While I am in the camp that thinks the man-made global warming scare is unfounded, I totally buy the idea that the ruling elite would try to push the planet toward catastrophe in order to give validity to their scare tactics, and do it in the name of saving the planet... (The whole war on terror is built on the same model!)

Study: Bio-fuels may actually be accelerating global warming
Agence France-Presse @ RAWSTORY
Published: Saturday February 14, 2009

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Study_Biofue...ating_0214.html

it's late. we could dispute the effects of humankind's deleterious effects on this planet for some length of time, i think.

but, suffice it to say, biofuels are a very complex issue.

in fact, the entire issue of "fueling the planet" is an extraordinarily complex issue.

i don't pretend to have any comprehensive set of solutions. but i do know this, the conversion of corn, sugar cane to ethanol, to be used as a fuel, may not be as benign a process as the "greens" promote it to be.

corn-derived ethanol is an economic catastrophe. that the process exists at all is the result of the usg financing the farm belt for votes.

and though the brazilian utilization of sugar cane is heralded as more cost-effective than corn, i think that the real costs of bagasse-derived ethanol go undissected.

ethanol is really not a good everyday fuel. good for racing vehicles, perhaps. good for beverages. but not a fuel that any industrial society should adopt.

in a very real sense, when one considers energy, i think that the only conclusion is that we need to find the ways to reduce our consumption of it, not exploit other resources.

but,i could be wrong.

No, IMHO you are spot on Albert.

I also deplore the escalating use of biofuels for a number reasons amongst them the ecological cost to the area used for growing which should be used for food crops first.

And I agree with Sanders that this is another perversion of the climate change debate by the elites along with carbon trading.

You all know my views about science and climate change in general but I see the devil in this one and I have stated this postion frequently in this forum.

I read an article once about the advantages of making fuel from algae. You can grow it vertically and don't need much land, the yield is much better than corn or sugar, and you can go from seed to product in only a couple of days ... apparently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9_-ZguuhBw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miNn8DyKSC0...feature=related

At the end of the second link there, he says that if 1/10th of New Mexico was devoted to Algae-biofuel production that could supply all of the energy needs for the US.

What about industrial hemp?

Just legalize it for crying out loud. That's the only way we can find out how much of a difference it will make. And if it doesn't, we certainly won't be any worse off.

While hemp is far better for fuel production than corn, I don't think it can compare to what you get out of algae. Hemp IS a great crop though, with many uses. The seeds are very nutritional too.

I recently learned that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.

Industrial hemp should be legal to grow in the US, it certainly wouldn't hurt the economy. Ironically, the federal government has no constitutional authority to tell the states what they can or cannot grow.

Source

---

James Lovelock thinks humanity has only one remaining option to halt climate change and save ourselves

With his 90th birthday in July, a trip into space scheduled for later in the year and a new book out next month, 2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity. He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves - and it has nothing to do with nuclear power

Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?

Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?

It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO₂ down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO₂ is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.

Do you think we will survive?

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

It's a depressing outlook.

Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.

How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?

We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO₂ was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction. It's already moving: if you live in the countryside as I do you can see the changes, even in the UK.

If you were younger, would you be fearful?

No, I have been through this kind of emotional thing before. It reminds me of when I was 19 and the second world war broke out. We were very frightened but almost everyone was so much happier. We're much better equipped to deal with that kind of thing than long periods of peace. It's not all bad when things get rough. I'll be 90 in July, I'm a lot closer to death than you, but I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to being 100.

Are you looking forward to your trip into space this year?

Very much. I've got my camera ready!

Do you have to do any special training?

I have to go in the centrifuge to see if I can stand the g-forces. I don't anticipate a problem because I spent a lot of my scientific life on ships out on rough oceans and I have never been even slightly seasick so I don't think I'm likely to be space sick. They gave me an expensive thorium-201 heart test and then put me on a bicycle. My heart was performing like an average 20 year old, they said.

I bet your wife is nervous.

No, she's cheering me on. And it's not because I'm heavily insured, because I'm not.

I'd like to add something ... the reason I posted the article in the first place is because it brings into relief the notion (unprovable but easy to see) that we are under assault from all sides. It is a many pronged attack on liberty, sovereignty, prosperity and everything we all hold dear, clearly with the intention to destroy society as we know it and institute a form of governance more to the liking of the global elite. It is clearly a concerted (i.e. "in concert") campaign that began even before 9/11 with the loosening of lending practices, pursuant to inflating a housing bubble. The derivatives market was created over this same time period. 911 gave us war, heightened surveillance and jack-boots with tasers, and a lot of dead or pissed off Muslims. Sometimes I wonder how nice the world might still be to live in if a handful of people weren't trying to muck it up it all the time?

The corruption is maddening, the sacrifices I make so I can pay my taxes are maddening, the lies I have to listen to day in and day out from the media are maddening.

I'm hopeful about these algae farms - they seem to be a no brainer. Production is cheap and fast, and the best part is, the algae traps CO2. Even the global-warming advocates can't in good conscience not embrace it. The only down-side, from the standpoint of the global elite, is that making fuel from algae is viable and truly "green", and doesn't help hurtle the world toward h@ll in a handbasket (like the idiotic idea of making ethanol from corn).

2 cents !!!!

..........
EDIT: I didn't see painter's post, we cross-posted. I was always fond of Lovelock's Gaia theory. Tying that to what I just posted, I'm not sure humanity wouldn't regulate itself better without a few self-proclaimed rulers trying to manage everything (at great benefit to themselves). An organism of any kind is a collection of its parts, right down to lowly atoms and how they interact with the atoms adjacent to them. It is how these parts self-organize that gives us things like people, plants, planets. Always bottom-up. A cell has no central government telling amino acids what they can or cannot do, subsidizing one reaction and slapping taxes and regulations on another ... and the cell organizes itself naturally and robustly.

Unless it is infected with a cancer.

Well, but I could argue, Sanders, that "liberty, sovereignty, prosperity and everything we all hold dear," was never much more than an illusion to begin with. What has happened, what is happening, for those of us who have fallen down the rabbit hole, gone through the looking glass or taken the red pill (choose your metaphor) is we have become increasingly disillusioned. We may not yet see the world as it is but we've come a long way toward no longer seeing it the way it isn't and never was.

We are not free. We never were. We never had our independence, only the possibility of it. There is no such thing absent a thorough understanding and integration of one's place in the larger cosmic order. Any "prosperity" based on creating a "deficit" within a closed system is a self-serving self-deception that will ultimately come back to bite one on the ass big-time (depending upon how much disparity the closed system can allow before its natural tendency toward balance reasserts itself).

This is why I keep saying the future isn't going to look like the past -- no matter what we do. We need to find what we value within ourselves -- experience for ourselves what our core principals are (if we, in fact, have any). Manifesting that from the inside out needs to become our "new normal." This requires an enormous shift in terms of our understanding of everything in and around us. This is why Richard Dolan, in his discussion of UFOs and the National Security State [MP3] begins to talk about "the realm of personal freedom." We can not loose anything that is truly our own; nothing that is truly our own can be taken from us. If we can loose our freedom (etc.), then we never really had it to begin with. This is the quality of lesson that is now before us.

I know, I know, it looks like I'm talking about metaphysics -- and I am -- and that this kind of thing is off-topic with the more immediate concerns regarding the increasing assault upon society from top-down sources within it. The question is, what is society's response? Does it continue to passively allow itself to be husbanded and culled by a small minority of psychopaths whose only vision is that of control? Or do we, as a whole, indeed as a so called "sentient" species rise to the occasion and begin to put forward a new, counter vision of a world based on principals that we ourselves are capable of manifesting?

I think there is a whole other level (perhaps more than one) operating here, too, but I'm not going to say anything about that just yet.

Another reason why ethenol production from growing corn is bad is the return on all the energy required to manufacture fertilizers, consider the source of some fertilizer ingrediants, and distribute it to the rich subsidised farmer who then employs environmentally costly machinery to apply the fertilizer and the accompanying doses of environmentally disastrous pesticides.

We really need to get back to crop rotation and mixed crop farming as demonstrated in the Chapter 'My Food' of 'Confessions of an Eco Sinner' by Fred Pearce. But of course the economic meltdown will be used as an excuse to throw out all environmental safeguards, not to mention any rights that workers may still have. A climate of fear for jobs does not nurture a favourable deal for workers. This was one intention of course. The ultimate goal being to make the people revolt so that they can be rounded up into detention camps - that for the lucky ones, or maybe given the past record of such camps the unlucky.

Fred has relevent things to add WRT minerals and wars in central Africa which are underpinned by the consumer boon in mobile 'phones, LCD TV's and digital cameras - think Indium. Then there is the rush to corner the world's stocks of ruthenium and bismuth - all command high prices on the markets and a high human price for those that find themselves living on top of the stuff. Rather than gain from the underground riches they loose - big time.

It was these types of issues behind the Rawanda genicide if you really look close and probably a good reason for suspecting foul play in the recent crash of Dash 8 flight 3407.

Wasn't icing pointed at in the Senator Wellstone crash and a probable ILS fault on the ground? WRT 3407, I noted the ILS malfunction concerns of the voice from Buffalo ATC who I thought could do with speech training to improve the chances of his being understood.

Then there are the other metals suddenly in great demand for catalytic converters on vehicles - platinum and palladium. I recall the metals used in the afterburner catalytic igniter - platinum and rhodium - of an F4K Phantom. All found in Africa.

Not to get me started on aluminium smelting operations by Alcoa, Iceland, and Rio Tinto in Queensland, Tasmania.

Global warming, eh?

It's cold here, and beginning to snow.
Seems to me that we only have two seasons,
and the summers are getting shorter.

There is an abundance of energy from numerous sources,
even the earth itself. Yet, we are kept in the dark,
for if we had use of them,
there would be no reason to even have an "elite".
...and they darnd well know this.

As for CO2 being a problem,
yes, it is for plants,
they are living on a starvation diet of it,
if plants had more CO2 available,
they will grow faster, bigger and healthier
and use up even more CO2!
I guess that is sort of self regulating.

This is the world of abundance,
which has been artificially mutated into a
world of scarcity and demand, in order
to keep a "class system" perpetuated,
where human worth is based on family lineage,
instead of the individuals' proven abilities.

Does the Earth have an intelligence?
We only know that we do.

imo, lunk

"We are not free. We never were."

Understanding this, at least is a step in the right direction in this never ending journey.

Painter, we think more alike than you think - I use those words (sovereignty, prosperity, etc.) in a measured way, but to explain and modicate at every turn how black or white or grey my intended meaning is is an indulgence and a distraction - and so I leave it at that (in my mind as I type). All we have are words (here on the internet).

In the 50's my dad bought a 3 bedroom house next to a park in a nice neighborhood while he loaded crates at the airport and my mom split her time between school and looking after (four of) us little banchees. The world was not as we thought nor as the media told us it was then, nor is it now. But it's gotten progressively worse, arguably for over a century. No, America wasn't the picket-fence utopia we imagined, particularly if we were paying attention to what was going on in the South, or in Latin America, or in Iran .... but for the average American it was still a world where a dollar bought (almost) a dollar's worth of goods, and the government hadn't figured out yet how to royally screw the public. To the extent that the American experiment succeeded, we had prosperity and the occasional nice evening on the porch, dividing our time between turning the ice-cream crank and trying to catch fire-flies in a jar, and laughing. To the extent that the American experiment has been usurped, we have us typing about how crappy everything has become on the internet - the house, the porch, the ice-cream maker, even the fireflies are gone. Maybe kids catching fireflies in a jar is cruel, but families spending their evenings on the porch is not.

I can see it here in Japan - when I travel outside of Tokyo I wind up on someone's porch, drinking with the neighbors. No one cranks out ice-cream, but they pound the "mochi" (sweet rice gelatin cakes?). I see culture slipping away, due to fear and a simple lack of optimism. Soon everyone will be at each other's throats.

If you leave people alone, they will miraculously squeeze the goodness out of life - and eventually work out their problems, IMO.

I certainly don't expect government to work out our problems ... they are the source of our problems. In the 50's America had already long been infected, but the symptoms of the disease weren't readily visible yet. Of course, now they are - in spades.

"I certainly don't expect government to work out our problems ... they are the source of our problems. In the 50's America had already long been infected, but the symptoms of the disease weren't readily visible yet. Of course, now they are - in spades."

I remember reading that inequality's in the US was diminishing until 1976 after that the reverse trend started and accelerated ever since, it coincides with a period of increased deregulation and privatization of the economy. Government is not the solution and it is not the problem, it is a tool, the interest's it serves depends on who has control over it.

Yes, government has simply become a tool. How do we fix that?

I'm of the opinion that the system isn't totally broken, but only half broken. If we could educate everyone to what's really going on and throw out the corrupt bastards, we'd be in decent shape. The tide definitely has to shift 180 degrees.

How do we get control of Government ?

First there has to be agreement that there is a WE, we have to create that, to understand that we have common interests, even rich people have common interests with the poor, but it would be a waste of time to try convince them of that. We need some revolution of some sort, eventually popular control of government or creation of a parallel form of government is required, but first there has to be unity, a common purpose.

as bill hicks once said, "we are just a virus with shoes."

This is too weird, I just built a front porch, on my house.
(edit) added (even weirder)
And I just got a new fireplace that burns wood and coal,
it has a crank for removing the ashes.

Totally agree.

The more I think about it, the more I come to feel that without it, no matter how well-intentioned the 'groups' that attempt to find solutions are, we will simply end up with yet more factions fighting for control.

IMHO, the concept of control and power over others is part of the problem, and therefore cannot be part of the solution... or at least any lasting solution.

The current difficulty seems to be, how to develop this without falling into the same trap of trying to control others into this way of thinking (being?)?

In the words of Gandalf and Elrond, in Tokien's 'Lord of the Rings', on being offered the ring of power:
"No! With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly. Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength."

"If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it."

At this point, we need to do all of it and algae is certainly a much better idea, then using corn which we need for food. I'd much rather eat a nice corn of the cob, then a bowl of algae. But of course, who pushed the whole corn thing anyway? BushCo of course. Anytime they had to make a choice between a good idea and a bad one, they always picked the worst one.

However, legalizing hemp will change the entire economy of the planet, and IMHO we can't save ourselves until we do.

Willow, I'm going to "presume/channel" OF/grizz here and recommend LIVING LOCALLY and hugging people. When in doubt, hug again. [And I'm not exactly the most "huggable" creature on this planet, but you WILL KNOW that you've been hugged afterward...]


Are you familiar with the writings of Anthony Sutton?

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum//index....showtopic=14289

Peace,
d

Familiar with many of the concepts he discusses, but wasn't with the man himself, or his work. Thanks for the link!