O Christmas Tree, O StreetLight ----

[flacaltenn]

Don't know where I first heard about this.. Hope I'm not stepping on someone else's thread here.. Think I heard it from my fav magazine below..

Replacing Street Lights With Glowing Trees - Reason.com

Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology. You no longer have to be Monsanto to hack Mother Nature

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are 26.5 million street lights in the United States. There’s an additional 26.1 million highway fixtures. Small cities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the electricity their street lights consume; big cities spend millions.

Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory’s suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a “biological app store,” might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a “renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable street-lamp”—in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.

They asked for $65,000. They got $484,013, from 8,433 backers. Eventually, around 6,000 of those backers, each of whom pledged at least $40 toward the project, will receive 50 to 100 genetically engineered seeds they can use to grow their own glowing plants. Another 210 backers, who pledged at least $250 apiece, will receive instructions and ingredients that will allow them to conduct further experiments and “transform [their] own plant at home, in [their] lab or at school.”

Got mixed feelings about this.. Great use of technology.. But enviro consequences are great. Probably confuse the heck out of bugs like fireflys.. And although the group assures everyone -- the tree cannot crossbreed in the open ---- we've all seen how Jurassic Park turns out..

 

[flacaltenn]

If you want to sing along -- the title should have been ---

O Christmas Tree, O Street TreeLight, how green and bright your branches..

EVERYONE ----

 

[skookerasbil]

Brilliantly stoopid!!!


Leave it to far left eco-k00ks to provide some of the most hysterical shit you are ever going to find!!!!

 

[flacaltenn]

Ecologically dangerous maybe.. But it's not the Stoopidest idea I've heard.
Streetlighting is major part of the grid load. Feeding a tree is pretty simple.

Who wouldn't want Main Street to look like the planet in Avatar??
:gasp:

 

[Abraham3]

Aren't you all afraid that such a move would hurt profits for the power and light companies and the suppliers of the fuels they burn? Dozens could be put out of work.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Fossil fuels cause lots of cancer and disease. They're not good for humanity.

 

[flacaltenn]

Aren't you all afraid that such a move would hurt profits for the power and light companies and the suppliers of the fuels they burn? Dozens could be put out of work.

I'm looking forward to supporting sane sensible ideas instead of the usual green crap you hater babies whine for. Is this one of those? Might be. Glowing trees wont blackout when the wind doesnt blow and sun doesnt show.