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POPSBombing the Moon Gives A New Meaning to Lunatics So how much does a metaphor weigh? A lot more than NASA thinks. The first man on the moon wasn't an American or a Russian, it was The Man in the Moon we all saw when we were kids, and somebody older showed him to us. That's the first man on the moon, her permanent resident, and now he's got a NASA rocket at his backside... They used to call the mentally ill lunatics. But now I wonder who the real lunatics are. And if there is water on the moon, what are we going to do with it? Grow moon-corn for ethanol until we kill the Earth? Such a great article it touched something, it really touched something more beautiful than finding water on the moon.
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POPSNext Stop - The Dead Zone Grows and Grows You know there is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, south of New Orleans, right? You didn't even more reason to read this. But the harsh news is that one of the only ways to reduce its growth, it to use less fuel, walk more, drive less. Pretty harsh? Climate change and clean up is not going to be easy - did you think?
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POPSUnderstanding Government Subsidies There are many people who will rally behind "socialized" oil, but read on: Hidden Oil Subsidies The real price of gasoline is what people actually pay for it, not just what they pay for it at the pump. That might seem subtle, but there's a big difference. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-thank, did a study on the subject. What they found is simply mind-boggling. They calculated that the US spent between $30 to $60 billion (with a 'b') a year safeguarding oil supplies in the Middle East during the 1990s, even though its imports from that region totaled only about $10 billion a year during that period. A more comprehensive study that includes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other oil protection services (the coast guard is clearing shipping lanes and doing navigational support to oil tankers, etc) shows that actual subsidies to Big Oil are between $78 to $158 billion (again, with a 'b') per year.
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POPSBiofuels Bad for the Environment (Feb 08) The last line is especially noteworthy: we know less than we think we do about these matters. We therefore risk unintended consequences that could make things worse rather than better.
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POPSEthanol's Thirst Is Growing "This is one more nail in the coffin for ethanol," says David Pimentel of Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, whose own studies have shown that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it releases when burned, and that the fertilizer used to grow corn for ethanol has contributed significantly to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico (areas of the ocean with low oxygen content due to increases in chemicals in the water).
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POPS The Ethanol Bubble Bursts In Iowa
To meet this political demand, VeraSun, Pacific Ethanol, Aventine Renewable Energy and others rushed to build ethanol mills. The industry produced just four billion gallons of ethanol in 2005, so it had to add a lot of capacity in a short period of time. Three years ago, ethanol producers made $2.30 per gallon. But with the global economic slowdown, along with a glut of ethanol on the market, by the end of 2008 ethanol producers were making a mere 25 cents per gallon. That drop forced Dyersville and other facilities to be shuttered. The industry cut more than 20% of its capacity in a few months last year. What's more, as ethanol producers sucked in a vast amount of corn, prices of milk, eggs and other foods soared. The price of corn shot up, as did the price of products from animals -- chickens and cows -- that eat feed corn. Texas Gov. Rick Perry reacted by standing with the cattlemen in his state to ask the Environmental Protection Agency last year to suspend part of
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POPSObama gives biofuels the big thumbs up
On the surface this may seem like a good idea, but the mandate to, by 2022, have up to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol counted toward the 36 billion gallon biofuel production level will only worsen its effect on food production. We’re at 6-9 billion gallons of corn ethanol now and with all the havoc that has wreaked on agriculture worldwide, the concept of almost tripling that amount over the next 20-odd years is terrifying. What may yet save us is the fact that it will likely prove a simply impossible standard to meet. And the fact that the administration’s rationale for expanding the use of biofuels continues to be the misplaced desire “to reduce our dependence on foreign oil” is just ludicrous. Addressing climate change WILL reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But simply reducing dependence on foreign oil won’t save the planet—only zeroing out our carbon emissions will do that. So energy policy in this country must be seen through that one, single lens.
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POPSSo when will the famine happen? The nation's second largest ethanol maker took corn from farmers, went bankrupt without paying many of them, and a whole lot of family farms are going to be foreclosed upon in short order if something isn't done.
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POPSCorn Ethanol Will Not Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions How many of us knew this? What a waste of time and money when they both could have been put to a much better avenue for energy independence. How about the increase in beef, chicken and egg prices at the grocery stores? DUD!
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POPSFlower turns animal waste into fuel continues: Duckweed, they discovered, has an appetite for animal waste, quickly converting it to leafy starch that can then be converted into ethanol. The current source for most U.S. ethanol is industrial-scale corn farming, which requires large amounts of toxic pesticides and dead zone-feeding, fuel-intensive fertilizers. When the costs are added up, corn-based ethanol may prove little cleaner than gasoline. Duckweed could help solve both problems at once. "We did small-scale tests in the laboratory to convert duckweed starch to ethanol using the same technologies as the fuel industry currently uses in corn," said Cheng. "With the same technology, we can easily convert it."
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POPSRaising Ethanol Standards? Ethanol producers have faced declining margins from a competitive market, coupled with low oil prices and relatively high prices for corn, used to make ethanol, said McMinimy. “That dynamic has to be changed,” he said. That says it all right there doesn't it. Let's just ignore the numerous signals of the market, and have the government manipulate it into production.
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POPSCorn Ethanol’s Promise is Evaporating
Increasingly more subsidies are given to the production of corn ethanol at the expense of a diversified and sustainable energy future. Ethanol lobbyists are pushing for more ethanol to be put into America’s gas powered vehicles which will require fuel system modifications. Fuel mileage improvement is negligible and does not reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. http://www.americanfuels.info/2008/03/ethanol-and-fuel-mileage.html Ethanol fuel mileage http://www.satireandcomment.com/sc0308ethanol.html The Ethanol Fallacy Leadership in sustainable energy needs to: # Phase out tax credits for corn ethanol and subsidize other biofuels only if they show clear promise to meet strict climate and environmental protection standards # Rebalance the U.S. renewable energy and energy conservation portfolio to favor options that do the most to reduce fossil fuel use, safeguard the environment, spur more widely-shared economic development and increase energy security I don’t see that lea
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POPSScientists urge policymakers to rethink biofuel policy Monoculture is not healthy. It is not natural and it will lead to a de-verisification of insect life and everything that depends on insects. In addition, corn requires high nitrogen fertilizer that is typically made from chemicals and petroleum. Most of this inorganic fertilizer gets washed off into the Gulf of Mexico where it depletes the water of oxygen which is reducing biomass and diversity. Here’s a pretty informative website that explains the process http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/. Besides, using corn for biofuel diverts it from food processing which further drives up the cost of food. Plus a monoculture can be easily wiped out by one insect. This is what happened in the early 1900s to the U.S. cotton crop. http://outreach.lib.uic.edu/www/issues/issue7_2/quarterman/index.html
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POPSScum of the earth may save planet The demands of algae are simple: sunlight, warmth, water, nutrients and, most significantly, carbon dioxide, the much maligned gas that is a major contributor to global warming.
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POPSFarming superpower Brazil spreads its know-how Planaltino, Brazil - As a young soil scientist, Edson Lobato looked out at the vast savanna of central Brazil and imagined fields of soy, corn, and cotton where most saw an inhospitable mass of red earth and tangled trees. His friends and family urged him to take his agronomy degree elsewhere, somewhere it would make a difference. But he joined Brazil's agricultural and livestock research agency (Embrapa) and relocated to the country's heartland, called the cerrado, where there was, at the time, little besides wooded plains, termites, and deer. Embrapa then set out to prove that those soils could produce like the most efficient cropland of Idaho. The agency poured millions into research. It sent teams of scientists like Mr. Lobato to the American Midwest to glean as much know-how as possible. Today his vision has helped turn Brazil into the world's largest exporter of soybeans, beef, chicken, orange juice, ethanol, and sugar.
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POPSOctober Surprise ~ 14 Inches Of Snow Fell At High Point State Park To continue passing legislation to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) or other “greenhouse gases” isn’t just stupid, it is lethal. What people are going to need more of is the energy to heat their homes and workplaces. Thwarting the building of more coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate electricity is suicidal. That is, however, exactly what Congress intends to do and we can anticipate blizzard of legislation, instituting “cap-and-trade” requirements, increases in ethanol requirements, and a host of other poisonous legislation that will severely handicap any recovery from the current financial crisis and inflict a host of allegedly “unintended” consequences. One of those consequences were the food riots that occurred earlier this year around the world when the price of corn rose in response to U.S. mandates that ethanol be used along with gasoline. Proposed increases in such ethanol use will require engineering changes in new automobiles . . . .
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