People, in addition to hobbits, seek out mushrooms for their wonderful tastes. Coming in many exotic shapes and colours, these culinary treats can bring excitement to many a dinner plate. Caution must always be practised as so many mushrooms are toxic and can kill whether from touch or from ingestion. But getting a bit of education so as to learn which are safe is a small price to pay so as to savour these treats.

Typical mushrooms have a paltry 18 kcal of energy per 70 grams or 1.1e6 Joules per kilogram according to the USDA. Frying these wonders on the stovetop for 20 minutes at medium temperature (about 1000 watts) consumes 1.2e6 Joules of electrical energy. Hence, frying mushrooms takes more energy than what they provide to us. They’re a net energy loss. And, this doesn’t account for hiking in the woods to pick the mushrooms, effort to clean the mushrooms, building the stove and generating the electrical power to heat the stovetop element.

According to the law of entropy, every activity results in a net energy loss as with our mushroom example. How will we decide which activities are worth the energy expenditure and which aren’t?

References

• USDA Home and Garden Bulletin Number 72

Author’s photo

Cities represent humankind’s freedom from banal existence. An unwritten guarantee of security and livelihood allows residents to pursue careers and lives with free abandon. Some such privileged personalities wrote epics, designed grand architecture and invented flight.

Yet, cities are a construct of people. Their location may reside more on a whim than on any practical reason. Their duration may be fleeting; gone with barely a memory. These resulting ghost towns dot the Earth. And, eventually the Earth reclaims them.

Should cities be considered permanent fixtures on Earth? If so, do optimal locations exist. And, should the residents be limited to a finite number, each having a finite skill? Or, do we let opportunity and happenstance direct the future of these bastions of our civilization?

Photo – Ghost Towns Canada

A summer time of sun and rain makes a plant’s life worthwhile as it again builds seeds to set forth into the world and make young plants. And, after millions of years of practise, they’re pretty good at so doing. Or, at least they will make some young ones as long as they don’t get copped.

One domestic apple tree bears about 40 – 200 kilograms of apples a year. Eating all this wonderful fruit imparts 9.828e7 to 4.9e8 Joules to a human. If a person could live from apples alone then this one tree would provide about a month of one person’s typical daily energy need.

Apple trees in an orchard have about a 6 metre separation. So each tree needs an area of about 36 square metres. If we replace the tree with solar collectors, and the site was in a really good location, then in Canada we’d get about 263 kWh annually or 1e9 Joules. And we could burn the wood of the original apple tree for an initial kick start.

The solar collectors apparently provide more energy annually than the tree. But, the tree allows some other life whether grass growing on the ground, worms in the soil or birds nesting in the branches. A solar collector provides for no life. It only powers mankind’s technology.

Allocating land usage should be for more than maximizing economic gain. Shouldn’t there be some consideration for our fellow inhabitants on planet Earth; the creatures that we depend upon for our own survival?

Human beings are strange creatures. We’re so concerned about value for money and getting ahead. Yet, we happily throw away the hard won proceeds with nothing in return but a little ephemeral stimulus. Though I’m not trying to sound like a righteous religious evangelist, gambling is an activity that provides so little yet takes so much from those participating.

n 2007 the total gambling revenue (less prizes and winnings) was over $13.6 billion dollars (StatsCan). In the broad scheme of things this amounts to 4.8% of the total national revenue. According to one source, this amounts to more than the revenue of bars, spectator sports, movie theatres, the performing arts and magazine, book and newspaper sales all put together.

As an individual, gambling seems rewarding as it provides a (very slim) chance at a better life from very little expense. As a group, Canadians remove $13B dollars from their economy for no compensation. Imagine if we focused this money toward a more rewarding form of energy expenditure than some flashing lights and spinning wheels.

The Hawai’in atoll boasts brilliant white shiny beaches, tropical rain forests and parched deserts. This great diversity exists within a paltry 3 million hectares of land. And, about 1.3 million people call it home. Each person thus has just over 2 hectares (an area about 200 by 100 metres) from which to draw all their resources. Or, at least this would be true if the atoll were on its own. But the rest of the world comes to its aid.

Indicative of this dependency is that of its 1.8e16 joules (17 trillion Btu) annual consumption, over 90% comes from imported petroleum oil. To relieve this dependency, the people on the atoll plan to produce biodiesel from algae.

Current estimates have annual production at about 3.6e12 Joules per hectare (10000 gallons of diesel per acre). So, the atoll need invest nearly 5000 hectares of land to meet their needs. Though the land may be available, the return on investment is not. So, not much progess occurs and the atoll continues to rely upon the rest of the world.

When no other alternatives exist, can we then afford to obtain energy from these alternative sources? Or, will they always costs more than their utility?

HR BioPetroleum

photo from New Mexico State University