“The greens worst nightmare? A CO2 to Oil process“. Anthony Watts projects his mental rigidity onto “the greens” when he posts a University of Minnesota press release titled U of M researchers close in on technology for making renewable “petroleum” using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.
Them greenies and climate scientists will be so mad when they can’t complain about oil companies! All that climate stuff is just an excuse I guess.
No thoughts about feasibility or production costs from our deep thinking Anthony, just misrepresentation in four words. The comments are an ocean of “greens hate everything”.
Wott's Up With That? 
chemistry – fail.
[What did you expect from something Anthony Watts was drawing attention to? – Ben]
well, obviously he knows quite a bit on photovoltaics but somehow his nervous system fails him and disconnects somewhere in between his brain and fingers unless he uses voice recognition software in which case the disconnect is located in his head or between his brain and butt.
It’s not a chemistry fail. It’s just a different kind of solar cell. You can turn sunlight and CO2 into hydrocarbons — plants do it all the time. The caveat is that we aren’t as smart as four billion years of evolution.
We’ve seen things like this touted before. Maybe it will be hot stuff in fifty years or so. But in real life, as opposed to Aryn Rand’s fiction, magical technologies do not suddenly blossom on an industrial scale in time to save us from the consequences of our own selfishness.
There’s nothing quite like the smell of a burning straw man in the morning.
What a shock (?) – cyanobacteria + light gives organic matter. Not sure why photosynthesis is worth a press release. Hardly seems like a new discovery nor will it be shocking to environmentalists.
[Anthony’s transfixed by simple, everyday things I guess. – Ben]