The idea of "engineering plants with weaker cellulose" is insane beyond language.

If there's a potential for us to survive Peak Everything, we would have to recognize that the Earth is bountiful but not infinite.

Hundreds of millions of years of trial and error probably developed the proper level of cellulose for plants - certainly with greater skill than overly bright technicians of empire.

http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/2008/01/bacterium-that-almost-ate-wor...

Elaine Ingham IN MY PROGRAM at Oregon State University in the early 1990s, we started testing the ecological impacts of most of the genetically engineered organisms being produced at that time. The question our lab was asked to address was, Did these engineered organisms have any impact out there in the real world?

The first fourteen species that we worked on - microorganisms, bacteria. and fungi - were organisms incapable of surviving in the natural environment. Putting them in the world would be like taking penguins from the South Pole and dropping them into the La Brea tar pits. Would there be any ecological effect if we dropped a penguin into the middle of the tar pit? Probably not; the impact would be rapidly absorbed by the system.

These first fourteen species of GMOs that we tested had a similarly negligible impact. On this basis. the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the regulatory agency that was determining U.S. policy on genetically engineered organisms, set a course that essentially said that a genetically engineered organism posed no greater risk to the environment than the parent organism does.

GMO number fifteen, however, was a very different story. Klebsiella planticola, the bacterium that is the parent organism of this new strain, lives in soils everywhere. It's one of the few truly universal species of bacteria, growing in the root systems of all plants and decomposing plant litter in every ecosystem in the world.

The genetic engineers took genetic material from another bacterium and inserted that trait in the GMO to allow Klebsiella planticola to produce alcohol. The aim of this genetic modification was to eliminate the burning of farm fields to rid them of plant matter after harvest. The idea was that you could, instead, rake up all that plant residue, put it in a bucket. and inoculate it with the engineered bacterium, and in about two weeks' time you would have a material that contained about 17 percent alcohol. The alcohol could be extracted and used for gasohol, for cleaning windows, or for myriad other uses: cooking with alcohol in Third World countries, for instance.

The genetic engineers thought this transformation would bring huge benefits. We would no longer have to burn fields, we would breathe better in the fall, and both the company and farmers would get a product that could be sold. There was actually a fourth win: the sludge at the bottom of the bucket is an organic fertilizer, and there are no waste products from that material.

So what's the problem? Suppose you're a farmer and you've got live, alcohol-producing Klebsiella planticola that you're going to spread on your fields (which might be easier than gathering up all the plant waste and putting it in buckets). Can it wash into the root systems of your plants? Most likely. Once it's there and growing in the root systems of your plants, it's producing alcohol. What level of alcohol is toxic to plants? It's one part per million. How much alcohol does this engineered organism produce? Seventeen parts per million. Very soon you will have drunk dead plants.

We did this experiment under controlled conditions in the laboratory because I wasn't going to take this kind of risk out in the field. We constructed three kinds of microcosms of a field, filled them with normal field soil as a growing medium, and planted wheat plants in the three separate systems - each consisting of multiple units - and put them in an incubator. In the first third of the units, we added only water. We added parent, non-GMO bacterium to the second group and the engineered Klebsiella planticola to the third.

About a week later, we walked into the laboratory, opened up the incubator, and said, "Oops, what did we do wrong?" Many of the plants were dead and were turning into slime on the surface of the soil. In all the units with just water in the system, the plants were doing okay. In those that had been inoculated with the parent Klebsiella planticola, the plants were even bigger, because increased nutrient cycling in the root system makes more nitrogen available, causing the plants to grow bigger. Clearly the parent organism was a benefit to the plant. But where the engineered bacterium was growing, all the plants were dead.

Later we tried this experiment using several different kinds of soils, but the result in every case was dead plants.

Take that information and extrapolate it to the real world. Given that the parent organism lives in the root systems of all plants, what's the logical outcome of releasing this organism into the natural environment?

Very possibly, we would have no terrestrial plants left. Some plants, such as riparian and wetland plants, have mechanisms for dealing with alcohol production in their root systems. But the logical extrapolation of that experiment is that we would lose terrestrial plants.

I have attended some of the United Nations biosafety protocol meetings. At the 1995 meeting in Madrid, the U.S. delegation was the strongest in saying, in essence, "Don't worry, be happy. Trust us. We don't need a biosafety protocol. Why would biotech companies ever do anything to harm people?"

To me, their words echoed those we've heard before from tobacco, pesticide, and fertilizer companies. At one such meeting, I related the story of Klebsiella planticola as an example of the lack of adequate testing for the ecological impact of genetically engineered organisms. The biotech companies object that it costs too 'much to do this kind of environmental testing. In my view, that's just hype, because I pointed out that our lab spent a very insignificant amount of money to do these simple experiments, especially considering that if this bacterium were let loose in the environment, we would have some very significant problems with our food supply.

No one in his or her right mind is going to test for the kind of risk Klebsiella planticola represents because once you release an organism, there is no way to get it back.

How far does a single-point inoculation of a genetically engineered organism spread in one year? An engineered Rhizobium bacterium that was released in Louisiana in the mid-1990s spread eleven miles per year and has by now dispersed across the North American continent.

At these United Nations meetings I warned that corn pollen is going to move a lot more than three feet away from the plant. "Oh no," said the biotechnology representatives present. "Corn pollen falls out of the air three feet from the plant." I would say, "Wait a minute, you've never heard of bees? How about birds? and insects? and wind "Oh no, it falls out of the air within three feet of the plant." Why do our bureaucrats choose to to believe these "scientists"? Just open any plant textbook and you find that corn pollen can be found in the Antarctic and the Arctic. But if you listen to Monsanto, corn pollen can't possibly be there. Armed with the knowledge of this peril, we need to convince members of Congress that appropriate ecological testing must be done prior to releasing GMOs into the environment. If this happens, it could help keep the problems that are already starting to occur from getting worse.

Addendum from Dave Blume:
I talk about the Klebsiella debacle in detail in my book, Alcohol Can Be A Gas, and it was actually a lot worse than this post relates. The original researchers threw out samples behind the lab and discovered the dead plants, got curious and discovered that the Klebsiella was alive and they had to dig up all the soil and incinerate it. Dr. Ingham subsequently elucidated the mechanism. I would add that the organism was engineered to eat cellulose and make alcohol. So in addition to the alcohol poisoning of the roots the bacteria was also eating the cellulosic root tips of the plants. I often tell this story and add that we really need to lock up all the genetic engineers in a very nice country club type prison since they have nearly ended life on earth several times already with bonehead projects like this.

I looked earlier today for a discussion in DB on these moves. None.

You didn't look here, apparently. ;-)

Agree with ericy 100%, but even more:

1) Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the long-time home of Arther Rosenfeld and others who have done great work on energy efficiency over the years. LBL is one of the world's top centers for work on energy efficiency, and if somehow people haven't heard of Rosenfeld, it's worth reading that webpage and looking at some of his recent presentations.

2) Here's what Chu said of Rosenfeld when the latter got an Enrico Fermi award.

3) So, an ex-Bell Labs guy [we overlapped timewise, although I never met him] has been 20+ years in Northern California (which cares about energy efficiency) at Stanford and Berkeley (both of which are quite intense on the subject), and since 2004 has run the lab famous for its energy-efficiency work for decades...

I don't think we have to worry too much that he'll ignore efficinecy.

Maybe even Obama can get his exercise working in the garden? Remember Clinton's jogging track?

See Obama at work here: http://www.eattheview.org/

I hope he has also read "The Sceptical Environmentalist"

Yes, well I hope he also reads about the errors in the book or can see through them with the power of his own reasoning. For instance, when Lomborg disputes Brown's and others assertions that we are approaching the physiological limit to rice yields, he says there are merely a lack of economic incentives to increase them. (Where do we often hear that?) But a type of graph we're all familiar with shows that there is good evidence to believe that rice yields are nearing their plateau and, as is often recognized here on TOD, sometimes economics bumps into physical limits:

Then, of course, there is his approach to climate change, which is to minimize its impact despite overwhelming evidence of clear negative trends already in existence at the time of publishing of his book (and unfortunately gaining strength every year since).

If we were to follow Lomborg's advice, I think we would even sooner live in a thoroughly denuded and polluted planet.

His mistakes and incorrect conclusions are too numerous to list here, but they have been well-categorized at this site:
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk

Nuclear power is not really even an energy "source" if you factor in having to baby sit the excrement for centuries and millennia.

Because the marginal energy consumption of a dry storage cask is quite large then?

Radioactivity and DNA are not compatible concepts.

Fine and well, address coal for its heavy metal content and radon that natural accumulates anywhere, as well as cosmic rays and the very K-40 in your bones, all which are orders of magnitude larger sources of ionizing radiation than nuclear power. We must ban intercontenental flights, medical radiography, and mountaineering as radioactive public health risks if we are to keep perspective.

We did not need a change in the law for EPA to decide to do noting about global warming. The President has great power to issue executive orders that do not require congressional approval. He can also choose to not enforce laws already on the books.

IMO few question Obama's intellect. What has been called into question is his actual agenda and his integrity.

I find Obama intellectually disnonest and arrogant. His racialist approach to politicking and its success requires he become whitest of all possible presidents. Since no one knows what a white president is, other than the antithesis of Marion Barry ... he cannot know how to actually be one. He will try ... He will not take chances; he is and will be painfully and purposefully conventional. He is a collector rather than a director. He might be a better general manager for the Washington Redskins than owner Dan Snyder, but he cannot command; he has never done so and I don't think he knows how.

Obama is the unluckiest president the country has ever had. Climate change, Peak Resources and Credit Collapse; the Great Leveling (down to my level) is taking place. Obama's term will be framed by circumstances; he lacks both the personal or civic resources to address them preemptively. He will react ... as he has done though his career to date.

The fault lise partly in his stars; America elscted a scapegoat. Americans are pretty smart about some things; such as who gets blamed when things go awry. Obama's great flaw is to not see the peril of his predicament; a wiser man would have avoided the ambition. Obama is blinded by the trappings of the office - to its responsibilities.

Obama is painfully insecure. He surrounds himself with tokens of power and authority so that they reflect authority upon him ... he possesses no authority that is his own. He has a long record in pulbic office, four years as a US Senator. Senators have the statutory authority to challenge it; even a responsibility to do so! He did not even though the country was desperate for someone to step forward. The Senator went along with the Democrats like a good soldier; ws rulled by the Bush administration like the other Democrats. He did run for president. He never questioned Bush policies except around the periphery. He was simply another humanoid blob of goo taking up space in the Capital Building.

Obama failed with the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. The Obama leadership technique was on public display; his lack of personal or political risk taking and his opportunistic approval of the bailout after it was safe. He is another water carrier for big business. Expect policies to be made by lobbyists and tycoons as they are currently. Energy policy will be made by oil companies and electric utilities. Browner and Chu are window dressing, like Paul Volcker.

The best thing about Obama is he is not a crook; he said so himself this morning;

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/12/10/2198345-analysis-scandal-threat...

Very reassuring!

And with 'unlimited (economically free) energy' one could re-process it 'economically'. If the 'big concern' is global warming - unlimited cheap energy would also mean increased heat within the atmosphere as the energy would be converted into 'work' as we are used to it.

Not to mention the effective weapon such devices/methods would be.

Aluminium is 8% of the Earths crust; there's no need to go rumaging around in dumps for it.

Chu is in favour of deep burn technology and doesn't think Yucca mountain is needed:

Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/12/steven-chu-named-energy-secretary.html

Another key area will be the Yucca Mountain project. If they cancel it, I would buy stock in utilities because Uncle Sam is going to have to pay back billions of dollars to them.

You seem to labor under the mistaken believe that the US of A operates under the rule of law.

In tough budget times, the Sovereign will do what it wants - in the interest of national security of course.

"Please keep in mind that there's nothing fundamentally different between climate change prediction software and the proprietary trading models of the now-extinct investment banks."
====

Because one of them is based on physics, the other isn't. About the only similarity is that they often make multiple runs and characterize the ensemble of results.

See FAQ on climate models.

or see more discussion of different kinds of simulations, including why finance models aren't physics models.

[I used to design and help sell supercomputers to climate folks, Wall Street financial modelers, petroleum geoscientists, car & airplane designers. Exactly one of these groups *doesn't* use physics-based models.]

So, I'm curious, as a hobby is tracking down sources of misinformation - can you say where you got this idea?

We do have millions of years of safe nuclear power - as long as the "reactor" is that fusion power source 93 million miles away.

If one is talking about mining uranium and fissioning it to boil water to spin a turbine, estimates vary but a few decades (possibly slightly more) is a more realistic estimate.

Peak Uranium.

Ask the Navajo uranium miners about the health impacts of digging this stuff out of the Earth where it is currently encapsulated through natural geologic processes. Your great-great-great-great-great grandchildren need us to keep this out of the biosphere.

There would be slightly longer estimates for nuclear fission power if the irradiated fuel rods are "reprocessed" -- dropped in nitric acid to extract the unfissioned U and the created Pu. But this would also put nuclear weapons material into widespread commerce, necessitating a totalitarian police state that did not bother with such antiquated notions as civil liberties and democracy. See the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 1975 "Barton Report," which predicted the suspension of civil liberties by a nuclearized economy.

No thanks.