No, I'm not ignoring that question, I'm trying to answer it. Ethanol does not do the job, methanol does.

Well, I don't know, perhaps you're not up to date on the latest developments. I'm not talking about using standard "green revolution" farming techniques, I'm talking about using the native productivity of the land... understanding how that system works, and "nudging" it a bit to maximize yields of stuff we can use.

In a word, it's called Permaculture. Check it out, it's kinda cool.

Seriously? After all this, do you still not realize that we're not talking about cellulose derived ethanol?

Roughly speaking:
      Starch + Yeast = Ethanol
      Cellulose + Yeast = Methanol

That's the whole point of using methanol in the first place, there's no starch or sugar required. Go ahead and grow your corn, and use the kernels for whatever you want. I'll take the rest of that plant (which is easily 90% of the biomass) and convert it directly into methanol.

And that's just using a standard green-revolution/annual crop... give me a well-managed perennial savanna and I could easily double the yield with NO petro inputs.

No, they don't. Not if you do it right.

Sure, if you try to raise a "mono-species" crop like modern-day corn or beans, you'll need inputs. But you just don't need that kind of approach. All you need is healthy, multi-species prairie (preferably fertilized by occasional ruminants) and you can mow it all down every couple of months and feed it to your fermenters. The simple fact of having a natural diversity of species means that you don't have to put any petro-inputs onto the land. There is no difference between "weed" and "crop" in this scheme... it's all just cellulose to the yeasts that digest it.

First: Half of all human-edible food produced today is wasted. We have a LOT more work to do on the political and economic side before we have to start worrying about our agricultural productive capacity.

Second, it has NOTHING to do with soil quality. In fact, in most cases, the "marginal" lands have much better soil, simply because they haven't been farmed as much.

Third, with only minor modifications the land can be "sculpted" to maximize productivity and minimize inputs.

Yeah, except for all those ethanol plants which could easily be converted to methanol production.

We can make methanol from your lawn mower's grass clippings. America currently has about 30 million acres of lawn.

'Nuff said?

Also, imagine the economic boost when we no longer have to send $400 billion per year to Middle Eastern states that don't really like us very much.

+1 Informative

I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. The current Dragon already matches the safety requirements of the original (pre-Challenger) Shuttle program. If push comes to shove wrt Russia, we'll be able to rapidly get a "provisional" crewed flight capability, and transition to a fully human-rated system within a couple of years.

Mod parent up!

"Modern agriculture" is based largely on annual crops, which deplete the soil and require massive inputs. Methanol can be made from perennial crops which can be harvested economically with little to no inputs.

And since perennials do not require tillage, there is very little environmental degradation. Indeed, if herbivores are incorporated in the farming scheme, the combination can actually increase the topsoil. Without tillage, such crops can be raised on lands which are currently considered marginal or unusable for conventional row-cropping. So methanol (unlike ethanol) would not compete with food crops at all.

It already is produced at industrial scale. It's one of the most common "industrial" chemicals on the market. Unfortunately, a good chunk is currently produced from natural gas, but it is (and has been) made from various feedstocks for more than a century.

Even so, growing corn to make ethanol is just dumb. Methanol would be a much better choice, since it can be made from any biomass, not just starch or sugar. The only reason we use ethanol is as an excuse to grow so much corn, which is heavily subsidized. Also, methanol is CHEAP... about $1.50/gal.

An easy solution would be to enact a flex-fuel standard for automobiles, which would require that all new cars be fully flex-fuel capable: able to run on any mixture of gasoline, ethanol, methanol, or butanol. (In most cases, the "flex-fuel" cars on the market today can only use ethanol, not methanol.) To convert an existing car costs 500 bucks, but if it's built that way at the factory, it only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle.

Such a requirement would change the market. With millions of cars able to use it, gas station owners would start selling methanol on one or two pumps. This would effectively break the current monopoly that petroleum has on transportation fuel.

According to this recent talk by Joel Salatin, cotton farmers in the south nowadays have to pay $70/acre to have people manually chop down the Roundup-resistant weeds before they harvest. Apparently they grow so big that they tear up the combine, and since Roundup won't kill 'em, they have to be hacked out with a machete.

As Salatin puts it, "This is a crack in the paradigm." The whole system of industrial scale, petro-chemical dependent, mono-species farming is about to fall apart.

If you've always wanted to start a backyard garden (or even if you haven't) now might be a good time to start.

Like an Onion headline.

This particular effect is not attributed to global pollution levels, but specifically to the northern Pacific zone. Given the known, prevailing wind patterns, it's pretty clear that China has the greatest impact on this particular area.

Of course, AGW is also a huge part of the overall problem, and the USA is a major contributor (the major contributor per capita), but TFA article is not really about AGW per se, it's about a a regional weather trend which happens to affect a neighboring region, North America.

IIRC, they're not trying to land this 1st stage on land, instead they're going for a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. But if they get good "numbers" from this attempt, they will probably try a "dry" landing in the near future.

Can someone explain to me in a sentence or two how and why Twitter is useful? I've had an account for many years, but every time I log in to check, it just looks like a mess. And yet there are millions of people who (apparently) think it's awesome, so I must be doing something wrong.

I would love to hear some examples of how others have found Twitter useful.

Yes. The "obstacle" causing the delay was a problem with a backup unit, while the primary is still functioning fine. They had originally scheduled a spacewalk to fix the backup, but presumably, in the event of a failure, they could just "park" the Dragon a convenient orbit to await repairs. So they're better off launching now instead of waiting for the repairs.

Sounds good to me... I just want to see another Falcon fly... ;-)

And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.

Now I can see the potholes as they rattle my bones in real time. Kewl! ;-)