Can we rely on biomass for most of the needs of advancing human civilization?
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EDITORIAL
Can we rely on biomass for most of the needs of advancing human civilization? Subhas Sikdar1
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Fundamental needs of human civilization are fourfold: food, feed, energy, and chemicals and minerals. This litany has remained essentially unchanged since homo sapiens abandoned the hunter gatherer lifestyle and settled down to husband agriculture, domesticate animals, and created safe environments for survival and species proliferation. Few of the vestiges of primitive and medieval practices exist to support present day human existence. For instance, though meat consumption has remained a dominant practice, it is no longer supplied by hunting wild animals; all meat sources are now domesticated. In recent years, biomass utilization has become a designed approach to provide food, feed, energy, and even chemicals. Minerals are the only need that biomass cannot satisfy, obviously. The question naturally arises: are there limits to what we can do with biomass, is there enough biomass to be had, are there global and local limits before we begin to harm the natural ecological support system, and how would we decide on a sustaining optimized utilization? For food and feed, the answer is obvious. All food and feed, including fish and meat, are ultimately derived from biological resources. For energy, the picture is complex and interesting. Energy is also fundamentally the causative force behind forays into biofuels and chemicals. Early humans used wood and timber for fuel and construction leading many early and not so early human settlements, cities, and countries to collapse because of deforestation, soil and nutrient loss, as Jared Diamond has analyzed in extreme details
* Subhas Sikdar [email protected] 1
in a landmark book.1 The advent of coal, later petroleum and natural gas, as primary sources of energy, replacing timber, provided the boost for sustained improvement in income, standard of living across the globe, accelerating urban and suburban infrastructure that stands as a pride of human ingenuity. However, at the same time the genie of environmental degradation was irreversibly unleased. This resulted in air, water, and land pollution, harmful to human health and the environment. The discovery that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and a few others can be the reason for global warming, and man is responsible in large part, and hence, human ingenuity can be harnessed to reverse the undesired impact, naturally spurred the current efforts on biofuels to potentially replace coal, petroleum, and natural gas for energy and power needs. Biomass is being used in continually improving the technology for fuels such as ethanol to be used for automobiles, and it is also being seriously researched for producing power for base stations for supplying to manufacturing, commercial, and domestic needs. The ecological impacts of biofuels such as ethanol have been discussed and debated for quite some time. I am reminded of the famous energy b
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