Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

Sarah Lyutse of the NRDC reports as follows: Last week, NRDC released a new fact sheet on the VEETC, highlighting how our government’s biggest incentive program for biofuels has almost exclusively supported the production of corn ethanol which, when all direct and indirect costs are added, creates more global warming pollution than the oil it [...]

In Washington, the EPA issued this week its proposed RFS2 renewable fuel blending mandates for 2011. Stunners among the announced targets were the confirmation of an 800 million gallon blending mandate for biodiesel, and the dropping of the cellulosic biofuel mandate from 250 million gallons to a 6-25 million gallon range.Overall the EPA did not [...]

A breakthrough by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers at the GLBRC has made it possible to perform genetic analysis on Cellvibrio japonicus, a promising bacterium that has long been known to convert biomass to sugars. Using a technique called vector integration, the team has developed a method to generate a mutation in any [...]

A renewable biofuel economy is projected as a pathway to decrease dependence on fossil fuels as well as to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. Ethanol produced on large-scale from lignocellulosic raw materials is considered the most potential next generation automotive fuel. In this paper, a Life Cycle Assessment model was developed to evaluate the environmental [...]

By examining genes that are expressed in the guts of gribble, the researchers have demonstrated that its digestive system contains enzymes which could hold the key to converting wood and straw into liquid biofuels.In research published today, a team headed by Professor Simon McQueen-Mason and Professor Neil Bruce at York, and Dr Simon Cragg at [...]

Biofuel startup ZeaChem has begun building a biofuel pilot plant that will turn cellulosic feedstocks into ethanol via a novel approach that uses microbes found in the guts of termites. The company says the ethanol yields from the sugars of its cellulosic feedstocks are significantly higher than the yields from other biofuel production processes. ZeaChem [...]

Daniel Hillel and Cynthia Rosenzweig have written a very good summary of carbon sequestration in soil: “Soil and Carbon Climate Change: Carbon Exchange in the Terrestrial Domain of Agriculture”, CSA News, Vol. 54 No. 6, June 2009.  If you somehow missed the soil classes in your geology courses, this article illustrates the big picture. Why [...]