Friday, May 8, 2009
In an article in The New York Times, the Obama administration discusses it's intentions with future energy needs. The fuel cell cars that the Bush administration had thought would be the future were unfortunately deemed impractical. I was sorry to hear that all work was stopped on the cars, but happy to hear about Obama's future plans. He will be restoring Futuregen a program to build a power plant prototype. The plant would turn coal into gas, separate out the carbon dioxide — a major contributor to the greenhouse gases that cause global warming — and pump it underground. Then it would burn the hydrogen, which is nearly pollution-free. One negative is that this will cost more than they had planned and will be payed for by another stimulus. How many of these can we have? I am curious to see what he will come up with next to solve our evolving energy problems and needs.
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Obama proposes another stimulus plan, surprise surprise! However, it's about time that the government take global warming seriously. They have been ignoring for far too long. We knew we strongly depended on different countries for the insane amount of oil we use. We produce more pollution than any other country, excluding China which is at least three times the size of the U.S. Biologists are making huge advancements in technology and are constantly proposing new ideas. One that I found very interesting was Craig Venter. In 2005, Venter founded Synthetic Genomics, a private company with a provocative mission: to engineer new life forms. Its goal is to design, synthesize and assemble synthetic microorganisms that will produce alternative fuels, such as ethanol or hydrogen. He was one of the leading scientists that discovered how to read the entire genome of organisms. That successful research gave Venter and his team the knowledge to make computer software to create organisms. He also traveled and did research on small sea organisms like algae and bacteria. Now Venter is working on developing new bacterial strains capable of eating CO2 and producing fuels. His ultimate goal is to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline. His work is ground breaking and absolutely amazing! It could very well save our planet! In the next thirty years our population will increase from 6 billion to 9 billion and we are rapidly using up the earth's resources. They have also applied this research to vaccinations. Of course, there are skeptics that believe that this research is very dangerous and there are Christians that are strongly opposed claiming that Venter is "playing God". But I bet if one of their lives or the life of their child could be saved by this break through science they would change their mind. For protection Venter has created a suicide gene that can be activated in any lab creation to kill it immediately, which would prevent someone from bio-hacking or trying to spread a "killer bug". This technology has the capability to save not only our earth but our lives.
ReplyDeleteThis is the link to one of his more famous lectures!
my govt 2305 blog has a really good blog on global warming and what the Obama administration is going to do about it. I argue that this is a good idea, but it will cost more money that the United States just does not have right now. And we really don't need another stimulus. This was good blogging; I got a lot of information in just a short paragraph. Well done my govt 2305 blog.
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