July 02, 2003

anything to oil
From the world of things that, if even remotely true, really ought to be getting zillions of federal research dollars comes news of an omnirefinery that cheaply generates #2 fuel oil (among other commodities) from refuse. Neat stuff!

A special prize, however, should be awarded to me for spotting the astounding, disingenuous hole in the following argument, posed by the company's guy and accepted uncritically by the reporter:

But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of the civilized world-domestic animals and plants, buildings, artificial objects of all kinds-would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously accumulate in the atmosphere. "Suddenly, the whole built world just becomes a temporary carbon sink," says Paul Baskis, inventor of the thermal depolymerization process. "We would be honoring the balance of nature."
If only my car turned octane into long-chain fuels...
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add chris lydon
Stumbled across Chris Lydon's site, whose NPR show I can't stand, but whose site is excellent. I've added it to the sidebar. It replaces the Times, which we all know how to find without a link to click on.
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titles
Finally got rid of those completely useless titles. In whose universe did it ever make sense that individual paragraphs must each bear a title?
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