Our concept of litter is often situated in our aesthetic vision of the world, and a short time view…
One of the largest problems in how we view the world is in how we consider the concept of litter and pollution. Ultimately these are false concepts because they are only related to how we see something, and in how long we live and the band of time we live in.
So if there are bacteria and living things that eat the oils and use them for fuel of life, then is oil a polluting chemical?
In other words, when there is an oil spill, you are not damaging a coastline forever, but only making it different to how we saw it a short time ago. What you have done is create a huge pile of food for bacteria to feast on. Is food pollution?
The only difference is the time scale you look at it. Look at it at an hourly scale and it looks different to you, and you are disgusted that the common natural aesthetic vision has been broken. Mostly because WE can’t eat oil and the creatures we like can’t eat oil, and so we don’t appreciate it as much as the bacteria that will eat and live and travel on it.
Give it time, and it will fade into the background again…
The same is true of all our pollution. Give it time, and they will break apart, and degrade. We don’t like plastic soda bottles because they ‘last 100 years’. Well glass bottles can last more than 1000 years!!! So why do we like them more than the plastic ones? Also the solution is there in the statement. Wait 300 years.
So then the problem is one of space, not one of pollution. And the kicker is that the problem of space will eventually fix itself. If one wants to find the richest deposits of minerals and materials, a garbage dump is the richest supply of such things. it is only a matter of short time that it will be more expensive to mine things from the earth than it will be to mine garbage dumps and render the garbage into raw materials.
We are approaching that level now with the ability to grind up cars and tires and things and sort the particles recovering around 80% of the material. What is left over would be buried and in another 100 or so years technology would exist to recover that material. By then we would be getting new material, and disposing of material in space sending it with a push to the sun.
The whole idea of burying our nuclear waste for 10,000 or 1,000 years is absurd. we are well within 100 years of safe individual space flight (when we are allowed to each have lots more energy, we then will all be able to do this. restrict energy, none of this higher order life is possible as each new level requires a new level of energy consumption). This means that nuclear waste will eventually be solar destroyed, as the sun is the greenest of all green garbage disposals for humans. (Not to mention that soon it will be easier to manufacture the most nasty things in space where venting stuff gets carried away by the solar wind)
We are on the verge of a new level of freedom… which is why the politicians are all siding with socialism. Like the industrial revolution before it, each new modern level of capitalism makes the politicians less relevant. And they then use their power to hurt the machine, so that it has crisis and it seems to make them very relevant. However the machine would run better without them, and space and all the new nationality type things it will bring, will fracture whatever globalism we have, and again, foil the feudalists who can’t control distributive power AND collect its fruits.
So what if the world runs out of natural resources? The solar system has more than we could ever possibly use, and we are on the verge of private flight. So we are not long away from our natural resources being scaled up by planetary quantities. Which would make the economics shift and make things like CO2 air scrubbers worth making and not hurt doing so.
Ultimately Marxist ideas and the movements it spawns is nested in the old world idea of running out of ideas, and that progress can’t solve problems (that it now has already solved!). That they are the ones fixed in time that do not see that the wonders will continue if we are allowed to progress to each new levels, and the ideas that they hold are ideas in which validity MIGHT only exist if such new progress was impossible to make.
They are the modern luddites hiding themselves in a veil of belief that allows them to think that halting progress is in some way making progress. that by restricting opportunities, you can create opportunities. That we are going to run out of ideas because Marxists are such very poor visionaries (which is why they keep trying to make a unworkable system work), that they cant see that as the total monetary scale grows, things that were impossible before become possible because they are now cheap. That being green and having a better world is a luxury that the poor can’t afford, or even make, as the expense of the luxury comes at the expense of their lives.
The socialist countries have been the worst polluters, and the ex leaders of such are the largest proponents of having to control all of us, to make stagnant the planet in a totalitarian rule that will then ration all the resources of the solar system before we run out. the western capitalist countries are not only orders of magnitude greener, they are also going back and cleaning up past dirt, and will do so in an endless process till its clean to our satisfaction.
To actually do that, one must be so bourgeoisie that one has the excess wealth to spend it on the luxury and energy to clean things up. Which is why hunters are greener than greenies, and put up money when the greenies want to steal with the power of the state to get theirs.
Without the kind of luxury that makes socialists want to puke, the pools of money are not large enough that the amount taken from them is small enough that we don’t mind making the world clean, green, and truly a better place. The one problem is that those leading the green movement, are not at all interested in actually making a cleaner greener world. They are only interested in using the desire for such as a premise to dictate I fine detail how you or I should live.
The restriction of cheap oil from drilling ANWR and other areas is often touted by these people as a way to make a greener world. However, as claimed above, the proof is in the actions and outcomes, not the platitudes and soft words they use to seduce us into a false idea. This season thousands of Americans and Canadians will go out and chop down trees to burn in their inefficient fire places to make heat and lower the oil costs. Rather than burn dead plants from several million years ago, we will go out and cut the live ones that are scrubbing co2 out of the air, and burn them at 1/6 the efficiency of oil, and throw much much more pollution up the chimneys, than even a poor oil or gas furnace.
Even worse, is that in areas like Kentucky, which is heavy coal country, many people will be taking high sulfur coal and using that in their stoves to get heat rather than buy gas or oil as they are land rich and money poor.
It’s all in how you look at it and how you wish to perceive the situation. They are dictating the ‘right’ perception, and so we are up in arms over a false situation that ultimately will make us respond in ways that we think will help, but will hurt a lot more, and later justify more intervention, till no more justifications are needed and the sham can be throw aside.
Maybe its time for us to take a look at things and start to think about why we see things the way we do, and perhaps not listen to those who only pretend to have our interests at heart, and who clearly only have their own in place. The USA is greener than most other places on the planet, even though we use more material, and use more power. Over time, that will get much better, if we do not stagnate in our progress to solve the problem by creating a dark age. At best, that would only hold off such progress till we forget why we aren’t progressing and a new age dawns.
Lets skip the progressive dark age, and move on to the next renaissance were we might cast away these feudal throwbacks to socialist demagoguery and proceed to expand into the universe that is all around us and provides literally more than a trillion humans could ever use in a thousand years. We are not bound to just the small dreams of big people, we are supplied by the unlimited imaginations of billions of free people. We need not look to the few with such poor views of the world, and of people like us to get to the future; we will get to the future despite them, and in spite of them, as we have always done, if we do not let the left stagnate us in the name of progress.
Study reveals an oily diet for subsurface life
Thousands of feet below the bottom of the sea, off the shores of Santa Barbara, single-celled organisms are busy feasting on oil.
Until now, nobody knew how many oily compounds were being devoured by the microscopic creatures, but new research led by David Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has shed new light on just how extensive their diet can be.
In a report to be published in the Oct. 1 edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Valentine, Reddy, lead author George Wardlaw of UCSB, and three other co-authors detail how the microbes are dining on thousands of compounds that make up the oil seeping from the sea floor.
“It takes a special organism to live half a mile deep in the Earth and eat oil for a living,” said Valentine, an associate professor of earth science at UCSB. “There’s this incredibly complex diet for organisms down there eating the oil. It’s like a buffet.”
And, the researchers found, there may be one other byproduct being produced by all of this munching on oil - natural gas. “They’re eating the oil, and probably making natural gas out of it,” Valentine said. “It’s actually a whole consortium of organisms - some that are eating the oil and producing intermediate products, and then those intermediate products are converted by another group to natural gas.”
Reddy, a marine chemist at Woods Hole, said the research provides important new clues in the study of petroleum. “The biggest surprise was that microbes living without oxygen could eat so many compounds that compose crude oil,” Reddy said. “Prior to this study, only a handful of compounds were shown, mostly in laboratory studies, to be degraded anaerobically. This is a major leap forward in understanding petroleum geochemistry and microbiology.”
The diet of the single-cell microbes is far more diverse than previously thought, Valentine said. “They ate around 1,000 of the 1,500 compounds we could trace, and presumably are eating many more,” he said.
Research for this project began seven years ago and much of the testing was done at one of the planet’s best natural labs. “We have the world’s most prolific hydrocarbon seep field sitting right offshore of Santa Barbara, about two miles out,” Valentine said. “We have something on the order of 100 barrels of oil a day coming up from the sea floor.”
The source of this oil seepage is near Platform Holly, but it’s not being caused by the drilling. “It’s just oil that is naturally oozing out, probably has been for thousands of years,” Valentine explained. “Holly just happens to be near some of these seepage areas, which is fortuitous because we were able to get samples from about a mile deep.”
By studying samples from the subsurface, the ocean floor, the mid-water, and then from the surface, the researchers could determine how much of the oil was being degraded and digested by the microbes.
Using a new technique devised by Reddy, the scientists were able to pick apart the differences in the makeup of the oil, which is migrating to the surface through faults from deep below the sea floor. The microbes prefer the lighter compounds of oil, the gasoline part of the black goo. They tend to leave behind the heavily weathered residue, which is what makes its way to the surface and, sometimes, to the beaches in the form of tar.
“There always seems to be a residue,” Valentine said. “They (bacteria) hit a wall. There seems to be stages in which they eat. There’s the easy stuff - the steak. And then they work their way to the vegetables, and then garnish, and then they stop eating after awhile. Just depends on how hungry they are and what’s fed to them.”
Reddy’s new diagnostic technology is called a comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC). Typically, chromatography involves heating up a sample and putting it into a column around 60 meters long. Compounds are then separated based on their boiling points, which works well with light crude oil, Valentine said. But, with the two-dimensional test, the compounds are put into a cooled trap, for about 10 seconds, and a flash pulse of hot air releases them into the second column. This two-dimensional separation allows the researchers to pick out the many thousands of compounds.
“This new technology was actually too good at its job,” Reddy said. “It was able to separate and help identify significantly more compounds in the oil samples than traditional analytical techniques. The end result was that we were handcuffed with too much data afforded by the GCxGC. However, we overcame this hurdle by using new algorithms to help us interpret the data, which in turn led us to these milestone discoveries.”
The next steps in their research are already under way, according to Valentine. They are following the oil diet in controlled laboratory conditions, and tracking the fate of the oil once it forms a slick at the sea surface.
“When you fly out of the Santa Barbara Airport, you can look down and see these massive slicks,” Valentine said. “You can follow them for about 20 miles. A lot of the oil comes up on the beaches, but then what happens to it after that? Certainly the microorganisms continue to act on it. Evaporation occurs, but most of it can’t evaporate. Some of it breaks down from sunlight. So where does the rest of it end up? We want to know how far the organisms will go in eating the oil and what happens to the residual tar. It doesn’t all stick to our feet and there must be a lot of it out there somewhere.”
Source: University of California - Santa Barbara
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