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Vital News for a Planet
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Biofuels, the Farm Crisis and Climate Changeby Paul Grignon I have been reading about Climate Change for years now. You probably have too. We watch on television as video cameras record images of open seas at the North Pole and permafrost melting. Some scientists warn that if the Arctic tundra melts sufficiently such a vast quantity of methane will be released that the Earth could become like Venus, shrouded in such a dense blanket of greenhouse gases that the surface temperature will rise into the hundreds of degrees. Of course long before then the ice caps will have melted and most of human civilization will have drowned beneath the rising ocean. Most of us block this stuff out. Apart from buying a subcompact car, which would be a good idea with the way gas prices are rising what can any of us do about it anyway? Change the channel. On a different station the top story is about farmers circling the combines around some seat of government demanding subsidies. They are even threatening not to plant any crops next year, as each year they just lose more money! The farmers' problem is that they produce too much and that lowers the price of their commodities until most of them are losing money. What does one story have to do with the other? On the surface, the farmers' plight is connected to the big squeeze they are caught in between monopolistic distributors, monopolistic bankers, and the rising costs of fertilizers they buy from monopolistic oil companies. As well, free trade allows other countries to flood our markets with cheap commodities that are subsidized even more than ours All that is very true. But even more fundamental is the fact that they grow more wheat, barley, corn, milk, beef chickens etc. than we can consume. Aren't we lucky! Unfortunately, the 35,000 children worldwide who die each day from chronic malnutrition or outright starvation don't have any money or anything else we want. So they can't solve the farmers' problem. But there is something that could. When the automobile was first invented, many people assumed that this convenient new form of transportation would be fueled with alcohol, not gasoline. It didn't happen because initially, petroleum was so cheap that no "biofuel" could come close to competing. But gasoline is not so cheap anymore. And as the Peak of Production arrives, almost certainly within this decade, the supply will go into decline as demand continues to grow. This should make biofuels competitive. Biofuels, from methane gas to liquid ethanol to heavy oils and charcoal can all be made from just about any organic substance, from wastepaper to sawdust to nutshells, sewage, and crops specifically grown for the purpose. Automobiles can be built to run on biofuels just as easily as on gasoline and most vehicles can be economically converted to biofuels or a mix of biofuel and gasoline by any backyard mechanic worth his or her salt. Brazil has been running cars on 'gasohol' (gasoline and ethanol from sugar cane) for decades. During World War II both Japan and Germany ran very short of petroleum and had to convert whole fleets of vehicles to run on anything from rice hulls to firewood. What is the connection to Climate Change? The connection is simple. Burning a plant fuel that grew in present time returns no more CO2 to the atmosphere than the plant removed from the air as it grew. Plants build their bodies with carbon they take in from the air. As long as that plant is replaced by a new one there is no build up of Carbon Dioxide to cause Global Warming. Now, if we are taking Global Warming seriously, as our governments are now claiming they are, why are farmers going broke producing a glut of food items in excess of our needs when they could be using all that wonderful agricultural capacity to grow fuels, that is food for our vehicles and furnaces as well? Does it not seem to be a certainty that if we took the climate change emergency as seriously as we take war and switched to biofuels as rapidly as Germany and Japan had to, farmers would not be going broke and the pace of global warming could be at least slowed if not reversed. The petroleum industry has long argued that biofuels are entirely inadequate to replace petroleum; that they could never be produced in a quantity comparable to current usage of petroleum. That is at least partially true. But fossil fuels are in finite supply and will run out some day. If we haven't made the planet entirely uninhabitable by then it is likely that biofuels will have to be the mainstay of our energy supply, however inadequate compared to today's consumption. Why not begin the switch now to whatever extent possible? What could there possibly be to lose? Well, oil company profits would be one thing. About half of the world's oil is still in the ground. And as demand will soon outstrip supply there is really a lot of profit yet to be made. But ultimately, the oil companies must know that their commodity will run out. What industry will they be in then? Perhaps it is all just a matter of timing. On the basis of the dictum "follow the money "I'm tempted to speculate that today's farm crisis is at least a fortuitous development if not a cynical strategy by which the last of the independent farmers surrender their lands to the bankers and other monopolists who will then suddenly see the light and convert our economy to biofuels. Doing it right now would be premature as it might actually empower farmers and consumers to free themselves from the control of those who seek to rule the world through corporate monopoly.
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Is Global Warming a Hoax? Overblown? or Very Very Real?
InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change Below is a link to the most informative site I have found on Climate Change The Insurance Industry Believes in Global Warming So does the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming was predicted back in 1896 The theory was controversial then and still is The basic science is hard to refute but the question is how big will the effect be? The Reliability of Climate Modeling Richard Lindzen is one of the best known "debunkers" of Global Warming Who pays scientists like Richard Lindzen? The American Petroleum Institute takes Climate Change seriously (as long as profits don't suffer) That should come as No Surprise Actually, Global Warming is a Hoax designed to Stampede Us into the Arms of the New World Order Or, we could adapt to Climate Change, & the End of Oil and still Prosper!!!
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