Word: ethanol
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...system slowed, and more nitrogen survived untouched to the open ocean - worsening the dead zones. That's cause for concern as American farmers plant increasing amounts of corn, a crop that requires heavy fertilizer, to meet the growing global demand for grain and to supply America's corn-hungry ethanol makers. According to a separate study published by University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin researchers this week in the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences, ethanol is directly linked to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. If farmers produced enough corn to meet the congressional goal...
According to The Economist, there are two reasons for the rise: Asians and ethanol. Firstly, rising wealth levels in Asia have led to higher spending power, and Asians are increasingly choosing to supplement their traditionally cheap, rice-based diets with more expensively produced meat. But the second cause of skyrocketing demand for basic foodstuffs is America’s most recent renewable energy craze: ethanol...
...Ethanol, the love-child of Bush’s bad poll ratings, a White House PR campaign, and the worst type of leap-before-you-look environmentalism, has helped to drive what might be the biggest rise in world food prices since the nineteenth century. The shame of it all is that ethanol isn’t going to clear up our climate change woes. Scientists aren’t even agreed that ethanol is energy efficient to produce and, if it is, it makes more sense to abolish immense trade tariffs and buy cheap corn from Brazil than...
...only beneficiaries of this folly are, of course, American farmers, who win both from high market prices and from subsidies dished out by a Congress desperate to look like it has some kind of solution to rising oil prices. But ethanol represents, on a broader level, the tendency to rush into high profile, fix-all “solutions” before we have fully analyzed the interdependency of all the elements involved. Instead of pursuing those modest, non-fanciful solutions that we have reason to believe might work (like forest management to increase carbon uptake and a carbon...
...living wage,” the benefits of unlimited dining, and being, alas, attached to the global economy, greater dining variety is off the menu. And instead of trading insults over open-lists, we’d probably do better to dispatch some keen IOP-niks to lobby against ethanol subsidies in Washington...