Green farts

If you think you have seen everything about dumb ideas on how to save the World, think again. Maybe you though it was impressive the Discovery Channel series “How to save the Earth". But raining forests, cover the ices in Greenland or even throw tones of iron into the sea are nothing compared with what suggest an article from this week’s New Scientist magazine: using a micro-organism’s farts to produce fuel.

According to Tom Curtis, form the Institute for Research on Environment and Sustainability of the University of Newcastle, in the UK, there is a micro-organism capable of producing methane (in the form of farts) from electricity and CO2. The methane, later, could be use as fuel in cars or even planes. Not to mention that it would help to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. A great fuel source.

The solution looks awesome. From the energy used on the process, an 80% is recovered. And, as there are no noble metals involved and only implies living forms, it is cheap, simple and green.

It isn’t something new or revolutionary, however. Farts have been seen as a possible solution to cool the planet since more than a year and a half. In December 2007, Athol Klive, an Australian scientific, launched a similar proposal but in the opposite way: aimed to reduce the methane expelled by cattle and sheep. Unlike the farts of the bacterias, it’s impossible (and very unpleasant) to recover cow’s and sheep’s farts. So methane from those animal’s stomachs goes directly into the atmosphere, and it becomes another greenhouse gas.

But Klieve discovered a bacteria in kangaroos' stomachs that makes their farts free of methane. His study is based on the implementation of this bacteria into cattle and sheep’s’ stomachs with genetically modified tech.

The measure, according to the Aussie scientific, not only will decrease the emissions in a 14%, but also will increase the animals’ stomachs’ efficiency in between a 15 and a 20%. This is, they will need less food. Obviously this makes happy many farmers.

Meanwhile, Europe has just approved what was discussed a year ago about the reduction of CO2 emissions in a 20% and increase of the renewable energy sources use up to the 20% by 2020. The so called 20-20-20 deal.

Surprisingly, data from 2008 suggest that they are on the right road. Last year, emissions in Europe were down a 6%. But to be fair, recession has had a lot to say on that.

At least it’s going down. With everyone (media, scientifics, even the defence industry) proposing solutions, politicians finally jumped into the green car of global warming.

Of course, it’s not purely altruistic. It has a lot to do with newcoming threats. Global warming is not just something affecting Africa or the penguins in Antarctica. It can fire up wars and there are a few spots worldwide that will be seriously threatened by this. They are about to become hot zones, but not because of the increase of temperatures.

However, not everyone is doing it well. Even the good guys, like Germany, Norway, Japan or Spain. In the latter, green energies are having a great backing from the government, but money goes into the implementation, not into investigation and development. The end of this cycle is just the same as the house bubble, especially because of how it is being implemented (likewise the housing permits before).

Also the debate about nuclear energy has arisen again. There is a lot of hipocresy around the official position. The Government bans new nuclear plants, but doesn’t hesitate to buy energy to France, mostly produced in nuclear plants.

Today, green energies aren’t as profitable -energetically speaking- as the rest. And to fill the gap until they are, the most efficient, clean and safe way to do so is with the nuclear energy. And even better if we can discover the fusion. That’s even truer if we think about emerging markets’ demands in Brazil, India and, of course, China.

Neither Japan nor Norway are doing it well. There is a lot of external image but few real interest. Japan is the world largest manufacturer of solar panels, but still three of each four units of energy he spends come from non-renewvable sources and it is one of the ten biggest contributors of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Norway, on the other hand, is a extremely green minded country. Probably the most. But as the Economist states, he doesn’t hesitate to drill his own marine floor to seek oil to sell to others. Double moral?

Maybe the only good example, up to now, is Germany.