As our politicians drill the human food supply for energy

by Christopher Calder                                                                     

     On December 19th, 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the "Energy Independence and Security Act" (summary pdf 107kb), which mandates that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be produced in America every year by 2022, a nearly fivefold increase over current production levels.  Ethanol (vodka minus H2O) and "biodiesel" (a.k.a. cooking oil) are made from food or inedible crops which displace normal agricultural activity.  Biofuel crops include corn, sugarcane, cassava, rapeseed (canola oil), soybeans, palm trees (palm oil), as well as experimental "second generation" crops such as switchgrass, jatropha, giant reed, hemp, and algae.  In 2007, 54% of the world's corn was grown in the USA, and an ever increasing percentage of that crop ended up in gas tanks instead of stomachs.  Ethanol production took only 7% of American corn in 1998, but has grown as a cancer on our food supply, taking 37 to 38% by 2007 (reference Fermenting the Food Supply by Stuart Staniford).  We use corn to feed chickens and cattle, so the price of poultry, eggs, beef, and dairy products will continue to rise.

     The amount of corn required to fill the 18.5 gallon gas tank of a Toyota Camry with ethanol is enough to feed a human being for 270 days.  At current levels of biofuel production, this "renewable energy source" has already caused huge increases in the price of food around the world which can be experienced firsthand at any supermarket in America.  According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food prices rose an incredible 40% in the year 2007 alone, producing the highest food cost level on record and qualifying 2007 as a year of food price hyperinflation!  Unfortunately, few consumers/voters understand exactly why food prices have risen so dramatically, and even our most respected politicians do not comprehend the inevitable global food disaster that lies just ahead, and which they themselves helped create.  [see Clinton And Obama On Iran And Biofuels] 

     The United Nations states that its charity programs can no longer afford to feed the starving peoples of the world because of the high cost of food created by biofuel production.  Jean Ziegler, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, denounced biofuels as "a crime against humanity."  Local food banks in the United States are running low on supplies, and many families who use to contribute food are now in need of help themselves.  When farmers plant more corn in order to cash in on high prices created by biofuel mandates, they reduce production of other crops such as wheat.  The United States Department of Agriculture has stated that on May 31, 2008, US wheat supplies will be lower than any time since 1948, when the US population was less than 147 million people.  [60 year wheat supply low] 

     The increased cost of oil has pushed the price of all products higher, but biofuel production has amplified an expected moderate food price rise by shrinking food supplies, thus turning a manageable cost problem into a global humanitarian disaster.  Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has!  The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat because we grow biofuel crops using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor we use to grow food.  As massive new biofuel mandates have only recently been signed into law, the world should be warned that the biofuel food price spiral has only just begun.  [see Parallels - Biofuels and Mao's "Great Leap Forward"]

     The ideology of biofuel production sounds innocent and wholesome superficially, a kind of green, health food store way of producing energy, and that is part of the reason why biofuels have an almost cult-like following in our scientifically undereducated United States Congress.  The problem is our biofuel plans are mainly based on political calculation and hype, without legitimate ecological or even economic justification.  Here are some very good reasons to oppose the current biofuel scheme.

                               Ten reasons to oppose the Bush biofuel plan                                          

1)  Starvation - Biofuel production starves the poor and reduces our standard of living by dramatically increasing the cost of food, which we all need just to survive.  Biofuel production is literally shrinking the human food supply at a time when we need much more food due to overpopulation.  The poor of the Third World, the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, and those living on Social Security and other fixed incomes are the hardest hit by high food prices.  News reports show people in Haiti resorting to eating mud because American biofuel mandates have made grains unaffordable.  As we heartlessly starve the world's poor, pressure for illegal immigration to the USA continues to rise.  Most Americans do not realize that global food reserves are at historic lows, while proven global oil reserves are at historic highs.  The United States alone has vast untouched oil reserves in Alaska, just waiting to be pumped, but our politicians have incredibly decided to trade food and thus human lives for oil instead.  With biofuels you pay twice, once at the pump and then again at the supermarket.

2)  Higher cost - Biofuels increase our Federal budget deficit because they demand large subsidies to exist.  Without Federal and State subsidies, tax breaks, and political mandates, there would be no significant free market demand for biofuels in the United States.  Ethanol contains 30 to 35 percent less energy per gallon than regular unleaded gasoline, so the new ethanol blended fuels reduce our gas mileage at a time we are all paying record high prices at the pump.  Ethanol fuel blends also increase engine maintenance costs and lower engine reliability, a particularly significant issue for light aircraft owners.  To calculate the true cost of biofuels, you must add together all of their negatives:  the high direct cost of producing the fuel itself, increased cost of food worldwide, loss of water used for irrigation, and increased damage to the environment.  Judged in total, biofuels are tremendously more expensive than using gasoline and diesel fuel made from oil.

     Without retail price distorting government subsidies, ethanol made from sugarcane would be the only viable biofuel.  Brazilian sugarcane ethanol costs about the same to manufacture as gasoline made from crude oil that costs $35 a barrel (its oil equivalent, or o.e.), while American ethanol made from corn costs $81 o.e..  The United States produces biodiesel from rapeseed at $209 o.e. and from soybeans at a cost of $232 o.e..  Italy is currently making ethanol from wheat at $145 o.e..  The only publicly verified method for making ethanol from cellulose is equal to $305 o.e., with switchgrass being promoted as a source of lignocellulose.  By contrast, Shell Oil physicist Harold Vinegar believes that by the year 2015 oil can be extracted from shale for about $30 per barrel.  Colorado alone has massive shale reserves reported to contain more oil potential than the entire Middle East did before the British began drilling in Iran in 1908.  

[SHOCK NEWS!  Cellulosic ethanol: not likely to be viable - Three agricultural economists with insider information at Iowa State University say Federal tax credits for ethanol made from cellulose will have to be raised from the current $.51 to $1.55 per gallon.  Switchgrass, crop waste, and wood chip biofuel schemes too expensive to work! - see STUDY pdf 180kb]  

3)  Environmental damage - Biofuel production harms the environment by needlessly eroding topsoil and encouraging the destruction of forests, which are desperately needed to soak up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the major greenhouse gas that causes global warming, and the two great sponges of carbon dioxide are the oceans and the forests.  The oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2 as they are becoming increasingly acidic due to pollution, so if we also destroy our forests global warming will accelerate that much faster.  Biofuel schemes speed up global warming because the entire biofuel production process, from beginning to end, releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while destroying native forests which naturally clean and rejuvenate the air we breathe.  [SHOCK NEWS  U.S. corn subsidies drive Amazon destruction - see pictures and graphs of Amazon basin devastation!]

     Roland Clift, a senior science advisor to the British Government, has stated that British plans to promote biofuels are a "scam."  Clift states that “Biodiesel is a complete scam because in the tropics the growing demand is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm trees (palm oil) and similar crops.  “We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70 to 300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction.”  Biofuel production transports carbon into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered (trapped) in soils and native vegetation.  In gaseous form these carbon based molecules, such as carbon dioxide and methane, act as a automobile windshield and hold in heat gained from solar radiation (sunlight).  

     The highly respected journal SCIENCE recently published the Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change, which states that the production of biofuels from grains or switchgrass greatly increases the release of greenhouse gases and is far worse for the environment than using gasoline.  The authors found that "Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.  Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.  This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products."

     Scientists point out that nitrogen fertilizers, which are made from natural gas, coal, and mined minerals, react with soil to unleash large amounts of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas estimated to be 296 times more effective at trapping the earth's heat than CO2.  Farming contributes more to global warming than all land, sea, and air transportation combined, so growing vast amounts of crops for biofuel will heat up the earth's atmosphere faster than if we only used imported oil.  Biofuel advocates ignore the fact that when we pump up grain prices due to our own biofuel production, we raise grain prices all over the world which gives other countries a strong financial incentive to burn down rainforests to plant more food and biofuel crops.  The last thing we should be doing is encouraging nonessential agricultural activity, which vastly enlarges our heavy human footprint on earth, and which speeds global warming and desertification of the planet.  [see Biofuels: an unfolding disaster - Dr. Andrew Boswell pdf 514kb]    

4)  Water shortages - Biofuel crop production causes water shortages because irrigation water is taken away from our shrinking supplies of safe drinking and agricultural water.  It takes 9,000 gallons of water to produce just 1 gallon of biodiesel from soybeans or rapeseed.  There is not enough salt free water in the world to grow biofuel crops and still provide essential utility water for our homes and to grow sufficient food for humans to survive.  

     According to climatologists, global warming will dry up much of our planet, and even without biofuel production we are turning vast areas of land into desert every year through loss of topsoil due to farming for essential food.  You would have thought that vocal celebrity biofuel advocates, such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (contact link) and country singer Willie Nelson (biodiesel business link & fan e-mail), would have considered such basic limitations before promoting biofuel schemes, but apparently they did not.  Unless we harvest algae from the oceans or use waste or salt water to grow algae, we will hit a brick wall due to a simple lack of pure H2O.  [SHOCK NEWS: California farmers want to sell water instead of growing food!]  

5)  It's a lie - America's "biofuel energy independence plan" is a scientific hoax and an economic fraud because all current American production methods use more energy to create biofuels than they yield in the form of biofuel itself.  We have to use large amounts of coal, natural gas, and oil just to manufacture biofuels, and it takes 28% more fossil fuels to produce ethanol from corn than it does to make gasoline.  Supporters hope that second and third generation biofuel crops will generate more energy than they take to produce, but those schemes have yet to be proven in the real world.  Our Congress has decided to mandate science fiction now and prove their hypothesis later!  Even proposed second and third generation biofuel plants do not eliminate the tremendous environmental damage that massive biofuel production will cause. 

6)  It's politics and greed - The biofuel hoax was created to a large degree by domestic American politics and corporate greed.  Both the Democratic and Republican parties want to get the "farm vote" in politically strategic states like Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana.  Our leaders have put political gain ahead of the world's starving poor, the elderly on fixed incomes, and the welfare of the American middle class.  Rich politicians can afford to pay the dramatically higher food bills that biofuel production creates, and they have decided to throw science to the wind and charge blindly into what will inevitably be branded as one of the most destructive political fiascoes of the 21st century.  Ambitious young biofuel entrepreneurs and giant agricultural corporations smell the money to be made, and have lobbied Congress and the President in hopes of turning the farm belt into the Saudi Arabia of "renewable energy," even if the energy they supply comes at the cost of human starvation and accelerated environmental damage.    

7)  The outlook for biofuels is dismal - Growing massive amounts of switchgrass to produce ethanol from lignocellulose has most of the same drawbacks of making ethanol from corn.  We will use land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor to grow switchgrass that will be diverted from food production, with soaring food prices as a result.  If we grow switchgrass on land currently used to graze cattle, we will reduce beef and milk production.  If we grow switchgrass on unused "marginal" prairie lands, we will soon turn those marginal lands into a new dust bowl, which they may turn into anyway due to global warming.  Computer models for the progression of global warming show the America Midwest and Southwest getting hotter and dryer, with much of our farm and grazing land turning into desert.  We know that biofuel use will actually speed up global warming, so why are we pinning so much hope on an environmental battle plan that any fool can see will blow up in our face over time?  We won't be able to produce enough biofuels to run our cars, or enough food to fill our bellies!  

     The very process of making ethanol from lignocellulose has not been proven to be economically viable (cellulosic ethanol not affordable pdf 180kb), and the Bush energy bill assumes new scientific breakthroughs that have not occurred.  Some of the plants being proposed as biofuel crops are noxious weeds which will have a destructive impact on wildlife and biodiversity around the world.  In practical terms, there is not enough usable land area to grow a sufficient quantity of biofuel plants to meet the world's energy demands.  Even if the USA dedicated 100% of our corn and soybean production to biofuels, we would only satisfy 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand.  "The biofuel potential of the entire human food supply is quite a small amount of energy compared to the global oil supply - somewhere between 15 to 20% on a volumetric basis, so 10 to 15% on an energy basis."  - Quote from Stuart Staniford in Fermenting the Food Supply.

     Using agricultural "waste" to make biofuels has its own problems.  Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all; nitrous oxide.  Much of the residual crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion will increase dramatically.  If we mine our topsoil for energy, we may end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire.  Without topsoil, the world starves!  Using wood chips to make ethanol sounds like a good idea until you remember that we currently use wood chips to make paper, particle board, and a thousand building products.  Every part of the trees we cut down for lumber are used for something, including the bark which is used for garden mulch.  The idea of sending teams of manual laborers into forests to salvage underbrush for fuel would be prohibitively expensive.  Our forests are already stressed just producing lumber without tasking them with producing biofuel for our automobiles.    

     The prospect of growing algae to make biodiesel has more positive potential than making ethanol from switchgrass, but you are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel.  To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity.  Research reports brag that algae can produces 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need approximately 30 million acres of algae ponds in the USA to meet 100% of our projected automotive fuel usage by the year 2022.  That figure does not include fuel for aircraft and ships.  Those algae schemes that use less land invariably call for feeding algae sugar.  The sugar must be made from corn or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka.  If you grow genetically engineered super-algae in open-air ponds, the genetically modified algae will immediately be carried to ponds, lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic consequences.  Using agricultural waste water is a good idea for producing algae, and algae may be of use to our society for making very small amounts of fuel, fertilizer, chicken feed, and lubricants.  The acreage required to replace all human oil consumption would obviously be impossible.  [see Shell Oil's algae research]  

8)  Political instability - Dramatic increases in food prices created by biofuel production will cause political instability around the globe, because food products are sold in a world wide marketplace just like oil.  There have already been mass public protests and food riots in Mexico, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Senegal and Indonesia over the high price of basic staple foods, and public anger over biofuel created food shortages is growing in Europe.  Imagine the political instability in Central and South America, Africa, India, and Pakistan that runaway food price inflation will cause.  Will a starving Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons, make the world a safer place?  If American politicians lead us down a path to global use of biofuels, we will be leading the world into an historic disaster that can easily kill more people due to starvation than have been killed in the Iraq War by bullets and bombs.

9)  Illegal immigration - President Bush imagines the United States growing and harvesting an incredible 60 million acres of switchgrass and corn to make ethanol, and the low paying agricultural jobs needed for this work will undoubtedly come from an expansion of illegal immigration.  Unlike the smaller number of high paying skilled jobs required for nuclear energy, coal to diesel conversion, or shale to oil conversion, switchgrass production is mainly a labor intensive, low paying endeavor which will be an unstoppable magnet for illegal immigrants.  The more we starve the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will want to come here. 

10)  It's a strategic national security disaster - In the years before biofuel production, the USA and most other nations had large food reserves kept in storage due to the excess bounty created by modern agricultural techniques.  Those days are long gone, and global food reserves are now at historic lows.  In earth's history there have always been great natural disasters that periodically cause poor crop harvests, such as impacts of asteroids and comets and volcanic eruptions that throw up so much dust and noxious gas into the atmosphere that sunlight is reduced for a year or even longer.  The eruption of the island of Krakatau in 1883 produced a 1.2 degree Celsius global temperature decline that did not return to normal until 1888, and which caused poor crop harvests around the world.

     When America's giant Yellowstone volcano inevitably erupts again, there will be disastrous effects on agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere.  By using agriculture to produce energy for both transportation and human caloric intake, we have eliminated our strategic cushion of food reserves.  When global disaster strikes again, starvation will set in quickly because of government biofuel mandates.  If we use nonagricultural energy sources for producing fuel for transportation, we will not suffer the double systemic insult of food and fuel shortages.  Large scale biofuel production, which depends on normal climactic conditions to grow crops, is a severe threat to our national security.  

                                       There is a way to survive on planet earth

     The father of the living earth Gaia theory, British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, has stated that nuclear power is the only way to have a large human population on planet earth without causing global warming and destroying the environment.  Please read James Lovelock's public statement on nuclear energy, Nuclear power is the only green solution.  "We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger."  Nuclear power is the only proven technology that can produce an extremely high volume of energy using just a tiny amount of land and at reasonable cost, all without emitting any greenhouse gases whatsoever.  

     We can halt global warming by creating an infrastructure based on nuclear energy, improved electric car battery technology, and possibly (see clarifications) the production of hydrogen fuel as an energy transfer agent.  Hydrogen fuel is a way to transfer energy from a nuclear reactor to the engine of your automobile, not an energy source in itself.  Hydrogen releases water vapor when burned, and is the cleanest burning fuel known to man.  Hydrogen can be used in both internal combustion engines and in fuel cells.  Hydrogen can be made through the electrolysis of water via electricity generated from any power source: nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, or fossil fuels.  Hydrogen costs about three to four dollars per gallon (gasoline energy equivalent) in 2008, but hydrogen fueled vehicles will get much better mileage, so hydrogen will be cheaper to use per mile.  The price of hydrogen will decline as the infrastructure grows and economies of scale lower production costs.  There is also the theoretical possibility of making gasoline and jet fuel from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using nuclear power, which is a surprising new idea that needs to be researched.  [see Honda's 2008, 68 mpg hydrogen sedan and GM's hydrogen vehicle]  

     Perhaps the best way to make the energy transfer from power plant to automobile is through a direct electrical connection via copper wires to recharge a large automotive battery.  Unfortunately, electric car battery technology is currently only good enough to drive us between 40 to 100 miles on one charge; useful for commuting to work, but not good enough for serious driving.  For the near future, automobiles and trucks will have to be hybrid vehicles containing both batteries and fuel tanks.  [see General Motor's Chevy VOLT electric hybrid and Mitsubishi's i MiEV fully electric automobile]

     Nuclear power currently produces 19.4% of our nation's electricity, and we need to build many more nuclear power plants now using mass production techniques if we want to end global warming.  One of the added benefits of nuclear power is that the United States already owns huge stockpiles of nuclear fuel in the form of nuclear weapons materials, which can be converted into fuel rods for civilian power production.  If you also consider the amount of uranium easily available in the earth's crust for mining, plus the newly proposed use of much more plentiful thorium as a fuel in breeder reactors, then the world has enough nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years; an essentially endless supply of fuel.

     Nuclear power plants efficiently output at least 93 times more energy than they consume over their lifespan, including the energy used in their construction and decommissioning.  Nuclear fuel rods can be reprocessed over and over again because only a tiny portion of the nuclear material is actually used up during each fuel cycle.  When you reprocess fuel rods there is very little high level nuclear waste that needs to be stored at the Yucca Mountain Repository.  The nuclear "waste" is simply reused as nuclear fuel, and that is part of the reason why France's nuclear power program has been so successful.  France relies heavily on nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel reprocessing, and thus France has the cleanest air and lowest electricity rates in Europe.

     The fears Americans have about civilian nuclear power plants are largely unfounded.  Our latest nuclear reactor designs are carefully engineered with many layers of redundant safety and security features built-in.  One lone disaster that occurred at an obsolete Ukrainian reactor is no reason to be eternally afraid of all nuclear power plants across the board.  The old Chernobyl reactor used a dangerous design that has never been used in the West, and which did not even have a containment vessel.  The 1986 Chernobyl accident was caused by Soviet engineers conducting wildly irresponsible experiments that were totally unrelated to normal civilian power production, and which would never be allowed in the USA.  The Chernobyl accident killed a total of 56 people, a great tragedy, but not a nation killing disaster.  

     Nuclear power plants in America have an excellent record for safety and pollution free operation.  By contrast, the over 600 coal burning power plants which produce approximately 49% of our nation's electricity emit sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen which cause acid rain, tons of toxic mercury, and an enormous skyward bound river of carbon dioxide gas which represents 10% of all CO2 emissions worldwide.  Coal power plants also spew out thorium and uranium, both radioactive metals found in coal, and release microscopic particulate matter which clogs the lungs and is attributed to causing approximately 24,000 unnatural premature deaths in the United States every year; 428 times the Chernobyl death toll.  There are unproven experimental ideas to reduce coal power plant emissions, and if proven successful even coal power may have a positive future despite all its current negatives.

     Why is there so little fear of coal burning power plants, but so much hysterical fear of much safer and healthier nuclear power?  The answer is that nuclear power has been unfairly demonized by a Hollywood entertainment industry trying to make a quick buck (The China Syndrome, The Simpsons, etc.), and by scientifically undereducated politicians and environmental activists.  There has never been a single death attributed to American nuclear power plants, which produce electricity at an average cost of about 3 cents per kilowatt-hour (2008 estimate), a rate comparable to hydroelectric power and less than natural gas or coal.  The cost of coal power is even more expensive if you figure in damage to buildings due to acid rain and increased human health costs; the monetary value of 24,000 human lives plus those who are simply made ill.  

     Building new, more efficient standardized nuclear power plant designs using mass production techniques for major structural and control components can make nuclear power a bargain.  Just like manufacturing television sets, the more you build using the same design the cheaper they become.  For the total US cost of the Iraq War, estimated to be well over 2,000 billion dollars (2 trillion), we could have built at least 670 1,500 megawatt third generation nuclear power plants outputting 1,005,000 megawatts total.  That would have given the United States virtual energy independence, more than doubling our current national electric generating capacity of 906,155 megawatts (2006 peak capacity).  The United States can build 670 new nuclear power plants in 20 years if we wish to do so.  If Europe could go from rubble in 1945 to an advanced industrial infrastructure by 1965, then America can transform itself from a polluting carbon based fuel economy in 2008 to a clean nuclear based economy by 2028.  Nuclear power has the potential to save us from desertification of our heartland, increased storm damage and coastal flooding, and world wide starvation caused by the deadly combination of global warming and government mandated biofuel production.

                                   Other positive ideas to consider                                          

     Solar and wind power are very positive developments, but even by the most optimistic estimates they can only hope to satisfy perhaps 20% of our energy needs because they tap into natural energy sources that are far too diffuse and fluctuating to power an advanced, industrialized nation.  Solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources currently produce only about 2.4% of America's electricity, so even an increase to 20% would be a major undertaking.  To help lower energy costs now, we could begin drilling in the Alaska ANWR oil reserve, which will do far less environmental damage than plunging ahead with biofuel production.  Scientific studies show that drilling at ANWR with modern, low land use techniques will have a minuscule, inconsequential impact on vegetation and wildlife.  Opposition to ANWR drilling represents emotional symbolism, not good science.  Another positive step would be to end America's counterproductive economic embargo against Cuba, which has strengthened Fidel Castro politically and has needlessly harmed both the Cuban and American people.  Cuba has newly discovered oil reserves which we could easily help develop to our mutual benefit, and American farmers could sell Cubans food instead of wasting it manufacturing expensive biofuels. 

     Are there any legitimate uses for biofuels?  Absolutely yes!  In the broad sense of the term, wood for your fireplace and the food you eat are 'biofuels.'  Ethanol is probably the best fuel for use in lawn mowers, snowblowers, and other small motorized devices, but we do not need government ethanol subsidies for such small application uses.  General Motors has made unsubstantiated claims that it has an economical way to make ethanol from garbage, including old tires.  If true, then their brilliant new process does not need government subsidies because market forces alone will make it profitable (warning - remember cold fusion?).  Building large numbers of nuclear power plants now is a good idea no matter what the future holds for transportation fuels, because we will always need more electricity for homes and industry.  Phasing out old coal burning power plants should be a top priority, as they produce the most greenhouse gas and unleash the most pollutants.

                                    The crime of the century that you can stop    

     The Bush "Energy Independence and Security Act" is a prescription for planetary suicide.  It dramatically shrinks the human food supply while rapidly accelerating global warming and aggravating water shortages.  As a politically concocted manmade disaster, it is reminiscent of Chairman Mao Tse Tung's 1958 Five Year Plan, known as "The Great Leap Forward," in which China's agriculture based economy was forcefully shifted to industrial output at the expense of food production.  Does that sound familiar?  Mao's well meaning plan ended up causing the largest famine in history in which tens of millions died from starvation.

     If you do not want food prices to continue their inflationary spiral, then write your political representatives and tell them that you do not want to waste food production resources on environmentally destructive biofuel schemes.  State the obvious fact that food prices are already way too high, and that you want all biofuel mandates and subsidies ended now.  The new Federal legislation required to accomplish this task could be called the Food Supply and Climate Preservation Act.  If this legislation is passed, food prices will start declining instead of rising, your local food banks will become full again, and the United Nations and other charitable organizations will be able to meet their moral obligations to help feed the world's starving masses.  With a worldwide human population of over 6.6 billion people and growing, we cannot afford to feed our families and at the same time use precious farm and grazing land to produce biofuels.  Those who continue to blindly support the Bush biofuel scheme are on the wrong side of both science and history.

Christopher Calder      e-mail          my home page                                                   

Notice:  Feel free to repost or publish The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!  

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