier.

I am torn on this issue as I can see two futures coming of all this. One in which we have attained energy independence and are free to refine our energy equilibrium to the point of balance with the ecosystems in which we live. Or the other where our environment has completely eroded and we have no choice but to fight amongst each other for the scant resources still available. The technologist in me says "onward" while the environmentalist says "onward, but mindfully." In either scenario the ideal of efficiency is a positive one that can be easily applied locally by individuals adopting more mindful habits.


Note:  This blog post was picked up by an editor at SEED magazine and turned into and e-cover story - The Dead Zone Dilemma.   In this article Dave Munger questions my optimism and my advocacy as a scientist. In so doing he is questioning some basic tenets of scientific inquiry.

He asks - "Shouldn’t scientists just be interested in giving us the facts, staying removed from policy decisions and letting the general public and politicians decide how to act? Doesn’t becoming an advocate introduce bias into the scientific process, potentially tarnishing results?"

After contemplating these questions I responded in a post titled "Should Scientists Speak their Minds?"

Heinzelman, P., Snow, C., Smith, M., Yu, X., Kannan, A., Boulware, K., Villalobos, A., Govindarajan, S., Minshull, J., & Arnold, F. (2009). SCHEMA Recombination of a Fungal Cellulase Uncovers a Single Mutation That Contributes Markedly to Stability Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284 (39), 26229-26233 DOI: 10.1074/jbc.C109.034058
Costello, C., Griffin, W., Landis, A., & Matthews, H. (2009). Impact of Biofuel Crop Production on the Formation of Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico Environmental Science & Technology DOI: 10.1021/es9011433

Evo Rap

Had to let this meme undergo a duplication event. Courtesy Pharyngula

Green Mountain gets deeper green

One of my favorite companies continues to impress me. Green Mounatin Roasters has finished installing a 572 panel solar power array on their plant in Waterbury, Vermont. An alliance between Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the State of Vermont's Clean Energy Development Fund and Green Mountain Power enabled this high up-front cost project to manifest.

I'd like to see this kind of collaboration happen in my home state of Colorado. Seems like businesses and cities around here talk about being green a lot but when it comes down to getting up the solar panels or wind turbines self-interest prevails and projects get halted. From a home owner's perspective the incentives are still left to be seen. Xcel energy gives no rebates to potential and eager home owners who wish to install solar panels if there is a tree partially shading their roof! Think about the amount of sun that is hitting my roof in Colorado vs. the amount hitting this factory in Vermont or any city in Germany for that matter. And the energy tyrants at Excel have the audacity to deny subsidies because of shade trees! Drives me batty.

The case of Green Mountain Coffee is a great example to follow. Perhaps we in Colorado on the frontier of the "New Energy Economy" can learn a few things about cooperative collaboration from this company.

Read more about this at Greenbiz.

10th Annual Sustainable Living Fair

Photos by Kristopher Hite
Valet bike parking upon arrival!


Zero Hero Waste Stations

New shirt!
Need food.

Green Ride

Panda Bikes



Matter Bookstore cleans up.

Two years of Tom Paine's Ghost

By Kristopher Hite

I am writing today to celebrate two years passing since the seed of Tom Paine's Ghost was planted. Planted as my heart pounded reading the CNN coverage of a printed-word fiasco happening right here on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. If you want to read the origin story in its entirety I spewed it out here in almost unbearable detail the day after my involvement was over.

If you want the short version I'll lay it out here.

At exactly midnight September 21st 2007 the editorial board at the Collegian Newspaper decided to publish in large font "Taser this... FUCK BUSH" on the opinion page of their student run periodical. Instantly this set ablaze a national media firestorm. Was it a breech of decorum? Yes. Rude, asinine, immature? Yes. Justified. I think so! Now that we are all lounging in Obamaland we too easily forget how George W. Bush and his cronies really did rob the entire planet of so much and in so little time. 8 years beginning centuries of conflict and making any kind of climate remediation that much more difficult.

Even though the text was profane and literally absurd it accomplished something. Four words elicited a response both positive and negative out of an otherwise complacent student body of nearly 30,000. Colorado State University and Fort Collins, Colorado for too long had enjoyed a kind of happy delusion. Being named the top place to raise a family and the number one small city to live in the United States we were running the risk of becoming completely void of personality and submitting to the corporate developers and house farms that continue to propagate to the south. The "F... Bush" editorial fiasco was like a large turd sitting in the side walk at city park. Yes it was disgusting, but we couldn't pretend it wasn't there. We could not keep pretending everything was just dandy in our country when we had a tyrant at the helm. We needed to clean that up!

For pointing this out the Editor in Chief at the Collegian - J. David McSwane - was put in the hot seat. With a petition started by the college republicans he ran the risk of loosing his job at the hands of the "board of student communication." To combat this threat I began circulating a petition to save his job. We collected several hundred more signatures in 2 days than they had in 4.

In the end he kept his job and basically got a written slap on the wrist for his breech of professionalism. A typical bureaucratic handling of free speech/free press issues by the powers-that-be seen lately in our own congress regarding the Joe Wilson outburst.

McSwane will get upset with me for saying this but I felt obligated to lend a hand in this situation after learning how he had won a Peabody award for investigative journalism while in high school. He basically shut down all army recruiting in the entire country for a week so that recruiters could have a lesson in ethics. As my best friend was, at the time, stationed in Iraq and had been recruited before this intervention I felt connected to McSwane though I had never before met him. Through his student paper he was able to change one small part of the system. This reiterates my belief that single voices can and do change the world. In fact, they are the only instruments that can.

Wells Meets Welles

Meeting of Minds

Returning the Rainbow

By Kristopher Hite

Red-Green color blindness is caused by a deficiency in opsin genes. These genes code for photoreceptor proteins positioned in the cone cells of the eye's retina. When light hits these proteins a tiny molecule buried inside the protein called retinal (aka vitamin A) changes its shape by swinging its bond angles and begins a signal transduction cascade. The signal of "red" or "green" is passed from this single "g-coupled" protein receptor along the optic nerve and eventually to the brain's visual cortex where the mind perceives the hue of that specific wavelength of light. This gene for this opsin resides on the X chromosome which means colorblindness has a higher incidence in males as females have two chances to get a good copy while men only have one.

A paper published this week in Nature describes research that essentially cured colorblindness in monkeys. This cure is miraculous because A.) it was done using gene therapy and B.) it was given to adult monkeys not monkey embryos. The researchers took a virus, inserted the corrected copy of the opsin gene into the virus' genetic material then locally injected the virus near the monkey's deficient retina where the virus proceeded to "invade" and insert the correct copy into the genomes of the retinal cells. Lo and behold, the monkeys were able to see color for the first time in their lives!

The researches say if they are able to hone the technique to where it is as safe as Lasik surgery it may one day be applied to humans. Research like this raises some questions as to enhancing our natural abilities. If we extrapolate this technique to brain proteins we need to ask some tough questions. If we knew of a gene that could make a human brain work more efficiently, thus making the individual smarter, should we allow people to have "corrected" brain genes injected? If Joe Millionaire could afford this but Joe six-pack could not should the government step in to avoid the rise of a genetic cast system paralleling the present day financial cast system? The prospect of broadly applied corrective gene therapy really is the pinnacle goal of so much bio-medical research, specifically when it comes to inborn errors of metabolism and other very clear single gene, single disease situations. But who will guide society through the slippery slope of choosing which genes are worthy of correction. Work continues on the "can we" side but I think all citizens regardless of their scientific background need to take part in the "should we" conversation. If this is not a healthy conversation I fear that very useful and beneficial gene therapy treatments will be the proverbial baby in the bathwater when the anti-GMO, anti-vaccine masses catch wind of these kind of available "treatments."

What do you think about this? Listen to the primary researcher - Jay Neitz - discuss the experiments in the following Nature podcast.

Mancuso, K., Hauswirth, W., Li, Q., Connor, T., Kuchenbecker, J., Mauck, M., Neitz, J., & Neitz, M. (2009). Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature08401

Obama Calls a Spade a Spade

Worth 16 minutes and 24 seconds

This represents the future of film!

Darwin STILL to controversial for America!

UNBELIEVABLE!

This well put together Hollywood-caliber movie about the life of Charles Darwin (BORN 200 YEARS AGO) is still too controversial for the USA. According to the Telegraph "Creation" - a film about Charles Darwin - has failed to find a US distributor. Are we really that provincial? This is an OUTRAGE!