Letters to the Editor
Chernobyl Kid
Published Letters: 91 Editor's Choice: 13
-
Hope against hope that Democrats will use the club being handed to them again...
[Read the article: Doing the Iraq dance, again]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When, as before, Bush vetoes the bill, all the Democrats are hereby notified that you have one absolutely devastating talking point:
"We approved a $50 billion bill to support the troops but President Bush vetoed it."
Okay? It's THAT SIMPLE. Democrats, please, please, take one page out of the Republican playbook and use the soundbites!!
Aw, fuck. Why do I even bother?
-
A view from Canada
[Read the article: How to solve America's water problems]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Michigan's protectiveness towards the Great Lakes reinforces what I've often thought--especially after seeing that map in 2004 that divided North America into "United States of Canada" and "Jesusland." Culturally people in the upper Midwest and the Northeast have much more in common with Canadians than with sunbelters.
But the Sunbelt and its lifestyle--especially the massive automobile dependency of it--bodes poorly for Canada's water supply even if it doesn't get piped south. The Alberta tar sands, currently being exploited to produce synthetic crude oil, are voracious consumers of water. Each barrel of synthetic crude comes with about two or three barrels of seriously polluted water (not to mention the natural gas we have to burn to produce the oil.) A bunch of one-sided trade treaties "negotiated" in the 1980's make it very difficult for us to not supply the U.S. with gasoline. The motoring addiction of sunbelters is driving a goodly chunk of the massive pollution of Western Canada's water.
So, to all those poor folks in Georgia and Phoenix and Vegas who can't keep their big-ass lawns and golf courses watered: Fuck y'all. Your greedy, stupid way of life (not to mention your neanderthal politics) has already inflicted enormous consequences and stripped the resources from people far away. Maybe you thought Jesus would come back and make the whole issue irrelevant before the chickens came home to roost but it turns out you were wrong.
I take comfort in the fact that, with the popping of the last suburban housing bubble, it's the big-ass suburban bungaloids of the sunbelt who will feel the triple whammy of peak oil, climate change and a collapse in property values first and hardest. In the future there will be a lot of need for farm labourers and people to dig coal out by hand--you know, the hard and dangerous way, the way they used to do it back before there were massive oil-fired machines to strip away mountain tops--and it's nice to know that a self-created horde of destitute losers will be the first to have to go down into the hole.
-
Why are we even still talking about this?
[Read the article: Who do you trust on ethanol?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Biofuels work by the capture of sunlight by plant materials, which are then harvested by humans. Whether those crops are switchgrass and soybeans to be processed into ethanol or biodiesel, or trees to be cut down and burned for heat, or food to be eaten by human workers or draft animals, is irrelevant from a gross energy standpoint. Allowing for minor increases in yield due to improved farming and management practices, the limiting factor—the rate of primary energy capture per hectare—is the same today as it would have been in the pre-industrial era.
Pre-industrial society's energy consumption was a tiny fraction of what we use today. To get an idea of how much smaller, consider that water wheels--one of the very few energy sources other than biomass available to pre-industrial people--typically produced up to ten horsepower and represented a significant advantage over horse mills or human labour. By 1682 the largest water-wheel installation in the world was Louis XIV's "Machine of Marly" with an upper capacity of 124 horsepower. The mightiest prime mover on the eve of the Industrial Revolution cranked out the power equivalent of a Honda Civic.
Ultimately, the primary production of biofuels was not enough to sustainably meet the energy needs even of medieval society. Europe's forest cover--itself representing hundreds of years' worth of stored solar energy--was reduced from 95% in 400AD to 20% in 1600 by peasants cutting trees for firewood. It was this deforestation and the resulting shortages of firewood that drove people to start burning coal.
Modern biofuels advocates suggest that by harvesting an annual crop such as corn or even switchgrass, we may sustainably produce useful energy at a rate thousands, or tens of thousands of times greater than in the Middle Ages. The notion is questionable at best.