"the liberal pessimist meme that insists we are in dire peril and need to pour untold amounts of grain into making ethanol"

The corn ethanol subsidy was pioneered by Senator Robert Dole, Republican Senator from Kansas.

George W. Bush is a powerful booster of corn ethanol. John McCain supports the use of corn ethanol.

My point isn't to paint the corn ethanol hype as an exclusively Republican project. There are also many boosters of corn ethanol to be found in the ranks of the Democratic Party- a label not to be confused with the term "liberals", although some overlap admittedly exists.

My point is to show that, contrary to shooter 242's assertion, corn ethanol as an alternative energy source is hardly a project that's the ideological inspiration of "liberals."

Of all the ways of producing ethanol, direct conversion of food crops is by far the worst.

The June 14, 2007 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works of Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute- an environmentalist who could fairly be called a "liberal":

"...The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide. Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since gasoline prices jumped at the end of 2005. Once completed, distilleries now under construction could double U.S. ethanol output, turning nearly 30 percent of next year’s U.S. grain harvest into fuel for automobiles. This unprecedented diversion of the world’s leading grain crop to the production of fuel will affect food prices everywhere, risking political instability..."

"...Against this backdrop, Washington is consumed with “ethanol euphoria.” President Bush in his State of the Union address set a production goal for 2017 of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels, including grain-based and cellulosic ethanol, and fuel from coal. Given the current difficulties in producing cellulosic ethanol at a competitive cost and given the mounting public opposition to coal fuels, which are far more carbon-intensive than gasoline, most of the fuel to meet this goal might well have to come from grain. This could take most of the U.S. grain harvest, leaving little grain to meet U.S. needs, much less those of the hundred or so countries that import grain.

The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world’s 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as rising..."

http://www.earth-policy.org/Transcripts/SenateEPW07.htm

http://tinyurl.com/3ybo2x

http://firedoglake.com/2008/04/24/our-high-horse/#more-22413

or click sig, there's more

We sing many praises, Republican, Independent, Democrat alike about how we're the greatest country on earth because of our "freedom", the "last best, hope of earth" as it was said by Lincoln so long ago. We declare and praise our Constitutional due process protections. But this statistic, by itself stares us in the face and tells you all you need to know about how deeply we actually believe in the principals we so glibly espouse.

But sadly, tragically, and most of all embarrassingly, we are in no position to brag about "freedom" to anyone. We have, in many ways aggressively or passively allowed ourselves to be self-terrorized into a virtual police state. The term "police state" is not used lightly. It does describe how badly we have been manipulated by our politicians and media -- but mostly it demonstrates how blithely we all have allowed ourselves to be manipulated.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The stonewalling (including contempt of court) by the Pentagaon - - and the continuing stonewalling by the TV networks - - belies the assertion, now being made by administration apologists (The Weekly Standard etc.) that the Pentagon and the networks had nothing to hide.

But was the "military analyst" program actually illegal?

That question merits an investigation.

Four years ago, the GAO investigated another government propaganda program and issued the following decision:

http://www.gao.gov/decisions/appro/302710.pdf

G A O

Comptroller General
of the United States

United States General Accounting Office
Washington, DC 20548

Decision

Matter of: Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—Video News Releases

File: B-302710

Date: May 19, 2004

[...] The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’s (CMS) use of appropriated funds to pay for the production and distribution of story packages that were not attributed to CMS violated the restriction on using appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes [...]

- - General Accounting Office, 5/19/2004

If that case was worthy of investigation, then this case is, too.

David Barstow:

http://nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21barstowqa.html

It is not legal for the U.S. government to direct psychological operations or propaganda against the American people. But the lines between ordinary public affairs and propaganda are sometimes blurry, and there are varying views as to whether this particular campaign crossed those lines.

- - David Barstow 4/21/08

Don't trouble her beautiful mind. I'd call you Mutton Head but that nick is reserved for someone else. How about Mutton Breath?

From the key source for your link to some dickweed at a local paper, The Hadley Centre for Climate Change:

Climate Change: The Big Picture

Fact 1: Climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it

Fact 2: Temperatures are continuing to rise

Fact 3: The current climate change is not just part of a natural cycle

Fact 4: Recent warming cannot be explained by the Sun or natural factors alone

Fact 5: If we continue emitting greenhouse gases this warming will continue and delaying action will make the problem more difficult to fix

Fact 6: Climate models predict the main features of future climate

Myth 1: The intensity of cosmic rays changes climate

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/

The Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change — named in honour of George Hadley — is part of, and based at the headquarters of the Met Office in Exeter. The Hadley Centre provides a focus in the United Kingdom for the scientific issues associated with climate change.

The Centre’s has several major aims:

To understand physical, chemical and biological processes within the climate system and develop state-of-the-art climate models which represent them

To use climate models to simulate global and regional climate variability and change over the last 100 years and to predict changes over the next 100 years

To monitor global and national climate variability and change

To attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors

To understand, with the aim of predicting, the natural inter-annual to decadal variability of climate

In 2005 the centre hosted the international scientific conference Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change.

The Met Office employs over 1500 staff, with approximately 200 working in its climate research unit. Most of its funding comes from contracts with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), other United Kingdom Government departments and the European Commission.

The climate models (termed Global Climate Models) developed by the centre are used for climate change research purposes across the world.

Research Projects based on Hadley Centre Climate Models

The volunteer computing project ClimatePrediction.net is a research team based at the University of Oxford conducting research into global climate change using adapted versions of the climate models developed at the Hadley Centre. Individuals can participate in the research efforts by donating spare computer resources to aid their research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Centre_for_Climate_Prediction_and_Research