How does it work? Just like you and I breathe in oxygen to make energy, algae breathe in carbon dioxide to make energy. So, if you capture all that carbon dioxide and feed it to the algae, they grow. Algae are particularly oily little buggers so after they’ve matured they can be squeezed to make oil. The leftover algae carcasses can then be converted to ethanol and used as feed for livestock.

algae breathe in carbon dioxide to make energy. So, if you capture all that carbon dioxide and feed it to the algae, they grow. Algae are particularly oily little buggers so after they’ve matured they can be squeezed to make oil. The leftover algae carcasses can then be converted to ethanol and used as feed for livestock.

Press Release 96-055 Iron 'Fertilization' Causes Plankton Bloom Scientists link iron to climate change October 9, 1996 This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts. For farmers and gardeners it would be revolutionary: a novel fertilizer with a cheap and widely available ingredient, iron, that produces more than two thousand times its weight of plant growth--within a week. Iron has that effect on parts of the ocean.

For farmers and gardeners it would be revolutionary: a novel fertilizer with a cheap and widely available ingredient, iron, that produces more than two thousand times its weight of plant growth--within a week. Iron has that effect on parts of the ocean.

Could we slow future climate change resulting from human activities by adding iron to under-productive oceans? Calculations for the equatorial Pacific, reported in the Nature papers, indicate that iron fertilization there would not significantly counteract the projected future increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The British charity warns that biofuels have in fact become a major cause of the food shortage and hunger crisis is likely to get worse. Industrial biofuels are currently made from maize, wheat, sugar cane and oil seeds such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed.

Switching from fossil fuels to allegedly cleaner fuels may not be as good for the environment as advertised says the United Kingdom’s Times. Similar to the renewable fuels mandate in the United States, the UK has a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation that requires 3.25% of fuel sold to come from crops – increasing to 13 percent by 2020. A new government study suggests that biofuels may actually be worse for the environment:

Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass. The term covers solid biomass, liquid fuels and various biogases.

coal and nuclear power together will still supply two-thirds of the energy