These books are of interest...
Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Excellent primer on the tribulations of being an omnivore in this day and age. Beginner foodies should definitely start with this book! So should beginner "slow foodies".Carlo Petrini: Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair
Carlo masterfully connects the foods we taste to our surroundings and lifestyle, and has clued into the fact that our recent neoliberal approach to food trade is destroying our communities, our health, and our Earth. (*****)Sachs Jeffrey D.: The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
With typical IMF and World Bank hubris, Mr. Sachs believes he has all the answers to saving the world from the scourge of poverty. Two stars for coherent English. (**)Raj Patel: Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Find out about the struggle for the world food system in this ingenious book. (*****)Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
While Naomi does get a little shrill at times, this book is an excellent example of how "free market" ideology steps in opportunistically at the onset of natural and manmade disasters to start unbridled business exploitation while the poorest victims are still reeling and unconscious. It makes me think about all the schemes that are going on in Myanmar and China after their recent natural disasters. Excellent book. I could not put it down. It also ties in the McCarthy era secret programs to "deprogram" people by first shocking them and then indoctrinating them, to the higher goal of doing that to entire societies. (****)
Publications about biofuels
- FAO: The Right to Food and Impact on Liquid Biofuels
Though a little TOO generous on the second generation (cellulosic) biofuels, this publication tells about the disastrous damage of ALL biofuels to date upon world hunger. - Environmental Working Group: America needs a truly renewable energy policy
"...New scientific evidence indicates that biofuel production and use results in a net increase of greenhouse gas emissions when compared to petroleum-based fuels..." - February 2009 - What's wrong with biodiesel?
Find out from the Center for Science in the Public Interest how palm oil, the primary grain in biodiesel, and the primary substitute for trans fats, razes rainforests and kills endangered species. - Science Magazine February 2008: Actually saving energy from biofuels production is complicated!
Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt Joseph Fargione, Jason Hill, David Tilman, Stephen Polasky, and Peter Hawthorne Science 29 February 2008 319: 1235-1238; published online 5 February 2008 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1152747] (in Reports) - Science Magazine: You save more emissions by reforestation than by creating and using biofuels!
SCIENCE MAGAZINE: "The carbon sequestered by restoring forests is greater than the emissions avoided by the use of the liquid biofuels..." Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests? Renton Righelato1* and Dominick V. Spracklen2 1R. Righelato, World Land Trust, Halesworth, Suffolk, IP19 8AB 2D. V. Spracklen, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. *Author for correspondence. E-mail: renton@worldlandtrust.org
Search this Blog
- Links to Publications
- Search this Blog!
Links and Blogroll
- Beyond Pesticides
- Biofuel Watch UK
- Bioneers
- Center for Food Safety
- Center for Rural Affairs
- Center for Science in the Public Interest
- Dogwood Alliance
- Environmental Nutrition newsletter (subscription required)
- Environmental Working Group
- Family Farm Defenders
- Food and Water Watch
- Food First
- Food Works at Two Rivers Center
- Friends of the Earth web page on Biofuels
- Global Justice Ecology Project
- Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First)
- International Forum on Globalization
- International Union of Food Workers
- La Via Campesina - International Peasant Movement
- National Farmers Union
- Rainforest Action Network
- Slow Food International | good, clean and fair food
- the ETC Group
- Urban Farming
- USDA Community Supported Agriculture program
- Wayne Pacelle's Blog, Exec. Dir. of the Humane Society of the United States
Contact
- Email Address:
- Website: http://www.saynotobiofuels.org
One-Line Bio
I'm a graduate Teaching Assistant of Sociology at the Catholic University of America.
Biography
June 2007
So what's wrong with biofuels?
Did you know the price of corn has risen 66% in the last year? And food prices overall have gone up 4%, twice that of the year before? I set out to discover the reason for this huge jump, and found out it was because of biofuels, or the industrial-scale us of corn converted to fuel for transportation.
On June 27, 2007, the senate passed an Energy bill (see also http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR00006:). The legislation requires that "ethanol production for motor fuels to grow to at least 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase over the amount of ethanol processed last year." This amount represents a little less than a third of what the U.S. currently uses for gasoline, or according to Greenpeace, about 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. With this mandate, much more than 100% of the United States' current corn supply would have to go towards biofuels, currently an impossibility if we want to feed our cows and eat food ourselves. (I therefore assume that the U.S. will turn to South American countries such as Brazil that already have deforestation problems.)
It struck me then - and still does - as perverse to put an agricultural resource into a car's tank simply to "get around". I had hoped that we could travel using nonfood, zero-emitting fuels such as electricity, hydrogen, or solar power to provide for our transportation needs.
I set out to find out more, and what I have found is shocking. The cost is enormous in terms of our:
1. our pocketbooks. The price of corn has risen 66% last year alone. The price of foods has risen 4% last year, double of the previous year
2. our environmental resources: Biofuels encourages the razing of tropical rainforests and virgin land for agricultural use. Its monoculture characteristic will leach the soils of essential nutrients, encouraging erosion. Enormous amounts of pesticides will be necessary to produce the amount of corn mandated by the government. In addition, water resources will be used to grow the corn, and it would be too expensive to treate the wastewater produced. It will end up as toxic runoff. Also, biofuels are corrosive and cannot be piped. They must be shipped, trucked, or transported by rail, another energy-intensive factor that should be considered.
3. Because of the net loss of plants required to produce farmland, biofuels will not contribute significantly any curbs in global warming. For all of our talk about energy independence, we will remain dependent on the centralized multinational agriculture, petroleum, and auto industries if we succumb to the biofuel craze.
I want to inform every citizen who reads this blog, and to encourage them to stand in opposition to biofuels, and I hope you join me in this endeavor.
