Nonrenewable Renewables?
What does renewable energy mean? This question isn’t as simple as it sounds.
Biofuels
Corn, Cars and Cows
Putting gasoline blended with corn in your gas tank can increase the cost of food on your kitchen table. That’s the claim of farmers and ranchers who say federal policies mandating corn ethanol production raise the price of feed for American cattle, pork and poultry.
The great biofuel greenwash
The petroleum giants have been pushing a wave of biofuel advertising. But the nature of such fuel is complex, and under Big Oil, all too easily descends into greenwashing.
Climate Question: Do We Get to Keep Flying?
An analysis of jet fuel alternatives that could be viable in the next decade.
Food & agriculture – May 14
•Science as Dialogue: What My Garden and I Are Discussing in 2013
•Biofuels a big cause of famine
•Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System
•Over half the world’s population could rely on food imports by 2050 – study
•Agriculture and Livestock Remain Major Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Food & agriculture – April 30
• The Trouble with Biofuels: Costs and Consequences of Expanding Biofuel Use in the United Kingdom
•Dance of the Honey Bee
•The benefits of alternative farming methods
•A Brief History of Our Deadly Addiction to Nitrogen Fertilizer
•Connecting the Dots: the Big Permaculture Picture
•YFF: Using the Sun to Empower Women and Help Family Farmers
•International Day of Peasant struggles
•Why Saving Seed and Growing Organic Food is a Powerful Weapon Against Corporate Tyranny
•Why farmers still struggle when food prices rise
Global Food Prices Continue to Rise
Continuing a decade-long increase, global food prices rose 2.7 percent in 2012, reaching levels not seen since the 1960s and 1970s but still well below the price spike of 1974. Between 2000 and 2012, the World Bank global food price index increased 104.5 percent, at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent.
Perils and Promise of Turning Plants into Gasoline
In 1917 Alexander Graham Bell, Canada’s premier inventor, had a bold ethanol vision. He predicted, in the pages of the National Geographic no less, that alcohol-based fuels would power the future when petroleum ran out. Corn alcohol "makes a beautiful, clean and efficient fuel," declared Bell. "We need never fear the exhaustion of our present fuel supplies so long as we can produce a crop." Well, Mr. Bell wasn’t alone in thinking that corn stalks and other biomass might dominate future energy supplies. Rudolf Diesel ran his engine on peanut oil and Henry Ford once championed gasoline made from sumac fruit and weeds as a way to reanimate rural economies.
Tracking the Causes of Sharp Decline of the Monarch Butterfly
A new census found this winter’s population of North American monarch butterflies in Mexico was at the lowest level ever measured. Insect ecologist Orley Taylor talks to Yale Environment 360 about how the planting of genetically modified crops and the resulting use of herbicides has contributed to the monarchs’ decline.
Twenty-First Century Snake Oil: Why the United States Should Reject Biofuels as Part of a Rational National Energy Security Program (review)
However, the sobering conclusion for the rest us is this: Biofuels were one of our great hopes in resolving/mitigating the impending crisis in liquid fuel supply. If biofuels are indeed a dead end as Capt. Kiefer has demonstrated, then one of our most promising ‘solutions’ is gone.
The Achilles’ Heel of Algal Biofuels – Peak Phosphate. – An Update.
The following is an update to a previous posting. If anything, the situation might be worse that I had concluded then, but the issue of phosphate rock reserves is more complex than I had deduced.
Food & agriculture – Nov 30
•Fracking Our Food Supply
•Biofuels and the right to food: Time for the US to get its head out of the sand
•Farming the city
•The Non-Controversy Surrounding Local Food
•Restrict developing quality farmland: Farmers Union