Posted by mdp2021 5 hours ago
More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. Plus ester instability when you sink heat into fuel. Plus freeze point. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels that doesn't even have very good properties otherwise they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.
Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
How common is farm landlords?
International markets and all that...
It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent.
Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.
The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern.
Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc.
Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.
Oh, and I bought a banana for $.22.
Cooking a steak takes about 10 minutes.
Microwaving a TV dinner ($7.50) takes more time.
From experience a microwave meal should take about 3 minutes to cook so I don't know how you're taking more than 10 minutes unless, like your food item comparisons, you're cooking enough of them to feed an entire town.
Our cheapest grass-fed tenderloin is $10 for a half pound cut. One. In a poor northern state.
We had that cow two years and didn't supplement grain. Cheap as you can grow them.
With a $5 steak, it might as well be corn chips.
Processed food may not be cheaper, but the flavor:effort ratio is waaaaaay higher.
I have bad news for you about flour
You know, how I'm like totally fed up with the US interfering with everything to come out as a winner, forcibly, because they lost it on science/economy etc.. (european here, not proud of europe either tbh.)
And I'm talking about the US Government with and without Trump. Not talking about tourists or American citizens. I like Americans, except the obnoxious or extreme ones.
My kimi.ai prompt, starting with goverment influence in the US: "List all major U.S. government interventions in 2026 across all branches and agencies. Format for Hacker News: plain text, chronological by date, each item as "Date: Action — Outcome" with source URLs. Prioritize foreign/extraterritorial impact (sanctions, military strikes, coercive diplomacy, secondary sanctions, ICC dismantlement, regime change operations). Emphasize abuse of power, intermediation, and harm to non-U.S. actors. Compact domestic items to the 5-7 largest only. Include executive orders, OFAC designations, military operations, State Dept actions, SCOTUS rulings, and Fed decisions."
A non-exhaustive chronological survey of U.S. government interventions in 2026. Emphasis is on extraterritorial influence, abuse of power, intermediation, and impact outside the United States. Domestic actions are compacted to the largest items only.
=== DOMESTIC (COMPACT) ===
Jan 20: EO restricts institutional investors from buying single-family homes.
Mar 31: EO mandates proof-of-citizenship for federal voter registration.
May 29: EO realigns CDC childhood vaccine schedule with peer-country practices.
Jun 2: EO on AI innovation establishes federal deployment standards and export controls.
Jul 21: ICE reports 356,389 removals in FY2026 (on track for 460K+ record). Federal courts document ICE violating 97+ court orders in 143 cases. https://abcnews.com/Politics/ice-350000-individuals-removed-...
Jul 28-29: Fed holds rates at 3.5-3.75%; 3 dissenters (Hammack, Kashkari, Logan) wanted a 25bp hike.
SCOTUS (Jun-Jul): Struck down birthright citizenship EO; dismantled Section 2 of Voting Rights Act; upheld state bans on transgender girls in sports; limited judicial review of TPS terminations; permitted immigration stops based on ethnicity-plus-other-factors.
=== FOREIGN / EXTRATERRITORIAL IMPACT ===
Jan 9: EO 14373 seizes Venezuelan oil revenue — Declares a U.S. national emergency over the "threat of attachment" against Venezuelan state oil funds and asserts U.S. control over proceeds. Directly claims jurisdiction over another sovereign state's primary export revenue. https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/934901/download?inline
Jan 29: EO 14380 declares Cuba a national emergency — Authorizes tariffs on imports from any country that directly or indirectly supplies oil to Cuba (Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, Algeria are primary suppliers). Extraterritorial: punishes third-country trade with Cuba. https://sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com/u-s-declares-nationa...
Feb 6: EO 14382 launches "Economic Fury" against Iran — Establishes a process to impose tariffs on any foreign country that purchases goods or services from Iran. Extraterritorial secondary tariff regime under IEEPA. https://www.thompsonhinesmartrade.com/2026/02/president-trum...
Feb 6: EO 14383 overhauls U.S. arms transfer strategy — "America First" policy redirects global weapons flows; prioritizes customers based on defense spending and strategic importance to the U.S. industrial base. Replaces first-come-first-served with politically conditional arms sales. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/11/2026-02...
Feb 28: Operation Epic Fury begins — Joint U.S.-Israel major combat operations against Iran. 12,300+ targets struck, 155+ Iranian vessels destroyed, 13 U.S. KIA, ~300 wounded by August. Iran retaliated against UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait. Strait of Hormuz threatened; global oil prices spiked. https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/04/peace-through-st... https://media.defense.gov/2026/Apr/01/2003905658/-1/-1/1/OPE...
Mar 2026: Pentagon plans ground invasion of Iran — USS Tripoli ARG and 82nd Airborne deployed to CENTCOM region for potential weeks-long ground operations. https://abcnews.com/International/4-phases-iran-war-key-mome...
Apr 28: Treasury sanctions China's "teapot" refineries — OFAC alerts banks worldwide to avoid transactions with Shandong Province refineries processing Iranian crude (90% of Iran's exports). Five refineries designated; secondary sanctions threatened on foreign financial institutions. China retaliated with its first-ever blocking-law prohibition order. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0476
May 1: EO 14404 imposes secondary sanctions on Cuba — Targets energy, defense, metals/mining, financial services, security sectors. Authorizes sanctions on foreign financial institutions facilitating "significant transactions" with designated Cuban entities, even with no U.S. nexus. Creates a modern secondary-sanctions regime parallel to the longstanding embargo. https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/1251
May 7: OFAC designates GAESA and Moa Nickel — Blocks Cuba's military conglomerate controlling ~80% of the economy and its largest nickel JV (with Canada's Sherritt International). Operations suspended. https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication...
May 18: OFAC designates Cuba's Ministry of Interior, police, intelligence agency, and 11 senior officials — Expands repression-related sanctions; total designations under EO 14404 reach 27 entities/individuals. https://sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com/us-continues-to-expa...
Jul 8: State Dept initiates rescission of Syria's terrorism designation — 45-day congressional review begins. Removes restrictions on foreign aid, defense exports, dual-use items, and international finance access. Clears path for U.S. corporate investment in Syrian energy and infrastructure. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Jul 13: State Dept launches campaign to dismantle the ICC — "Whole-of-government" effort to disable the International Criminal Court via visa revocations, sanctions threats, diplomatic pressure on 125 member states to withdraw, and conditioning military aid on ICC rejection. Explicitly targets the court's ability to investigate U.S. personnel and allies. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Jul 17: Treasury updates Hong Kong sanctions program — Adjusts legal basis following expiration of the prior national emergency; maintains restrictions on Hong Kong and PRC officials. https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
Ongoing: Counterterrorism strikes in Somalia and Yemen — AFRICOM airstrikes targeting ISIS-Somalia in Golis Mountains (Jan, Feb, Mar 2026). Reported U.S. drone strikes against AQAP in Yemen's Marib and al-Mahra provinces (Jan 2026). No official U.S. transparency or press releases for Yemen strikes since 2020. https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/36268/us-forces-conduct... https://www.justsecurity.org/129392/us-airstrikes-alqaeda-ye...
Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...
Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.
There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense.
This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though.
Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle.
Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like open fields. Something like corn or sugarcane.
Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable.
That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.
In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.
But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0]
Coconuts could be a breakthrough!
If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.
Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.
Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?
Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.
Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.
Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.
Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?
If someone wants to eat a watermelon like a dirty slave that is their business and you are not going to deny them that right. This is pure insanity.
China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand. If trains were more effective they would have built them already. If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.
Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.
Want to save the environment?
Ditch smartphones (future e-waste) and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.
Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.
We just couldn't post to social media about how uncomfortable the airplane seat was and how the onboard Wi-Fi sucked.
Well they're more convenient by virtue of being faster. The well off will inevitably pay for convenience if allowed.
> If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
The only thing California stands as an example of in that regard is political dysfunction. A hypothetical benevolent dictator could have built out high speed rail there on time and on budget.
> I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses
Has it not occurred to you that maybe that's a red flag that perhaps your own views or emotional state are a bit off?
> on account of dubious climate histrionics.
An empty dismissal of a vague and poorly defined (on your part) concept. How about engaging with a real position instead of name calling a straw man?
> Ditch smartphones (future e-waste)
And what do you suppose the combined total environmental impact is for those globally compared to other categories?
I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.
BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.
Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.
I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.
Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
And yes, no tourist income. It's dirty money.
Externalities can be made to bear a cost.
If the use case does not require fossil fuels, certainly, carry on. Same if your biofuel isn’t going to cause the Amazon to be clear cut and can be economically produced at scale. But until then, have to aggressively impair the consumption of fossil fuels, because it’s only going to keep getting hotter, year after year, long after we reach net zero (which is still a decade or two away). Maybe one day we’ll have a mechanism to sequester carbon, and enough low carbon energy to suck all of the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution started out of the atmosphere for long term, stable storage to mitigate climate change. But not today, and therefore, these are the facts that must drive policy until the facts change.
Climeworks' capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 - May 2025
> Al Gore gave a TED talk in 2023 where he discussed the carbon capture and disposal industry and specifically mentioned Climeworks. He made fun of the company, calling the capture industry nothing more than a cover for oil and gas companies to keep their businesses afloat.
Even if you don’t like Al Gore, the math remains the math.
The cost applied to externalities can be spent to amend the specific damage, which is sometimes impossible, or can be commensurate to the estimate damage in order to create different benefit.
> indulgence
I concour with the analysis, but not necessarily with the moral evaluation. I have already mentioned nearby that money is a token to be spent on freedom in a framework of choice in allocation: Economics, science of Optimization, is the science of the management of Scarcity to some authors - and that scarcity is structural, existential (as evident in the case of Time). The purpose of resources is to invest them according to preference - some choices more loaded, but the computation compares the values of said "load" with the "preference" and the "resource (money etc.)".
The actual rebuttal: if you had to go "black vs white" in preferences, vs the continuous framework I proposed, than heating for example would be a problem - an externality bearing investment that we could not compensate with a reversal of the damage. But should we do without heating? You yourself defend touristic travel. Where can we put a threshold? At that point, it is best to quantify damages and charge the externalities.
Electricity->Batteries, renewables, geothermal, hydro, transmission, cross country interconnectors
HVAC->Heat pumps, low carbon district heating, insulation, sand heat batteries
Mobility->Electric vehicles, bikes, scooters, light rail, heavy duty electric vehicles
Marine traffic->Low carbon produced methanol or ammonia
For air travel that must remain and cannot be replaced with an electrified or low carbon alternative (until low carbon solutions exist), the component that must remain be made as efficient as possible. Regardless of wealth, you fly commercial, just like everyone takes the subway, regardless of wealth or status, in cities with high quality mass transit. Your need is met, just within our collective societal tolerance for the harm incurred for the travel desired (Point A->B).
We may disagree, and that’s fine. I believe the climate data is clear as an input to this decisioning. Whether you’re wealthy should not be a factor in outsized carbon emissions (private jet travel, specifically) simply because the socioeconomic system is defective on this. I assume the appetite for this goes up as climate change consequences become more dire, compelling more appetite for extreme actions to course correct.
There's nothing except the political preventing the governments of the world imposing the unpalatable price on the market and policing the capture operations for net effectiveness.
Curious -- what speed are you assuming for such a high speed rail?
Within the scope of land travel, it’s clear it can be built. If it isn’t built, of course, that’s a choice. But it’s a lie to say it cannot be done.
Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.
Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.
It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours. Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Compared to that an overnight train with a bed sounds delightful. People could do almost-day-trips, coast-to-coast, with no ill effects. Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it.
https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/cur...
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... (page 32 risk impact matrix)
(day job is risk assessment and management, and the lens through which I see and model this entire system)
Which sucks, because I really would go for a US high-speed rail network.
> https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.
Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?
Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.
Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.
The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.
I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.
The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption. An extra source of hydrogen would be needed to do this, but hydrogen can be made renewably (and, indeed, that's a good way to provide dispatchable demand to help deal with renewable intermittency, and will have to be done anyway to displace the use of natural gas to make hydrogen.)
As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
This isn't the future I want.
> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.
It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.
I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.
If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.
I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.
Not to mention another glaring omission here: "By adding acetone to a mixture of alcohol and coconut oil"
How much energy is needed to produce those two ingredients, and the things THEY are made from?
If I were a junior-high teacher, I'd probably give this paper a C.
