One of the few reasonable voices out there. Points out that a few are becoming extremely rich at the expense of the planet and the poor. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html As some in politics push for mandated production of ethanol, the very areas of the planet that filter out toxic carbon emissions are being destroyed so that speculators can reap huge profits from commodities prices. Why isn't Gore pointing this out, and asking for a reasonable approach to the Global Warming hysteria? Do we know where his investments lie? http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22663 He appears to be making his money through the new carbon offset industry. Go figure?
I didn't look at the article, but I've always had problems with biofuels. Years ago, I read a chemical engineering analysis of ethanol produced from corn. The result was little or no net energy produced. Already world food prices are being negatively impacted. Biofuels may make sense in some places on a limited scale, but they aren't the large scale solution they're being made out to be.
I'm suffering the biofuel business in my country right now. About 42% of croplands are used to produce soybean, including 1,2 million hectares (2.6 million acres) of woodlands lost in recent years. Argentina is now World's first exporter of soybean oil and the second exporter of soybean, and this year they started many plants to produce biofuel departing from soy to send to Europe. Soybean is produced with fertilizers and we can see the soil year by year becoming from deep black to chestnut color as it loses its humus, releasing a formidable amount of CO2 to the atmosphere. Making my own calculations I concluded that the net effect on CO2 stocks of new croplands is very negative the first decade, and only 30 to 40 years later the CO2 saved from fossile fuels through soy biofuel matches all the CO2 released by the soil. Ethanol from corn is even worst. Only ethanol from sugar cane makes sense, as new technologies let us get about 12 metric tons of ethanol from one hectare of cane. That's why I found absurd President Bush's initiative of promoting ethanol in continental USA. We have the same peril here at home, as many land owners who have quite dry lands about 1200 kilometers (700 miles) from the nearest port, lands that nowadays are used for cattle, well, they mayn't afford the cost of transportation of corn, plus fertilizers, plus irrigation, and the low prices of corn. But producing corn and locally transform it to ethanol they may pump to the ports, plus the higher price of corn owing this biofuel madness, is tempting them to switch to corn, thus we will have more deteriorated soils and more CO2 release to the atmosphere. We live in a time where third rate aids for global warming relief are chosen because they are prime business. Only when it shows the cure even with the illness they'll switch to better systems, like taxation based on CO2, from direct fossile fuel consumption to land taxes. About Mr. Gore, I'm quite sick of all the criticism about his electricity bill. He is a rich man, his house is an office where dozens of people work and even he hosted the secret service agents that protect him longlife, by law. He surely could spend a couple of hundred grands to install solar panels, as the publicity will worth a million. But the messenger get the shots. In that critics I only can see the atavic envy on the rich that the "poor" (poor-minded, sure!) feel.
Right now the US can produce 7 billion gallons per year of ethanol, and in the next 18 months new refineries will have the capacity to produce another 6.4 billion gallons a year. we burn 400 million gallons a day. 35 days worth of fuel,like pissin in the ocean.
I read somewhere that some of the early ethanol production was done from "rapeseed" which corn and soy farmers can grow in their off-seasons. Why can't we still do it? This totally makes sense to me. Farmers make a better living, food supply is uninterrupted, and you don't have to chop down the rainforest for farmland. I read the Time article and got pretty PO'd.
American Voters got snookered by green legislation that made stockholders of Archer Daniels Midland, inc. wealthy. The Farm Aid concerts did the heavy lifting by "raising awareness" I am sure that everybody is now screaming about corporate welfare. All that our activists need to do is wheel out a Christopher Reeve and count on voters to go with a gut feeling and vote the subsidy. Why these Red State farmers are continuously voted subsidies by our Congress is beyond me.
Christopher Reeve died October 10, 2004. Neither is really better for the environment Staggert: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2507851.ece Something to think about before jumping on the green bandwagon.
i remember when time magazine was corporate media long before all but indie media was corporate media, when there was a large format of lots of black and white photographs called 'life', that was bought by them and subsiquently droped. and there was another one called 'look'. when warner brothers wasn't time-warner either. why are we even talking about 'bio-fuels' other then methane from recycled organic waste for home heating and cooking. its the use of combustion that's the problem, exerbated by population levels of course. there's no such thing as a clean fuel. only clean tecnologies that are clean precisely because they don't involve burning anything. and i'm not talking about nuclear either. nor are wind, solar, geothermal, modest scale and responsibly sited hydro, et all, the kind of pie in the sky that way hydrogen and a major roll for fission would be. growing fuel crops is neither a sensible solutions for energy and transportation, other then a mixed crop farmer burning corn squeezins in his tractor, nor environmentally sensible at all. it is an 'alternative' to kissing the ass of oil and coal. but not one that solves anything. nor one the same intrests that control oil and coal, don't control themselves or seek to gain control of. nor is the whole myth of clean fuels. carbon reduction IS important. the flim flam is that replacing what we're burning now with some myrical fuel is going to in any way solve it. what we're burning now will run out though, and that has economic implications. but the whole economics of comodifying everything is what is creating the incetive for keeping everything screwed up. everything from the perpetuating of the illusion that we need to burn anything to have an advanced and ever advancing tecnology, to conning people, creating situations that virtually force people, into indenturing themsleves for transportation and a place to live. i don't see how any of that justifies the politics of trying to discredit someone who is merely trying to tell people their heads are up their assess and they don't have to be. =^^= .../\...
Rice and cattle produce methane and soybean, alfalfa/lucerne and land fires produce N20, both greenhouse gases. In fact, I have read that 50 million cows in Argentina produces about 7 million tons of methane per year with the same greenhouse effect of 145 millions metric tons of CO2, more than all the CO2 thrown by transportation and heating in all Argentina. But both methane and nitrous oxide are natural products with a short life in the atmosphere (12 years of average life for methane) while CO2 from fossil fuels cycles are decades or centuries. The downside of biofuel crops are soil deterioration and the losses of tons of CO2 contained in decaying soil humus.
Good post, as always Water holds the key... Water in, water out... the technology exists... and beyond that we can look into completely different forms of propulsion...
Up until the deregulation of utilities in California in the nineties, hydropower was a big source of California's electrical generation. But with deregulation PG&E sold off their pits/hydro plants. It bothered me at the time and it still bothers me, because it seemed like the most sane way of generating power. I used to fish around a couple of them, they were clean and non-polluting. I could never understand how closing them was a benefit to anyone.
