Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? 468
Andy_Spoo writes "Something that I've been trying to get an answer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but another is CO2. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction. So how much is the manufacture and consumption of alcohol contributing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
Bloody hell! (Score:4, Funny)
"There" ?
Over THERE wherever the poster is from, THEIR education system is so bad that THEY'RE making repeated mistakes over and over. THERE needs to be an improvement in THEIR attitude towards THEIR literacy. As long as THERE exists a culture of flippancy towards being properly literate, THEIR children will always respond to people correcting THEIR use of language with indignant responses scoffing at the need to be accurate in the use of language. THEY'RE constantly talking about things like "evolution of language" and that THERE have been many changes in the use of words over history, but THEIR mistake stems from the fact that THEY'RE completely disregarding the difference between language evolving to meet different circumstances, and language devolving due to the apathy and ignorance of those who speak it.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and regarding the actual article, no CO2 from the alcohol industry is on a wholly different scale from CO2 emissions from industry and transport.
It's like wondering if you peeing in the ocean when you go for a swim is making a difference to global oceanic warming because, after all, your pee is quite warm.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
(I'm SOOO going to mod-point hell for the above posts.)
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Yeah, but at least you'll be going in style! (personally, I would have modded you up)
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Indeed. Might as well speculate that humans pissing their pants on the beaches contributes to ocean acidification ;)
SB
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who pisses their pants on beaches? people that are ghastly afraid of sharks?
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Children.
I'm going to hell for that one...
Sounds like a nice warm place.
SB
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a nice warm place.
hell or the children's pants?
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:4, Funny)
Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd have to say alcohol is the solution to saving our planet. As a very short friend of mine once said, all you have to do is:
1. Drink excessive amounts of liqueur
2. ???
3. ???
Re:Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? (Score:5, Funny)
But if alcohol is the solution, it is also the cause!
WE'RE DOOMED NO MATTER WHAT WE DO!!!!!!!!!!!
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But if alcohol is the solution, it is also the cause!
WE'RE DOOMED NO MATTER WHAT WE DO!!!!!!!!!!!
So eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow the planet turns up the thermostat?
Re:Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? (Score:5, Funny)
2. Too drunk to drive
3. Less CO2!
4. ???
5. Profit?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
1. Drink excessive amounts of liquor
2. Too drunk to fuck
3. Fewer people on the planet
4. ???
5. Profit?
Re:Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? (Score:4, Funny)
It also helps dull the pain as you gnaw off a limb in the morning.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The thing everyone apparently has overlooked is that a major byproduct of respiration is CO2. Since all animals utilize respiration in the production of energy, is anyone researching alternative methods of energy production to reduce or eliminate the amount of respiration in order to save the planet?
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stick to your first point. /. has always done the stupid April's fools stuff, and it's not remotely supposed to be taken seriously.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like the CO2 being released by the yeast came from fossil fuels ... it came from hops and grains, which took the CO2 out of the atmosphere. If those hops hadn't been grown, the CO2 wouldn't have been sequestered for part of the time. Think of all the undrunk beer as a temporal CO2 storage locker. There's probably a million tons locked up at any given time.
So help fight global warming by popping a cool one.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there _are_ parts of the planet where bread is not the staple starch source.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
freedom fries? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. Freedom fries [wikipedia.org].
Serious silliness I miss not living in the US.
Might explain some of the questions I have gotten from English students on the subject.
(Wonder what could be done so that trying to link to the Japanese article doesn't send wikipedia to ampersand.)
(See, honey, reading /. is educational.)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, I had no idea that staples contained starch.
I have a whole new respect for the lowly office supply cabinet now.
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ah yes passover, it's the greenhouse gas methane produced from the Borsht and horseradish beets that's dooming us all! Oy Vey!
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I'll throw some organic material on that fire ;)
Baker's ovens. Gas fired, for the most part.
(anyone who has worked in a bakery knows that gas fired ovens are lots better at baking bread evenly than electric ones are)
SB
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Interesting)
[Citation needed]. The biochemistry of anaerobic conversion of sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide produces a fixed ratio of alcohol to carbon dioxide, independent of the yeast strain. The main difference would be that baker's yeast has to be rapid-growing (the bread has only a few hours to leaven), while brewer's/wine yeast can take more time but must survive under high alcohol concentrations.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Informative)
Damn, you beat me to it! Don't you love how any bullshit sounding remotely authoritative just gets modded up...
I will just add one simple statement as supporting evidence to your correction:
C6H12O6 => 2(CH3CH2OH) + 2(CO2)
Also, fermenting in (solid) dough tends to trap the gases in pockets, followed by cooking which evaporates the alcohol. Fermenting in (liquid) wort/must releases the gases (unless bottled, etc) and keeps the alcohol in solution.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've brewed with bakers yeast before. It makes a drinkable, if fizzy, pint.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I was at Cambridge Brewing Co. in Boston a few years ago when they rolled out a one-batch beer called Ninkasi, brewed with sourdough bread yeast from an Egyptian bakery that had been culturing it continuously for over a millenium. It was delicious.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Interesting)
How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Pot:
http://www.allaboutbeer.com/features/235coffee.html [allaboutbeer.com]
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GINORMOUS ! [wondermark.com]
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lame. I'll bet you pronounce nuclear just like Bush as new-que-lurr. Look, if you don't pay attention to at least adhering to a simple standard, you'll look like sloppy to the people who do. Mastering grammar school English composition is a commendable achievement. But if you're going to be sloppy and not pay attention to the details, you inflict your lack of standards on everyone who has to read your work. It's a case of "if you want to look like a sloppy person who does not even proofread his own work, that's fine, but please keep it away from us who don't want to see your lack of attention to detail." Remember that you're penning/typing your message not for yourself but for others to read, you should at least be respectful of the people reading and proof your own work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't make me a hypocrite. You can end a sentence with a preposition under certain circumstances. I did proof my work. If there is a problem with what I wrote, please point it out.
Examples follow:
Please print that out.
Is the radio on?
Please point it out.
It's not high an mighty, it is simply paying attention to the details. You do pay attention to the details in your code don't you?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't ending a sentence in a preposition, it was "look like sloppy". You didn't end the sentence in a preposition, "do" is a verb.
In fact, none of your examples are ending sentences in prepositions either. While "on" and "out" can be prepositions in these cases you're using them as adverbs or adjectives (simply modifying "print", "point", and "radio"). Ending a sentence in a preposition might look like:
This is the table the radio was on. ("on" connects to "the radio" to "the table". A crude re-orde
their, their, settle down... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Funny)
You need to relax dude, have a beer!
At the very least, a cold, frosty one will cool you down what with all the global warming it just caused.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but that's bullshit. (Do you have a citation to support this theory?)
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We All Know (Score:2)
As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years)...
Or you're good at selectively quoting the evidence.
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Can you even classify the quoted material as evidence?
At best, there is a correlation between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the average temperature. Correlation does not imply causation.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I went and read the paper, and basically what they're arguing is that the last ice age wasn't ended by an increase in CO2.
Fine. But that doesn't prove that CO2 has no effect on climate. Quite the opposite:
Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter ~4200 years of the warming.
There is, in fact, an argument for manmade climate change. They finish up by saying
The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present-day and future climate.
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases release
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases released by dying wetlands) and that heats up the atmosphere more. Which releases more gases...
Such a feedback system should go out of control, unless there is also a separate negative feedback component in the system that has a stronger effect than the positive feedback component. The data shows that both CO2 and temperature go in cycles, which would indicate, assuming that there IS a positive feedback effect, that a stronger negative feedback component is keeping it somewhat at an equilibrium.
This is my main problem with the whole area, I'll be the first to acknowledge that I'm not a climatolog
Please stop (Score:2, Insightful)
It's never been funny. Just stop.
Re:Please stop (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that's not true. OMG Poniez!!!1! was funny. It's just unfortunate that Taco has not yet topped it.
This year hasn't been that great, I'm afraid. Next year Taco... there's always next year.
Without beer... (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't fart that much.
Yea, we gotta stop.
Stop worrying, I mean.
Perfect opportunity for a Simpson's quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Alcohol - The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
As I write this, I'm wearing my Homer baseball cap with that exact slogan on it. Creepy, man.
That slogan is one of my favorites, and is proof that only the truth is funny.
Re:Perfect opportunity for a Simpson's quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Or that he doesn't want Canadians to take over the world. Dunno why. The world would assuredly be a better place if we were in charge.
what matters is where the carbon came from (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon from biomass is just cycling in and out of the atmosphere, no big deal.
The problem is digging up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and releasing it (either directly into the atnosphere or into a place where it is likely to get released).
Re: (Score:2)
NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow News day? Correlation is not Causation? This thread is useless without pics? Whatever it takes; NO!
For the love of all that's sacred... the answer is NO NO NO! Please dear God.. NO! Because without Alcohol .. does a world even exist?
are our childrens learning? (Score:5, Funny)
is aliens probing us rectally?
is beer causing global warming farts?
how is babby formed?
issues are the complicated. i try to thinks hard abouts them when i'm on the toilets. and i push reals hard and out come deep thoughts like: pubs cause global warming
i am the smarts type person with the deeply thinking type stuff
CO2 is Balanced (Score:3, Informative)
Actually shouldn't have TOO much effect. I can't comment on the cylinders of CO2 used in pumping or carbonation, but the CO2 that the yeast releases is balanced by the CO2 which the plant absorb in order to produce the sugar that is fermented.
As to how many petrochemicals/fossil fuels are used in the production/creation of those plants and that sugar, that's a different story, but that is less related to alcohol specifically and more to how our agricultural/transportation system function generally.
In short, no. (Score:2)
Now you've gone too far (Score:2)
No net change (Score:5, Informative)
Ethenol is fermented from plant products, no net change in CO2. The CO2 in the keg system is taken from the air, no net change.
First they came for my beer, and I said nothing.
Re:No net change (Score:5, Funny)
Shit, if they came for my beer I'd have one hell of a lot to say about the matter.
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Over my dead soldiers...
SB
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Had I not been passed out I would have noticed that...
Grains (Score:5, Informative)
Alcohol is made from breaking down grains or other starches. Those plants gather CO2 from the air. So the consumption of alcohol doesn't really add to the problem. That is, at least only to the extent that agriculture does. If you're really worried about CO2 related to your food/beverage intake, you should cut back on meat, which has 8x-10x as much of a carbon footprint per calorie than grains. I guess alcohol would be somewhere in between.
Is Slashdot Killing our Planet? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Electrons may be expensive.
But lack of communication is worse.
SB
I'd doubt it. (Score:3, Insightful)
If it does, then pop beverage would probably be just as big, if not a bigger, contributor to the greenhouse effect, which I highly doubt to be true.
Good question.
Nope (Score:2)
The planet? No.
Me? Yes.
By yeast, not at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
...because the carbon produced by yeast comes from sugar, which comes from plants, which comes from the atmosphere. Remember, it's only new carbon that causes a problem. Recycling atmospheric carbon is fine.
Bottled carbon dioxide is likely to be new carbon, as one of the major production techniques involves decomposition of limestone with acid.
And, of course, any energy used in the beer production is likely to come from fossil fuels, which will release fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
Re: (Score:2)
And. or course, it's a very small percentage of the release of previously housed carbon.
We gat all the cars to be electric, charged from Nuclear or industrial solar thermal then we might want to take a look at this. Maybe.
Yes it is (Score:2)
COWS! (Score:2, Funny)
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Ooops, that just slipped in there. But, I'm not worried about buffalo farts. As others have pointed out, buffalo are just processing the carbon that was extracted from the atmoshpere a few weeks or months ago. Not to be compared with releasing millions (trillions?) of tons of carbon that was bottled up in another age.
Just like ethanol and biofuel (Score:2)
Planet? No. (Score:2)
It's still April 1 (Score:2)
This is the lamest April Fools' I've seen all day.
Yes ... (Score:2)
No but it did wonders for your mom (Score:2)
Especially before you were born.
Seriously, did you do any research at all before posting this? It's not even worth posting a link to "Let me google that for you".com
Bottled CO2? (Score:2)
"And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to there pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
Where do you suppose bottled CO2 comes from? The same place to which it returns. The air. This looks like an April Fool's post (but you never know). It's really stupid but it's not that funny or clever.
No (Score:2)
No, we don't "know" (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, most of us have been "conditioned to know that CO2 is destroying the planet". Big difference.
Submitter = Least popular kid ever (Score:2)
Assumning this isn't just an April Fools joke, might I suggest for the submitter membership in the No Cussing Club [nocussing.com]?
Growing barley (Score:2)
Just grow barley next to the beer plant:
1. Plants absorb CO2
2. Less transportation
One Balvenie at a time (Score:2)
I'm helping to kill the planet, one fine single-malt Scotch at a time.
Fossil fuels for themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
If climate change were all about a few extra breaths of CO2 and beer, we would hardly have a problem with CO2. It's difficult to really believe that man could actually have an impact on the planet. It is. The atmosphere is enormous, but then, so too are all the industries that provide us energy.
The United States mines and burns, each year, about the same mass of coal as roughly 200 Great Pyramids. That which took nearly the entire ancient Egyptian economy, with all of their wealth, decades to produce, the USA does 200 times over, every year, and then burns it. You could almost say that the USA burns a great pyramid sized mountain of coal just shy of every two days the year. Nearly all the weight of that goes straight up into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. The carbon from the coal combines with oxygen, and there you go, you got 200 great pyramids floating around.
If you doubt this, go take a drive to your local power plant. Chances are, its a coal fired unit. You should see rail lines coming to it, and, what looks like one or more big black hills sitting next to it. Those hills are piles of coal and they will be burnt in about 30 days. The trains that ship the coal are easily a mile long. Sure, you could drive past it in a minute, but take the time actually to imagine that the whole thing probably weighs about 3000 tons.
By mass, that's enough coal to double the atmospheric concentration of CO2 over a fairly significant. Do the math. Take 3000 tons of carbon, and knowing that earth's atmospheric pressure is 15psi, of which a 300ppm is carbon dioxide, and see just how many square inches that trainload of carbon touches. It's a big number, and thousands of these trains cross America every year, each carrying mile long trains of coal from places like Wyoming all across the country.
I did a back of the envelop calculation that shows that replacing all of this coal fired generation with windmills. If you use the windmills site being installed off of Delaware as a benchmark, you can calculate that it would take about 300,000 windmills to replace all of our coal.
It is for this reason that energy businesspeople scoff at the green lobby. For the most part, environmentalists really do not understand the scale of what they propose. America's energy industry is just physically enormous. Conversely, you can't seriously take an energy man's claim that fossil burning can't effect the planet. Unlike other industries, energy executives usually have degrees in engineering and they can do or should do the calculations needed to see that the scale of their activities is in fact planet altering.
Of course, I have not even touched on the natural gas and petroleum we consume. But, I can tell you this much. If you use 15 gallons of gas per week, you are putting about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide, straight into the air. How many square inches does it take to spread that out, just so that it doubles the amount of CO2 in the air?
I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination, as I've written plenty about enviro's being commies out to crush the USA... but it is pretty indisputable that our activities are planet consuming and that, as goofy and perhaps as evil as enviro's are, they are right on one fundamental point. We do have to manage the atmosphere. We do have to manage our ecosystem. We do have to view the earth as a closed system and we do have to understand the effects of our actions upon its chemistry and consequently our environment. There are just too many people with too many powerful tools consuming too much energy to do otherwise.
The Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
I drink Rye or a good Kentucky Bourbon.
Jim Beam Rye is good and Cheap. Old Overholt and Wild Turkey Rye are good too.
Eagle Rare, or Knob Creek as as good as it gets.
Don't forget soft drinks! (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering there's almost 200% as many people drinking soda pop, one would think there's more of a threat from drinking a Coke than someone drinking a beer.
Alcohol SAVES our planet (Score:4, Insightful)
Alcoholic beverages are a CO2-storage. All the beer that's stored somewhere in pubs or your fridge or basement contains CO2, which, therefore, is temporarily out of the atmospheric CO2-cycle. It sort of takes the place of that other CO2-storage, which we're slowly emptying, namely oilfields and the likes. The more alcohol we drink, the more has to be in storage, the more CO2 is temporarily out of the loop. Just like with wooden houses, carbon bikeframes and the likes.
And, even better, since CO2 is used to pressurize taps for alcohol beverages, even more CO2 is out of the loop. The latter is even actually taken directly from the atmosphere!
Also, alcohol consumption lowers the average lifespan of humans, thereby making the problem - humanity - smaller;-)
But that's theory. Reality is a bit more painful; the amount of CO2 in alcohol is miniscule compared to the amount of CO2 that comes into the biosphere through the use of pesticides and fertilizer, which are mostly produced from natural gas. What you should understand, is that for everything you eat and drink, about TEN TIMES AS MUCH energy is needed to produce it than is contained within the food. Therefore, some people say, "we actually eat fossil fuels".
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html [fromthewilderness.com]
So the bottomline is: yes, alcoholic is killing our planet. But that's not due to the fermentation process, which does not bring NEW carbon into the cycle. Instead, it is due to the energy that's added when growing and transporting it, which basically comes from fossil fuels. The same goes for most other foods and drinks; for each calory you eat, ten calories of fossil fuel were used to produce it.
Possibly more interesting is that the fact that you ask this question shows your lack of understanding of the amount of CO2 that a simple car produces. There's about 50-60 gram of CO2 in a liter of beer. Using a liter of fuel in your car produces about 2500 grams of CO2. That's about 50 times as much. So, if you want to compensate for your beer consumption, just try to use 1 tank of fuel less a year; that'll give you enough CO2-credits to drink well over 20 beers each day, which should be more than enough:-)
No carbon being created (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeast do not create carbon from thin air. They convert the sugars in the plants (grapes or barley) into alcohol and CO2.
The plants have absorbed that carbon from the atmosphere using photosynthesis.
So the total sum of carbon added to the atmosphere is zero. And this is a dumb article.
Re:No more than cattle? WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing Cattle production (more CO2 equiv emissions than transport [fao.org]) and the alcohol industry? WTF?
Cattle production is a significant cause of soil compaction, topsoil degradation, coral reef degeneration, methane emissions, acid rain, water contamination (with cow shit / hormones / antibiotics).... I could go on & on.
One of the easiest things you can do to help the environment is consume less beef & dairy products.
No 'more' than cattle. Yeesh!
Re:No more than cattle? WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Surely the best way for me to reduce the number of cattle is for me to eat more of them?
Steak anyone?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can't decide if the person who modded you insightful is doing some subtle trolling or simply doesn't get the joke....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you count growing the plants and fermentation alone it's a carbon sink, because a lot of carbon ends up in stems and other unused parts.
Then you have fuel used for transportation, energy used in sugar extraction, grain-based drinks require roasting the grains, hard liquor requires distillation, and a few types are aged in charred oak barrels. All of these processes require additional energy, which may or may not be carbon neutral. Then again, there would be similar amounts of fuel/energy required
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The OP and whoever allowed that crap to get posted on Slashdot should be drowned in a large vat of warm whale spunk!
There is a visual I just didn't need... on the rest of your post, however, I completely agree.
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