Biofuel scam
By promoting large-scale mechanized monocultures which require agrochemical inputs and machinery, and as carbon-capturing forests are felled to make way for biofuel crops, CO2 emissions will increase not decrease. The only way to stop global warming is to promote small-scale organic agriculture and decrease the use of all fuels, which requires major reductions in consumption patterns and development of massive public transportation systems, areas that the University of California should be actively researching and that BP and the other biofuel partners will never invest one penny towards.
Progressive Traditionalist:
Hello, Stan.
Something of which I have been in doubt myself for some time.
But still, this isn’t the full picture.
First, let’s say that the emissions related to production of a crop are incidental. That is, those emissions would be there regardless of whether the crop was to be used for a food source or a fuel.
Secondly, I can tell you that the current emissions systems can and will trap CO2. Not that it’s designed to do that, but it does.
Looking at this, and I want to be clear without telling too much of my personal history.
So let’s say that the phrase “current emissions systems” refers to the next generation of supercritical steam generators, slowly going up in the US.
We had tremendous success stopping acid rain, and we learned a lot from it.
Still unsure of whether there is a net gain.
26 January 2008, 5:44 amskol:
It’s still a stop-gap measure working for a paradigm necessitating progressively greater stop-gap measures, all of which are inversely proportional to the harm the industry does and the need for it go away.
26 January 2008, 12:38 pmBy the by, eating corn and farting isn’t nearly as polluting as filling your car with it (the corn; they haven’t looked into farts yet).
Michael:
Biofuels are one of my favorite examples of what I’ve come to think of as ‘the faith of reason’ or ‘the religion of science’ My model, which is still evolving, goes like this; Science (the father) through the agency of Technology (the son) will save us (our materialy priveleged lifestyles) from evil(reality). Illuminating the process is the holy spirit of rationalism.
It seems to me that when one encounters a belief system two of the things that might happen are we might change our behaviors to conform to the belief system or we might interpret the belief system to justify our behaviors and in fact we probably do a bit of both. Rationalism is, to my mind, a belief system that is as susceptible to being used in a manner contrary to its essence as Christianity, Islam, Taoism or any other.
Anyway, one middle aged middle class white mans opinon in a world that’s full of it, I mean them.
2 February 2008, 3:17 pmDeAnander:
Rationalism is, to my mind, a belief system that is as susceptible to being used in a manner contrary to its essence as Christianity, Islam, Taoism or any other.
utterly agree that any “form of words” can be quoted to justify practically anything, humans being what we are.
but this gets us into the very interesting question of what the “essence” is, and whether the implementation of e.g. xtianity or rationalism is really a corruption of some more pure and benevolent original intent, or a logical consequences of first principles (i.e. Cartesion reductionism, sky-god-father suppositions).
this question of “a fall from grace” haunts many political narratives, such as those which suppose a good and true set of founding values for e.g. the US, its Constitution, etc., and see subsequent imperial disasters and crimes as deviations from an original, sound set of principles; the obverse is an analysis which rests on the original intents and practices of the colonisers of N America (i.e. profit-seeking, dishonest, violent and cruel) and suggests that subsequent imperial adventurism and crime are a direct and predictable consequence entirely in keeping with founding values.
“rationalism” as a belief system was imho by no means apolitical, and rested on some dubious pillars such as demonisation and discrediting of folk-practitioners (particularly women) in food and medical realms, contempt for peasant and indigenous knowledge, etc. — it’s not clear to me whether the “religion of science” aspects we see today are really a deviation from some originally cleaner or more hopeful train of thought, or just the same old control-freak impulse manifesting in a long tradition. Descarte’s absurd insistence that animals are merely machines, for example, seems so wilfully and stubbornly ignorant that it’s hard to perceive much “reason” in what is so fundamental a pillar of reductionist rationalism.
I think Pollan goes into this territory to some extent in his latest book about food — haven’t read it yet but am told it includes some good material on the “scientific” approach to food and how this played out in reductionist agricultural and nutritional praxis, with the (by now rather obviously disastrous) results we see around us.
if a core founding tenet of rationalism (not rationality) is reductionism, then the “religion of science” based on a Taylorist and reductionist worldview seems like a consistent development rather than a fall from grace. the fundamental problem is that reductionism itself is not rational, in the sense of not being reality-based; it is a convenient fantasy for lazy or frightened minds (and not coincidentally for lazy or evasive consciences). a living, interconnected world is more complicated than an isolationist, dead, dissected one; impossible to comprehend in its entirety, and full of moral obligations and consequences.
anyone have an opinion, btw, on John Ralston Saul? someone offered to lend me a couple of his books and on a quick skim they look intriguing, but given that he gets rave reviews from Hitchens (uh oh) and Paglia (oh nooooo) I am wondering whether he is worth spending limited reading time on.
2 February 2008, 7:08 pm