Via Worldchanging, an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor.

Bolted onto the exhaust stacks of a brick-and-glass 20-megawatt power plant behind MIT's campus are rows of fat, clear tubes, each with green algae soup simmering inside.

Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly even in the wan rays of a New England sun. The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40 percent less CO2 (a larger cut than the Kyoto treaty mandates) and another bonus: 86 percent less nitrous oxide.

After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel for automobiles.

The Prophet Kunstler has assured us that such efforts are bound to fail. So a few guys are throwing a little money at the idea. It's just another misallocation of resources enabled by the "hallucinatory nature of our economy".

GreenFuel has already garnered $11 million in venture capital funding and is conducting a field trial at a 1,000 megawatt power plant owned by a major southwestern power company. Next year, GreenFuel expects two to seven more such demo projects scaling up to a full production system by 2009.

That's not going to be soon enough. Peak Oil is happening now.

Greenfuel isn't alone in the algae-to-oil race.

So what.

Last month, Greenshift Corporation, a Mount Arlington, N.J., technology incubator company, licensed CO2-gobbling algae technology that uses a screen-like algal filter. It was developed by David Bayless, a researcher at Ohio University.

A prototype is capable of handling 140 cubic meters of flue gas per minute, an amount equal to the exhaust from 50 cars or a 3-megawatt power plant, Greenshift said in a statement.

So there are other guys throwing money away too. Proves nothing.
They're just far gone in the madness.

Peak is making us insane and passing peak will make us more insane. There may be no moment of clarity, only new kinds of delusion and disorder...James Howard Kunstler

So who do you trust more? An aging and embittered architecture critic? Or some no account rocket scientist from MIT? Tough call.

For his part, Berzin calculates that just one 1,000 megawatt power plant using his system could produce more than 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. That would require a 2,000-acre "farm" of algae-filled tubes near the power plant...

Roughly eight square kilometers. It works out to 45,000 gallons of liquid fuels per acre per year. 112,000 per hectare. Eleven point two gallons per square meter. Per year. Hmmm.

All kidding aside, I like the idea. It takes unwanted effluent and turns it into a money making commodity. I hope it pans out.

Regarding Brother James and his travelling Revival Show, there's a not too bad review of his latest book cropping up in various places around the sphere. Now it's cropping up here, too.

Samples follow...

The deeper theme of The Long Emergency is not oil so much as human powerlessness...

The most striking example of the sense of powerlessness is as it applies to Kunstler himself...In places it is perhaps possible to read The Long Emergency as a revenge fantasy.

Embittered at his inability to convince others that they should change their ways, Kunstler takes refuge under the wing of Nature's avenging angel. He can be ignored (he attributes this to a psychological flaw in his detractors); the inhuman laws of nature cannot.

Apparently, those who will suffer most terribly in the long emergency are the US Republican states...Neighbourhoods with spacious housing ('McMansions') and 'poor street detailing', a particular insult to Kunstler, are singled out for destruction...There is an uncanny alignment between the supposedly objective, inevitable laws of nature and Kunstler's prejudices...

He claims that the entropy produced by a high-energy society was responsible for everything from the 'now mythic disillusionment with civilisation that followed the [First World] war...to Stalinism, the Holocaust and beyond. Only a low-energy, local economy in which we are in touch with the land, claims Kunstler, can avoid the destructive effects of entropy. The core of The Long Emergency is the anxiety that problems will outweigh solutions...Alienated from progress he has no answers himself and fears we are relying on a few techno-geeks to come up with a fix. He is haunted by the question, what if we fail?