Friday, April 27, 2012

Hold the Oil, Pass the Algae

Still waiting to hear President Obama's plans for the new "green" economy? Well, it arrived yesterday in the form of the "National Bioeconomy Blueprint," released with great fanfare by the White House. It's all there -- the Age of Fossil Fuels is on its way out, the Age of Biofuels has begun.
Now to be fair, there's a lot of good stuff in this 84-page report, in terms of medical advances, agricultural innovation, and new industrial technologies. Since the decoding of the DNA molecule in 1953, the biological sciences have made extraordinary progress and continue to do so today. Whereas the 17th and 18th century could be called the Age of Physics and the 19th and early 20th centuries the Age of Chemistry, we are now living in an era when biological research is the cutting edge.
To be fair again, all this happened long before Barack Obama arrived in the White House. In declaring government support for the Bioeconomy, the President and his Administration are essentially running to the head of a parade. True, there's going to be lots of government funding to hand out and true, to this point the biologists have felt somewhat neglected. "Some people in the biotechnology industry have grumbled that the White House's idea of innovation focused on electronic devices, social media and solar energy," reports the New York Times. Yet ever since the Egyptians, priests and politicians have been claiming credit for every natural occurrence, from the rising of the sun to the blooming of crops, so there's nothing new in this Administration claiming to make it all happen, either.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/27/hold-the-oil-pass-the-algae

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