Randomly, last night I caught the debut episode of the new CBS series Cane. It's about the Duque family, a Cuban-American clan in both the sugar and rum businesses in South Florida.
At the outset of the show, the Duque's long-time rivals, the Samuels -- a drawling family of white Southerners -- offer to buy up their sugar fields, claiming that the sugar business is slow and the real action is on the rum side. "We'll do sugar; you do rum."
Family patriarch Pancho (Hector Elizondo) turns them down. Why? Because his adopted son and heir to the business Alex (Jimmy Smits) lets him in on a secret: the government is ready to switch its investments from corn ethanol to ethanol made from sugar! That's going to make sugar, in Alex's words, "the new oil."
Yes, it's a sprawling, high-budget night-time network drama based on ... cellulosic ethanol.
Hilarious!
(For what it's worth, the show itself is ... eh. It aims to be a Dallas-meets-Sopranos, but it's not quite soapy enough to be a guilty pleasure and not quite hefty enough to be engaging as a drama. The cast is top-notch, but nothing I saw in the debut made me feel compelled to return for the rest. Your mileage may vary. Trailer below the fold.)
Climate Citizen: Michael Pollan on agriculture and health care
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Soda lobby gets its game on
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 6:24 am
13 Aug 2007
Sometime get your hands on the video "Alcohol...it's a gas".
It's the most information dense video I've seen for biofuels and agriculture for energy.
It clearly shows that corn is the worst crop for the land, the environment and the people. He advocates alcohol as a fuel (Flex-Fuel) but shows why sugar beets and other crops are far more efficient for making the fuel, are easier on the land, and require less pesticides.
John Bailo
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