Word: ethanol
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...number of calories in meat-form than it would by consuming the plants themselves. This puts a strain on the global demand for plant matter. But far and away, the culprit for these soaring prices is corn. Last year, 20 percent of the crop was siphoned off to make ethanol, the forerunner of the bio-fuel movement, putting a pinch on the rest of the supply. This sparked a huge chain of events: as the supply of corn for food decreased, prices increased, affecting almost every item in a grocery store since corn derivatives are (alarmingly) ubiquitous. As the corn...
...couple of years. As food prices soar worldwide, people are growing ever more worried that biofuel production can drive up the prices of staple foods. Tens of thousands of Mexicans marched in January 2006, for example, to protest the rising price of corn, used in the U.S. to make ethanol. Virgin and partners claim that their airplane fuel is, as Branson says, "completely environmentally and socially sustainable." It's not made from staple-food crops or from crops that required deforestation. But even coconuts and babassu have their problems: the oil yield is just not that high...
...price of staple crops like corn. But the Science papers make a more sweeping argument. In their paper, Fargione's team calculated the "carbon debt" created by raising biofuel crops - the amount of carbon released in the process of converting natural landscapes into cropland. They found that corn ethanol produced in the U.S. had a carbon debt of 93 years, meaning it would take nearly a century for ethanol, which does produce fewer greenhouse gases when burned than fossil fuels, to make up for the carbon released in that initial landscape conversion. Palm tree biodiesel in Indonesia and Malaysia...
...simplistic, and failing to put biofuels in context. And it's true that the switch to biofuels can have benefits that go beyond climate change. Biofuels tend to produce less local pollution than fossil fuels, one reason why Brazil - which gets 30% of its automobile fuel from sugar-cane ethanol - has managed to reduce once stifling air pollution. In the U.S., switching to domestically produced biofuels helps cut dependence on foreign oil, and boosts income for farmers. But in all of these cases, the benefits now seem to pale next to the climate change deficits. Fargione points out that...
...Missouri's demographics and its election rules make it particularly tough to handicap a close race here. Because the state mirrors America, every conceivable issue might gain traction - Missouri has nervous factory workers and ethanol-happy farmers; it has failing school districts and wealthy boomers irritated by the estate tax; it has huge corporations alongside angry populists. No one agenda has captured the race...