Sometimes good isn't good


If cheap artificial ethanol enzymes happen, the results will be ugly
Via Karl at Rite Wing Technopagan comes a link to this article about unintended consequences of the ethanol push.

Now picture a world in which cellulose-splitting enzymes are cheaper than bottled water, and a pint poured into the steel cow behind your hut will quickly turn a hundred pounds of wood chips or grass into a gallon of diesel. However sensibly we Americans might use the enzymes in Kansas, we know where cow-gut chemistry will inevitably lead in rural Burundi, India or China. Sure, a villager will fill the still with waste cellulose first. The enzymes, however, are just as happy to take apart freshly cut wood or grass, and that's what villagers will use instead when they need or want more energy than waste alone can supply. Just as villagers do today when they cook. The one difference is this: When the villager harvests wood or grass today, he can only bake chapatis, heat his hut or feed his cow. With cheap enzymes at hand, he can also power a generator and a motorbike.

History has already taught us what a carbohydrate energy economy does to a rich, green landscape--it levels it. The carbon balance goes sharply negative, too, when stove or cow is fueled with anything but waste or crops from existing farmland. It's pleasant to imagine that humanity might get all its liquid fuels from stable, legacy farms or from debris that would otherwise end up as fungus food. But that just isn't how humans have historically fed whatever they could feed with cellulose.

From the perspective of all things green, cellulose-splitting enzymes are much the same as fire or cow, only worse. Fire and cow consume cellulose, but the process is generally messy and inconvenient, which is a big advantage, from the plant's perspective. To improve on wood-burning fires, or grass-eating cows, perfect the cellulose-splitting enzyme. Then watch what 7 billion people will do to your forests and your grasslands.

I didn't know that these ethanol enzymes were in the works, but I can't disagree with his analysis. If these things become cheap, you can pretty much say goodbye to vast tracts of rainforest, jungle, grasslands, or pretty much any massive amount of plantlife.

So is that good or bad from the official environmental standard? It wouldn't be the U.S. doing it, but it would devastate the ecology.

Worth thinking about, and it earns a spot in my blogroll.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - June 15, 2006 at 04:41 PM  Tag


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