Earth Day ruminations, part 2

Filed under: Collapsables, Rants, Typecast — Oliver April 24, 2008 @ 2:09 pm

Typecast 04/22/2008

2 Comments »

  1. Oh, it burns me up (no pun intended) that they go ahead with this corn ethanol insanity. I hadnt heard of switchgrass – I had wondered if sugar beets could do well. But to hear that there is something – anything – that would work better than corn and to see them go on blithely using inefficient corn – grrrr!

    Germany is using solar power rather effectively – Germany! And we have the entire Southwest – I ask you!

    (For some reason, the apostrophe on my keyboard has decided to go funny.)

    Comment by CStanford — April 24, 2008 @ 2:36 pm

  2. I grew up on the prairie, and my adolescent view of the world was sharply impacted by the farming crisis of the ’80s. All around, people I knew were spiraling into poverty as agricultural prices plummeted, thanks in great part to the emergence of corporate farms. Corn ethanol helped put an end to the corn surplus that had farmers receiving literally pennies per bushel and reluctantly signing on to the government subsidy program that paid them to not plant sections of their field. (A farmer lives to work the land, and believe me, none were eager to let their land sit empty, even if they were being paid for doing nothing.) That’s why I supported corn ethanol for so long. But now it has become unjustifiable.

    The sad thing is that heliostats were pioneered in the Arizona desert. Europe embraced the technology while we just shrugged and dropped it. Can you imagine the output if we were to put up one or two in Death Valley? I’d be much more willing to sacrifice a portion of national parkland for clean, natural energy production than for oil drilling.

    Comment by Oliver — April 24, 2008 @ 2:50 pm

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