Biomass Quotes

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond

Whereas CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas overall, it accounts for only 11 percent of agricultural emissions.2 The rest is nitrous oxide (53 percent) and methane (36 percent). Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent per pound than CO2 as a climate-change gas, and on farms it results mainly from the use of fertilizer but also from cattle pee, especially if there is excessive protein in their diet, and from the burning of biomass and fuel.3 Methane, which is 25 times more potent than CO2, is mainly emitted by cows and sheep when they belch. Some is also emitted from silage. The CO2 comes from machinery but also from the heating of greenhouses to grow crops out of season or in countries that just don't have the right climate. ~ Mike Berners-Lee

A 'biomass' man does not use logical and analytical thinking ~ Sunday Adelaja

Even God does not call every human a man. There are some who have not managed to attain the height of those who God refers to as men. They might be giving birth, eating and drinking, having fun, but yet, when they don't live for what they were created for, they remain biomasses. ~ Sunday Adelaja

By far the largest single organisms that ever lived are plants, and an impressive percentage of the world's biomass is locked up in plants. [...] The surface of the land is green because of plants, and the surface of the sea would be green too if its floating carpet of photosynthesisers were macroscopic plants instead of microorganisms too small to reflect noticeable quantities of green light. It is as though plants are going out of their way to cover every square centimetre with green, leaving none uncovered. And that is pretty much what they are doing […] From a plant's point of view, a square centimetre of the Earth's surface that is anything but green amounts to a negligently wasted opportunity to sweep up photons. ~ Richard Dawkins

A 'biomass' man lives by his instincts ~ Sunday Adelaja

For example, in my own State of Arizona, an Israeli scientist is working with an Arizona company on a demonstration project involving a very fast-growing algae which can be used to power a biomass energy plan. ~ John Shadegg

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me. ~ Alan Garner

A 'biomass' man is not deeply analyzing things to draw a meaningful conclusions ~ Sunday Adelaja

Microbes are invisible to our naked eye, with a few exceptions that reinforce the rule. Millions can fit into the eye of a needle. But if you were to gather them all up, not only would they outnumber all the mice, whales, humans, birds, insects, worms, and trees combined - indeed all of the visible life-forms we are familiar with on Earth - they would outweigh them as well. Think about that for a moment. Invisible microbes comprise the sheer bulk of the Earth's biomass, more than the mammals and reptiles, all the fish in the sea, the forests. ~ Martin J. Blaser

Redwood rainforest has five to 10 times the biomass - that's the sheer weight of living material - of, say, deep tropical rainforest in the Amazon basin. ~ Richard Preston

Hemp is Earth's number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months. ~ Jack Herer

A 'biomass' man reaction comes from reflexes and instinct ~ Sunday Adelaja

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them. ~ E. O. Wilson

A new era has dawned in Ontario; one where the air will be cleaner and the multiple costs of coal-fired generation have become a distant memory. Atikokan's successful conversion to biomass will put Ontario on the world map as a leader in using this sustainable fuel source for electricity production. ~ Bob Chiarelli

rotten fruits and vegetables n.
distressed produce

sewage plant n.
wastewater conveyance facility

sewage sludge n.
1. regulated organic ingredients
2. bioslurp
3. organic biomass

Some people may call the residue of treated sewage "sludge," but to John Gonzales of the Reno-Sparks, Nevada, sewage treatment plant it's "organic biomass."

4. biosolids

It might look like sludge to you, but others call it "biosolids."

5. regulated wastewater residuals ~ William D. Lutz

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers. ~ E. O. Wilson

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline. ~ Vinod Khosla

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. ~ Richard Heinberg

A biomass will live with a self-preservation instinct ~ Sunday Adelaja

A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the [Younger Dryas] onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record. ~ Graham Hancock

You are the ONLY you there is, you have a purpose, you are not just a biomass ~ Sunday Adelaja

The lumbering bagos and topheavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black
motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for
the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like
overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,
portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,
they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a
blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,
altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't
what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse
abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-
drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving
just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty
years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their
bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense
lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will
melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the
bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. ~ Neal Stephenson

Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general
sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Huh?"
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it
was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it
sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports -
- you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow
that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone
of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude
suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre
tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper
than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of
biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a
virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one
person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass.
To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having
babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just
lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. LeavesNeal Stephenson