exocrinous

Xbox OS is clearly winning with the 360

A risk averse culture would take the climate crisis seriously. We live in a YOLO culture.

Let's replace all intercontinental flights with high speed rail and sleeper trains, and only use planes for long haul flights over water. For those planes that do stay in the sky, let's fuel them with renewables. Poo based jet fuel does not add carbon to the environment.

When poo is returned to the earth, it's digested by insects and microbes which use it for energy, and then emit CO2. Poo in the dirt puts carbon in the air the same as poo in a jet

Carbon can exist in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, (CH4), or as a lot of bigger organic molecules like ethane. Over years, methane you release will eventually decay into CO2. But until that happens, the methane has 20 times the greenhouse effect that CO2 does. So processes like this can take CO2 from the air and turn it into methane, which is bad.

We need less flying, but if we're going to have flying, it should use technologies like this which have 1/10th the lifecycle emissions of fossil jet fuel.

According to an article I read, the total lifecycle greenhouse emissions is 10% of fossil jet fuel.

Here's how it works: A farmer grows crops like, say, beans, which take energy from the sun and carbon from the air, and use it to make tasty sugars and proteins. You eat the beans, and your body absorbs the easy nutrients to get. But the stuff that's hard to get out is left in the food mass and turned into poo. You go to the toilet and your waste is collected by the sewage system. Then this company takes your poo, and uses energy from the grid to subject it to a process that makes crude oil. Then they distill jet fuel from the crude.

All of the carbon that is in the jet fuel came from those beans you ate, which got it from the air. So the jet fuel isn't adding any new carbon to the air. There are still emissions associated with putting energy into the poo to refine it into oil, though, because it's using energy from the grid.

Karl Marx predicted this more than a hundred years ago