This story has so much irony about the modern condition.

We make such a big deal about using food to make fuel that we don’t realize how much fuel we could save by just stop wasting food.

The question is the more we continue our addiction to fossil fuels, the more we encourage waste and destruction? By simplying stop wasting food, we would have no need to rape the Earth for unconventional sources of fossil fuels, such as oil from oil tar sands and oil shale.

We express so much concern about how we are going to feed a expanding global population when, in reality, we produce enough food today to probably come close to feeding double the present world’s population.

In reality, growing food sometimes seems to be the easy part of the equation despite its many, many challenge. It’s after the food is produced is where many of the modern problems exist with the biggest obstacles being infrastructure and politics that keeps the food from the people who need.

This is a bold statement, but I really can’t understand why people have to go hungry in our modern age. Despite the growing population, the diminishing amount of farmland available to grow the food and the struggle for water, there’s is plenty of food available on this planet for the people who live here. If we are going to feed a hungry population, we better be more worried about how to get people to cooperate in getting the food where it is needed, invest in the needed infrastructure to make sure the food can get there and most of all, quit wasting food.

According to the American Chemical Company, scientists have identified a way that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — “without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting food”. Their study found that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year’s worth of food in the United States.

The study found that food contains energy and requires energy to produce, process, and transport.

“Estimates indicate that between 8 and 16 percent of energy consumption in the United States went toward food production in 2007,” according to the study. ”Despite this large energy investment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the U.S. waste about 27 percent of their food. The scientists realized that the waste might represent a largely unrecognized opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming.”

 According to the study,  the analysis of wasted food and the energy needed to ready it for consumption concluded that the U.S. wasted about 2030 trillion BTU of energy in 2007, or the equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil.

“That represents about 2 percent of annual energy consumption in the U.S.

“Consequently, the energy embedded in wasted food represents a substantial target for decreasing energy consumption in the U.S.,” according to the study. “The wasted energy calculated here is a conservative estimate both because the food waste data are incomplete and outdated and the energy consumption data for food service and sales are incomplete.”

The bottom line: Conspicuous consumption is the source of our energy crisis and the threat of global warming. We can still have the kind of progress technology promises by following these three little words: Recyle, Reuse and Reduce.

 This story is from the University of Oregon concerning how GMO regulations are hurting the growth of biofuel industry.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Faster development of the promising field of cellulosic biofuels – the renewable energy produced from grasses and trees – is being significantly hampered by a “deep and thorny regulatory thicket” that makes almost impossible the use of advanced gene modification methods, researchers say.

In a new study published today in the journal BioScience, scientists argue that major regulatory reforms and possibly new laws are needed to allow cellulosic bioenergy to reach its true potential as a form of renewable energy, and in some cases help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

“It’s extraordinary that gene modification technology, which has been adapted more rapidly than any other technology in the history of agriculture, and had some profound environmental and economic benefits, has been regulated virtually out of existence for perennial cellulosic biofuels crops,” said Steve Strauss, a distinguished professor of forest biotechnology at Oregon State University, and lead author of the paper. 

In the report, the authors noted that exotic plant species pose a serious risk of spread and ecosystem impacts, but face much less stringent regulation or obstacles than genetically engineered crops, which are carefully designed to solve problems, not cause them.

A genetically modified plant in which one or a few genes have been changed is treated as more of a risk than an invasive species that has thousands of new genes, and as a result is often resistant to multiple pests and has novel adaptive traits such as drought and heat tolerance, they said.

Companies that have the technical expertise to conduct advanced research have been forced to stay away from gene modification methods, rather than adopt them to speed breeding progress and insert novel traits important to the growing biofuels industry.

Traits that could be improved with gene modification include enhanced stress tolerance, reduced costs of conversion to liquid fuels, reduced use of water and fertilizer in cultivation, avoiding dispersal into the environment, and synthesis of new, renewable products such as industrial enzymes.

But virtually none of that potential is now being developed, they said.

The current environment poses enormous legal risks that can and have cost some companies millions of dollars in civil lawsuits, the scientists said, sometimes for damages that were more of perception and market issues, than of safety or environmental impact.

“Even research on traits expressly intended to reduce environmental impacts face the same legal risks and regulatory barriers as other traits,” Strauss said.  “Our own federally-funded research on means to promote ecological containment of gene-modified and exotic biofuel crops has been brought to a standstill by regulations.” 

The scientists said that the end result of a gene modification project – the trait produced, and whether it is safe and beneficial or not – should be the primary consideration for regulation, not the process used to produce it. Low-level risk and high benefit projects should be identified and allowed to move forward with much less stringent regulation or none at all. They also made several other suggestions for reform to make the overall system less slow, costly and uncertain.

“It is essential that we create an intelligent regulatory system that does not indiscriminately penalize the gene modification process and obstruct essential field research,” Strauss said. “The one-size-fits-all style system of today treats the process of genetic modification as inherently dangerous, although many high-level science panels have concluded that the process is at least as safe as conventional breeding methods.”

In some cases, the stringent regulations make it virtually impossible to do the very research needed to adequately understand issues of value and safety, the researchers said.

“The regulations in place, forthcoming, and those that have been imposed by legal actions result in the presumption that all forms of gene modified trees and grasses are ‘plant pests’ or ‘noxious weeds’ until extensive experimentation and associated documentation ‘prove’ otherwise,” the scientists wrote in their report.

Solving these problems will require new ways of thinking and strong scientific and political leadership to create a regulatory system that enables, rather than arbitrarily blocks, the use of gene modification as a tool to accelerate and diversify the breeding of perennial biofuel crops, the researchers concluded.

This story is available online: http://bit.ly/bfMSYm

Each day, research is released indicating that what’s happening worldwide with rising temperatures and global weather patterns are a result of man’s influence on those chaning weather patterns through his activities, such as the increasing use of fossil fuels.

And to feed our addition to fossil fuels, we are turning our technological expertise to exploiting unconventional sources of oil from shale and sand.

According to the Guardian Environmental Network, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming hold oil shale reserves estimated to contain 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil,  based on information from the U.S. Department of Energy, half of which the department says is recoverable. Eastern Utah alone holds tar sands oil reserves estimated at 12 billion to 19 billion barrels, the article said.

 The tar sands region of northern Alberta, Canada contains recoverable oil reserves conservatively estimated at 175 billion barrels, and with new technology could reach 400 billion barrels and would be partially transported via pipeline that will go through Nebraska.

 Deep gas-bearing shales of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Gulf Coast contain countless trillions of feet of natural gas. If current projections turn out to be accurate, there would be enough oil and gas to power the United States for at least another century, according to the article.

“But even as one of the largest energy booms in history has erupted along a great arc of the continent, the consequences are prompting civic discontent, lawsuits, and political battles in state capitals,” the article said. “The boom is producing fresh scars on the land and new threats to scarce water supplies. Government studies show that exploiting unconventional fossil-fuel reserves generates more C02 emissions than drilling for conventional oil and gas and uses three to five times more water.

“It’s a pact with the devil,” says Randy Udall, a consulting energy analyst from Colorado. “The tar sands and shale oil and shale gas require a lot of water. It sets up a collision course for the West.”

In communities from Wyoming to Texas, the article said that thousands of trucks now rumble down rural roads, carrying the huge amounts of water — 2 million to 4 million gallons per well — needed to free oil and natural gas from shales by blasting them with high-pressure fluids. In places such as North Dakota, which receives modest amounts of rainfall, local residents and conservationists worry that the energy boom will deplete aquifers.

And the explosion in development of these unconventional fossil fuels raises a troubling question at the national level: At a time when the country should be embracing a renewable energy revolution, it is hurtling in the opposite direction, developing on a massive scale sources of energy that cause considerably more environmental harm than conventional oil and gas drilling, according to the article.

And with a lot of those unconventional recovery methods just starting, will it only add to the environmental harm already taking place in the world.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by GISS’s director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and found that an unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, along with a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States that strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems have reinvigorated questions about humanity’s role in climate change.

What the researchers found was that globally, June through August, was the fourth-warmest summer period in GISS’s 131-year-temperature record. The same months during 2009, in contrast, were the second warmest on record. The slightly cooler 2010 summer temperatures were primarily the result of a moderate La Niña (cooler than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) replacing a moderate El Niño (warmer than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean).

According to NASA,  as part of their analysis, Hansen and colleagues released a series of graphs that help explain why perceptions of global temperatures vary — often erroneously — from season to season and year to year. For example, unusually warm summer temperatures in the United States and eastern Europe created the impression of global warming run amuck in those regions this summer, while last winter’s unusually cool temperatures created the opposite impression. A more global view, as shown below for 2009 and 2010, makes clear that extrapolating global trends based on the experience of one or two regions can be misleading.

“Unfortunately, it is common for the public to take the most recent local seasonal temperature anomaly as indicative of long-term climate trends,” Hansen notes. “[We hope] these global temperature anomaly maps may help people understand that the temperature anomaly in one place in one season has limited relevance to global trends.”

Last winter, for example, Hansen said unusually cool temperatures in much of the United States caused many Americans to wonder why temperatures seemed to be plummeting, and whether the Earth could actually be experiencing global warming in the face of such frigid temperatures. A more global view, seen in the lower left of the four graphs above, shows that global warming trends had hardly abated. In fact, despite the cool temperatures in the United States, last winter was the second-warmest on record.

Meanwhile, the global seasonal temperatures for the spring of 2010 — March, April, and May — was the warmest on GISS’s record. Does that mean that 2010 will shape up to be the warmest on record? Since the warmest year on GISS’s record — 2005 — experienced especially high temperatures during the last four calendar months of the year, it’s not yet clear how 2010 will stack up.

“It is likely that the 2005 or 2010 calendar year means will turn out to be sufficiently close that it will be difficult to say which year was warmer, and results of our analysis may differ from those of other groups,” Hansen notes. “What is clear, though, is that the warmest 12-month period in the GISS analysis was reached in mid-2010.”

The Russian heat wave was highly unusual. Its intensity exceeded anything scientists have seen in the temperature record since widespread global temperature measurements became available in the 1880s. Indeed, a leading Russian meteorologist asserted that the country had not experienced such an intense heat wave in the last 1,000 years. And a prominent meteorologist with Weather Underground estimated such an event may occur as infrequently as once every 15,000 years.

In the face of such a rare event, there’s much debate and discussion about whether global warming can “cause” such extreme weather events. The answer — both no and yes — is not a simple one.

Weather in a given region occurs in such a complex and unstable environment, driven by such a multitude of factors, that no single weather event can be pinned solely on climate change. In that sense, it’s correct to say that the Moscow heat wave was not caused by climate change.

However, if one frames the question slightly differently: “Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels,” the answer, Hansen asserts, is clear: “Almost certainly not.”

The frequency of extreme warm anomalies increases disproportionately as global temperature rises.

“Were global temperature not increasing, the chance of an extreme heat wave such as the one Moscow experienced, though not impossible, would be small,” Hansen says.

More than 90 percent of Nebraska’s 14 million-plus acres of corn and soybeans are made up of gentically modified organisms  whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques.

But can the same science be used to help combat global warming?

In a study conducted by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the researchers found that forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming.

Besides increasing the efficiency of plants’ absorption of light, researchers said that they might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots–where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries.

Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops, according to the research. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the research authors’ estimates.

Study said that the researchers stress that the use of genetically engineered plants for carbon sequestration is only one of many policy initiatives and technical tools that might boost the carbon sequestration already occurring in natural vegetation and crops.