Economic Meltdown (seconda parte)

[kandrathe]

but I don't see any major growth before we start seeing something different that can drive jobs without government subsidization.

I don't agree on government subsidy as the best method of instigating change. It can skew choice away from what would otherwise be the correct one, such as what has and is happening with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops.

I do not think I wrote what you think I wrote. Without subsidies.

Oh. Then I agree with you entirely.

I fully agree with you about ethanol / biodiesel. My actual vision is that non-farmland ethanol production is the next big thing for the US economy.

There is some bioengineering and R&D to take place yet, but I do not think it outside the realm of possibility to engineer some kind of organism that lives in salt water, eats some kind of animal feces, and "poops" ethanol or something that can be easily turned into ethanol. We clearly know of natural organisms and algae that eat something and poop ethanol (fermentation), but natural organisms only do this in the absence of light and very slowly. The main hurdle is bio-engineering them to do it in sunlight, as the sunlight energy should significantly speed the conversion process.

All current ethanol processes destroy whatever plant matter it uses. I think a truly viable ethanol process where ethanol is created from live matter rather than dead matter will eventually happen.

Meeting all the conditions I mentioned would be somewhat of a holy grail (salt water organism = ethanol plant doubles as desalination plant in drought prone areas, if it "eats" animal feces in some form, even if it needed processed, then "food" would be extremely cheap. While the US doesn't have tons and tons of hot arid areas near salt water, it does have a fair amount of the south, Texas and CA that would be close enough that pumping salt water shouldn't be too costly,) but meeting even one should dramatically reduce the cost of ethanol production compared to today. Ethanol is almost an economical alternative to gasoline now, just not able to be scaled to quantities needed.

I honestly think we are close to a breakthrough here. I think much closer than we are to any breakthrough that would make electric vehicles feasible on a large scale.

The biggest problem right now with ethanol is with it's association to farming. This is why it's become such a political issue. Any funding towards ethanol research instead becomes branded as a farming handout, even if it is not. Breaking the ties between ethanol and farming, not just at a government level, but in the mind of the everyday person is an uphill battle. It's one of those things where people in the US hear ethanol and think corn. It's a terrible starting point, with two major lobbies against any rational decision making (oil lobbies and farm lobbies).

And besides the potential gain, the irony circle of such a discovery would be good for a laugh.
After all, if an ethanol process were discovered that would make ethanol cheaper to make in hot, sunny areas near salt water than the cost of extracting oil from the ground, the US would have a brief period of sticking their tongue out at the Middle East before they realized the Middle East is one giant hot & sunny desert bordering salt water and it would probably end up cheaper for them to make ethanol there and ship it to the US than it would be to make it in the US at US labor rates.

You are probably spot on. My sister and her husband work at UCSD in molecular biology, and bioengineering. One of the labs there run by Dr. Mayfield is working on an algae that makes ethanol.