On my webpage I have links to news stories showing rainforest devastation in Brail, Indonesia, and other tropical countries, all because of expanding production of sugarcane, palm trees for palm oil, and soybeans and other crops for biodiesel. Brazil still grows sugarcane for sugar to eat. Where do you think the new, vast amounts of sugarcane for ethanol production are coming from? They are coming from new sugarcane plantations all over Brazil. Tropical forests, both rainforests and dryer tropical forests, are being burned down to grow more biofuels and more food to make up for the loss of US grains to biofuel production. When you destroy any forest you unleash vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere that will take decades or centuries to make up for through carbon recapture. Sugarcane ethanol production speeds global warming and causes mass starvation. So why do so many people still mindlessly support it?
Below is a letter I just sent the Obama transition team. Obama is now surrounded by vegitarian food fanatics who will only increase food price hyperinflation and thus starve millions more. -----see below--- Biofuel production, promoted enthusiastically by President-Elect Barack Obama, has already killed many times more people globally through malnutrition and related illness than al-Qaida has killed with bullets and bombs. Most Americans do not realize that according to the United Nations, somewhere between 12 and 16 million people died worldwide in 2007 alone due to a lack of food, and the number of starvation related deaths in 2008 may double those figures thanks to ever increasing global biofuel production. The problem is not just limited to ethanol from corn driving up grain and fertilizer prices. Biodiesel production from soybeans and rapeseed has driven up the price of cooking oil all over the world, starving Third World families while self-deluded "green" Americans burn edible cooking oil in their trucks and automobiles. It takes 9,000 gallons of water to produce just 1 gallon of biodiesel made from soybeans, so we obviously need to save our very limited supplies of ground water to grow food, not fuel. In California water is now so precious that some farmers want to sell water instead of food. 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. Biofuels are the most destructive hoax of the 21st century. Biofuel zealots now claim they want to produce ethanol from cellulose instead of food, but a study from three agricultural economists at Iowa State University with insider information on the latest biofuel technology states that ethanol made from cellulose will likely never be affordable. Switchgrass, crop waste, and wood chip biofuel schemes are too expensive to ever work. Coming after the Princeton study published in SCIENCE showing that all biofuels are far worse for the environment and global warming than using ordinary gasoline leaves biofuel advocates little cover to hide behind. Switchgrass and other biofuel weeds will be grown by ordinary, profit motive driven farmers, not by environmentally trained scientists. Farmers will grow switchgrass on land that could be used to grow corn, wheat, or soybeans, and farmers will want to maximize yield, so they will use lots of fertilizer to increase output. The plans biofuel idealists are now trying to sell the American public will never produce the kind of "green," food friendly energy source they promise. Biofuels displace food production, as our tiny overpopulated planet does not have enough usable land, water, or fertilizer to grow both food and fuel. Few science fiction movie fans can forget the 1963 movie, "The Day of the Triffids," which told a grim tale of carnivorous weeds taking over the earth. Barack Obama wants to plant millions of acres of invasive biofuel weeds on U.S. farmland, thus taking that land out of food production and shrinking the human food supply. Recent studies suggest Obama's plan will lead to 9% a year or greater food cost inflation through the year 2012, and Obama seems committed to his biofuel scheme despite food riots and pleas from hungry people around the world to stop the madness. A key element in the global biofuel disaster is the difficulty we will face when we inevitably realize that weed based biofuels are also a tragic mistake. We will then try to rid our farmlands of the invasive biofuel plants, but this will be no easy task. Switchgrass, Barack Obama's Triffid of choice, has very deep roots and is difficult to get rid of once it has been planted. Future newspaper headlines will tell of the great cost of trying to eradicate the biofuel weeds, which include water hungry giant reed and toxic jatrophra. Jatropha is being planted in poor tropical countries to turn its poisonous seeds into biodiesel, and it is even more difficult to eradicate than switchgrass. The planting of millions of acres of jatrophra in Burma, India, Indonesia, and the desperately poor nations of Africa could destroy the value of the tropical lands for food production and wildlife habitat for centuries to come. Biofuels have been condemned by United Nations food officials, Oxfam, and poverty fighting groups around the world. Planting biofuel weeds is just another way to destroy the food production capacity of our overpopulated, fresh water and food starved little planet. The fact that biofuel production speeds global warming, causes water shortages and water pollution, drives up the price of fertilizer, and erodes vital topsoil is ignored by biofuel propagandists. Their attempts to replace the massive stored energy of fossil fuels with the tiny energy of biofuels shows a lack of understanding of basic mathematics and science. Even if the United States used its entire 300 million acres of cropland for ethanol biofuel production, it would only satisfy 15% of our national highway energy demand. Every year the human race burns up the equivalent of 400 years' worth of total planetary vegetation in the condensed form of fossil fuels. The one and only energy source that is large enough to replace all of that massive stored energy is nuclear power, because the nucleus of the atom is where the major energy lies. The mass of an atom is in its nucleus, not in its electrons, and as E=MC2 the nucleus is where the really BIG energy is stored. The tiny energy created by bonding and unbonding electrons through chemical reactions in the growth of vegetation must be amplified over centuries by the slow process of fossilization in order to make that inherently small energy strong enough to run an industrialized, heavily populated planet. Solar and wind power can help us a little, but those diffuse (spread out) energy sources are far too weak and fluctuating to satisfy the bulk of our energy needs unless we want to revert to a horse and buggy economy and intentionally kill off the majority of the earth's human population. Human beings can eventually replace fossil fuel energy by creating an infrastructure based on nuclear power, improved electric car battery technology, and the use of new technology to make superior quality, sulfur free gasoline and jet fuel from atmospheric carbon dioxide in a new process called Green Freedom. This new energy scheme is cheaper and more practical than using hydrogen as fuel because it is completely compatible with current vehicles and our existing energy distribution infrastructure. Using nuclear fuel reprocessing and adding abundant thorium as fuel, we have enough nuclear materials available to last for over 10,000 years. An essentially endless supply of carbon neutral gasoline is possible if we start facing reality and stop trying to sell the public phony biofuel schemes that are mathematically impossible. Barack Obama is now surrounded by many delusional pseudo- environmentalists who want to force all Americans to become vegetarians who only eat organic food that is grown in their own neighborhood. These childish fanatics will drive up the price of food so high through new taxes on food production and through impossible regulations that the current global famine caused by biofuel production will get even worse. They even want to tax farm animal flatulence as part of a carbon tax scheme that will put American beef and chicken farmers out of business. Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot killed the most people through well meaning and idealistic agricultural policies, not through executions. If you get both food and fuel policies dead wrong you will destroy the nation, and that is what Barack Obama is going to do unless he stops thinking politically and fanatically and starts thinking scientifically and realistically. It is everyone's moral obligation to explain to Barack Obama all the terrible harm he has done already by supporting biofuel production, and urge him to reverse course immediately. For more information and better energy alternatives, see http://home.att.net/~meditation/bio-fuel-hoax.html Christopher Calder --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. 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