Corn, Cars and Cows

By Greg Dalton, originally published by Climate One

September 11, 2013

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Image RemovedPutting 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. Furthermore, transportation fuel including corn doesn’t reduce carbon pollution much when its entire lifecycle is considered. Does corn have a place in powering America’s future? How does it impact California’s clean energy goals?

 
Speakers:
Colin Carter, Professor, Agricultural Economics, University of California, Davis
Neil Koehler, CEO, Pacific Ethanol
Michael Marsh, CEO, Western United Dairymen

Greg Dalton

Tags: agriculture, Biofuels, food prices, Transport

Robert Jensen argues that ‘fewer and less’ is unavoidable. But the future is not fixed

By Matthew R. Sanderson, Resilience.org

It is true that no high-energy society has ever halved its material throughput and existed at that level across generations. But an absent precedent for an unprecedented situation merely tells us the situation is new, not what people will do.

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A future of ‘fewer and less’ may be unavoidable. But how do we get there humanely?

By Robert Jensen, Savage Minds

With age, I’ve become more aware of the world’s complexity but also better equipped to come to simple, albeit painful, conclusions: We need to replace fantasies of endless growth with ideas about managing the contraction.

September 16, 2026

Affordability, not scarcity, is the real energy crisis

By Gail Tverberg, Our Finite World

In this post, I examine differences in economic behaviour by comparing two types of periods: those with low energy affordability and those with high energy affordability.

August 26, 2026

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