http://home.att.net/~meditation/bio-fuel-hoax.html

The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!

As our politicians drill the human food supply for energy


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 the United
States 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, soybeans,
rapeseed (canola oil), sugarcane, palm trees (palm oil), cassava,
jatropha, as well as experimental "second generation" crops such as
switchgrass, 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 along with the escalating cost of corn.

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. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization, global food prices rose an incredible 40% in the year
2007, 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." 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 by May 31, 2008, US wheat supplies will
be lower than at any time since 1948, in part because 16% of US
farmland formerly planted in wheat and soybeans is now being planted
in corn.

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 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 that 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
liquid biofuels production for transportation.

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 and in the Bakken Oil Formation, 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, which effectively makes biofuel
production a massive new tax on food.

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 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
$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. [This paragraph is
already out of date, as ever rising grain prices have increased the
costs of all biofuels beyond the stated figures. In March, 2008, one
gallon of biodiesel made from US soybeans costs $5.58 without the
$1.00 per gallon Federal tax credit.]

[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 are too
expensive to help us. 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.

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 each year than all land,
sea, and air transportation combined, so growing vast amounts of crops
for biofuels will heat up the earth's atmosphere faster than if we
only used imported oil.

[SHOCK NEWS! US corn biofuels will expand Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone':
scientists - A new study says corn ethanol biofuel production will
cause a 10 to 34 percent increase in nitrogen pollution in the
Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers due to fertilizer run-off, thus
increasing the size of the "DEAD ZONE" in the Gulf of Mexico. STUDY
ABSTRACT]

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 in order 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. 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. 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.

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.

[SHOCK NEWS! California farmers want to sell water instead of growing
food!]

5) It's a lie - President Bush'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 as 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 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 production will 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 new biofuel
crops are toxic 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. To quote
Stuart Staniford, "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." Every year the human race burns up the
equivalent of 400 years worth of planetary vegetation in the condensed
form of fossil fuels. How are we going to replace all that
concentrated energy by growing biofuel crops on our desperately
overpopulated, pure water starved little planet?

Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for
all our biofuel problems, but we 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 produce
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
concrete or plastic lined algae ponds to meet 100% of projected US
automotive fuel usage by the year 2022. Those algae schemes that use
less land invariably call for feeding algae sugar. Sugar must be made
from corn, beets, 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 be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all
over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and
possibly catastrophic consequences. Using agricultural waste water
for algae production is a good idea, but algae may be more logically
used for making modest amounts of animal feed, as algae is very costly
to turn into fuel. [see Shell Oil's algae research]

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 will 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 to make
pellet fuel for stoves, paper, particle board, and a thousand and one
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 liquid biofuels for automobiles, a scheme which
will inevitably drive up the price of everything made from wood,
creating yet another resource crisis.

8) Political instability - Dramatic food price inflation created by
biofuel production is causing political instability around the globe,
because food products are sold in a worldwide marketplace just like
oil. There have already been mass protests and/or food riots in 20
countries: Mexico, Haiti, Bolivia, Morocco, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen,
Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the
Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines,
and Italy. In the UK, anger over biofuels has led to numerous street
demonstrations by environmental groups. The great call of ordinary
people around the world is for food supply security, not for
biofuels. Unfortunately, our governments are "sleepwalking into
crisis" as the American television media ignores the destructive role
of biofuels in favor of reporting stories about Hollywood starlets and
cute zoo animals.

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 droughts, floods, 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 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 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

British scientist James Lovelock, the father of the living earth
Gaia theory, 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 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 significant amount of greenhouse gases.

We can halt global warming by creating an infrastructure based on
nuclear energy, 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. [see "Green Freedom" 1.8mb
pdf] This new energy scheme may be cheaper and more practical than
using hydrogen as fuel, because it would require fewer changes to our
existing energy distribution infrastructure. To make this energy
system truly economical, intense heat from lower cost, high
temperature, gas cooled pebble bed nuclear reactors is used to break
down carbon dioxide into its component parts, carbon monoxide and
oxygen. The carbon monoxide can then be combined with water in a
catalytic process to make either pure hydrogen gas or more easily
transportable liquid synthetic fuels that can be used in ordinary
automobiles. Initially, the viability of this scheme could be
demonstrated by using conventional, but higher cost electrolysis of
water to produce the needed hydrogen gas, using electricity generated
from currently available lower temperature water cooled nuclear
reactors.

Nuclear power currently produces only 19.4% of our nation's
electricity, so we need to build many more nuclear power plants now
using mass production techniques if we want to end global warming.
One of the 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 use of much more
plentiful thorium as fuel in breeder reactors, then the world has
enough nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years; an essentially
endless supply.

Current 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 power
plant design has the potential to improve by leaps and bounds like
computer technology, becoming ever more efficient, cheaper, and
safer. There is even the future possibility of direct conversion of
nuclear energy to electricity without the use of turbines, making
nuclear power plants stable, essentially solid state devices with far
fewer moving parts. 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 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 France has the
cleanest air and lowest electricity rates in Europe.

The fears Americans have about civilian nuclear power plants are
largely unfounded. One lone disaster that occurred at an obsolete
Ukrainian reactor is insufficient 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 irresponsible experiments that
were unrelated to normal civilian power production, and which would
not 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 49% of our nation's electricity
unleash tremendous pollution. They 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 which naturally accumulate in coal.
Incredibly, the potential nuclear energy value of these trace metals
actually far exceeds the energy value of the combustible carbon
content of the coal itself. Coal power plants also release
microscopic particulate matter, which clogs the lungs and is
attributed to causing approximately 24,000 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, and by
scientifically undereducated politicians and environmental activists.
There has never been a human death attributed to American civilian
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 calculate the damage done to
buildings due to acid rain, the value of the 24,000 human lives lost
every year, and the physical harm done to 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 long term cost of the
Iraq War, estimated to be about 2 trillion dollars, we could build 670
1,500 megawatt nuclear power plants outputting a total of 1,005,000
megawatts. Gas cooled pebble bed reactors with containment structures
can be used in areas without sufficient water for conventional water
cooled designs. Pebble bed reactors are inherently meltdown proof due
to the basic laws of physics. If the reactor's cooling system should
fail, the core temperature automatically lowers itself to safe levels
without mechanical intervention. This plan would give the United
States virtual energy independence, more than doubling our current
national electric generating capacity of 906,155 megawatts (2006 peak
capacity). Nuclear power has the potential to save us from
desertification of our heartland, increased storm damage, coastal
flooding, and worldwide starvation caused by the deadly combination of
global warming and government mandated biofuel production.

Other positive ideas to
consider

Solar and wind power are positive developments, but 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. Alternative energy sources
currently produce 2.4% of America's electricity, so even an increase
to 20% would be a major undertaking. To help lower energy costs now,
we should begin drilling in the Alaska ANWR oil reserve, which will do
far less environmental damage than plunging ahead with biofuel
production. Drilling on the proposed 2,000 acres of ANWR's 19.6
million acres will have inconsequential impact on vegetation and
wildlife. [see The costly symbolism of ANWR] The Bakken Oil
Formation in North Dakota holds hundreds of billions of barrels of oil
which we can extract without driving up the price of food. Another
positive step would be to end America's counterproductive economic
embargo of Cuba, which has strengthened the Cuban People's Socialist
Party, and has needlessly harmed both our countries. Cuba has newly
discovered oil reserves which we could 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? Yes! In the broad
sense of the term, wood for your fireplace and the food you eat are
'biofuels.' General Motors has made unsubstantiated claims that it
has an economical way to make ethanol from garbage, including old
tires. If true, then their 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 greater industrial output at the expense of
food production. Mao's well meaning plan ended up killing tens of
millions of people through 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 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
http://home.att.net/~meditation/bio-fuel-hoax.html