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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
If biofuels mandates are a 'crime against humanity' than basically any action which doesn't minimize food prices is a crime against humanity.
Unless you are willing to make the totally supportable, but in my mind deeply morally wrong, argument that 'property is theft,' or an argument that we have an obligation to not value a commodity more than a poorer person, than this is an awful argument.
Past awful. It is awful the way the idiots who talk about 'post carbon' are awful.
If you want to argue that wealthy nations and wealthy people have a moral obligation to not let poorer people starve than have at it. But growing crops for fuel is no more a crime against humanity than growing, say, coffee rather than maize is a crime.
This isn't a bombshell to anyone who has an inkling of economics. Of COURSE prices of food are going to go up when there is a completely distorted market for grains. The market was horribly distorted by governments that were urged on by companies like ADM that stood to make tons of money and the environmentalists, who, acting the useful idiot role, demanded more ethanol.
Now that ethanol has been proven to be a complete boondoggle and waste of everyone's money, can we move on and start looking for REAL solutions?
... investing in public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes than in biofuels.
But biofuels are sexy. They give the illusion that we can keep on driving our individual private cars into the future.
Public transit, pedestrian crossings, and bike lanes are boring. They also mean getting out of the beloved car, even if it's small, even if it's a hybrid, even if it plugs into the wall.
So what if the feds took those biofuel subsidies and poured them into transit agencies large and small? What if they helped towns without transit form bus systems? What if they helped do boring ordinary things like build park and ride garages across the suburbs so people could more easily take the bus? But again, parking garages are boring.
The use of numbers like "75", "3", "40" as "percentages", coming from prestigious organizations, really mislead people into thinking that this is an equation that can be answered. To really understand the conclusions represented by a single or two digit number would require a Talmudic intensity that almost no one (except for Mr. Leonard) is willing to expend.
Remember that government subsidies to ADM (and related firms, along with the ethanol companies that are now folding left and right) don't line the pockets of big donors and don't garner votes in the flyover states. Remember that McCain came out against ethanol and was destroyed in Iowa.
This is the item from the July 2 report. Bush wants to remove all the tariffs on biofuel from Brazil, right?
Head of the World Bank is Neo-conservative Robert Zoellick, who signed the 1998 paper advocating the invasion of Iraq.
Commit to re-examine policies towards bio-fuels in the G8 countries:
7. Agree on action in the US and Europe to ease subsidies, mandates and tariffs on bio-fuels that are derived from maize and oilseeds; accelerate the development of second generation cellulosic products.
[more]
Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks
World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development
Biofuel production has pushed up feedstock prices. The clearest example is maize, whose price rose by over 60 percent from 2005 to 2007, largely because of the U.S. ethanol program combined with reduced stocks in major exporting countries. Feedstock supplies are likely to remain constrained in the near term. However, unless there is another major surge in energy prices, it is likely that feedstock prices will rise less in the long term. Farmers will respond to higher prices by increasing the planted areas and supply of these feedstocks. At the same time, rising prices will lower the demand for feedstocks because of the falling profitability of producing biofuels at these higher prices.
Rising agricultural crop prices caused by demand for biofuels have come to the forefront in the debate about a potential conflict between food and fuel. The grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol (240 kilograms of maize for 100 liters of ethanol) could feed one person for a year; this shows how food and fuel compete. Rising prices of staple crops can cause significant welfare losses for the poor, most of whom are net buyers of staple crops. But many other poor producers, who are net sellers of these crops, would benefit from higher prices.
Future biofuel technology may rely on dedicated energy crops and on agricultural and timber waste instead of food crops, potentially reducing the pressure on food crop prices. But second-generation technologies to convert cellulose from these waste products into sugars distilled to produce ethanol or to gasify biomass are not yet commercially viable—and will not be for several years. Moreover, some competition for land and water between dedicated energy crops and food crops will likely remain.
[and the environmental benefits]?
Potential environmental benefits. Environmental benefits need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, because they depend on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the cultivation of feedstocks, the biofuels production process, and the transport of biofuels to markets. And a change in land use, such as cutting forests or draining peatland to produce feedstock such as oil palm, can cancel the GHG emission savings for decades, according to the 2006 EU Biofuel Strategy.
[It looks like carbon trading is the only viable policy to balance the environmental harm, and GHG emissions.]
Perhaps they were hoping no one would read it.
What I meant to say is that parking garages and public transit don't line the pockets of major donors (to both parties) like ADM, etc.
I gotta quit posting stuff when I'm drunk.
Reading the columns and letters around biofuels/peak oil/electric cars that have been popping up lately I had a small epiphany. It occurred to me that the big petroleum companies would get completely cut out of the picture if we switched to electric cars where the batteries get recharged from plugin-type outlets, since the electric companies already have/own the grid that distributes the "fuel". But if we switch to any type of liquid fuel where you pull into your friendly corner filling station to refuel, then the petroleum companies simply need to do some upgrading to equipment to be able to distribute and sell that new fuel.
I suppose this might have already occurred to some of you, but to me this seems a bit of a revelation. The oil companies (which usually do refining and distribution too) are NOT going to just quietly fade into the sunset. They are going to do everything they can to push us into using some type of liquid fuel for cars, and from their point of view if it is petroleum based, then the upgrading might not even need to happen (oil from shale or coal or algae or plants).
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
