Why certainly, the future holds great promise for both corn fuel and food production.  There is a long waiting list for new green machines from Deere.  Monsanto is raking it in with protection from "brown baggers".  Lots of coal trains rolling into ADM ethanol plants.  The future could not be brighter!  I'll call my representative today and tell him that we need to increase the mandates for corn ethanol.  

Bushland will burn up first.  And be hit by huge hurricanes and floods, alternating with drought.  How do you modify corn to grow under flood waters?  Cross it with seaweed of course, hehey.

This is all on track and probably unstoppable anyway.  Anyone who has been across this hell on earth, red state, bible belt of christian jihadists, hummer lovers, chemical ag, golf courses, malls, tree farms, and parking lots knows it is not worth trying to reclaim.

Too bad about California, they set the trend for the nation, but even they were too late.  Latest 26,000 acre fire by Yosemite started by "target practice".  No neglience involved.

So shoot 'em if you got 'em.  Yikes.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

as in their "this is just the tip of the iceberg" line, might be the wrong metaphor to use...onaccounta the entire industrial agricultural model might be about to sink.

" He served as national spokesman and chief communications strategist for the '08 Edwards presidential campaign, after serving a similar role on John Kerry's 2004 run."

If someone on the inside can sink industrial ag, Kornblau's the man who can do it.

It's always sad to see that, when economic reason is used as the guiding light, the big ugly monocropping multinationals win hands down.

There are hundreds of millions of Indian, Chinese and other people from the developing world craving for mobility and a car - the ultimate symbol of economic success and of modernity.

The Tata Nano nightmare.

We can try to convince these hundreds of millions of people not to follow our historic example and our modernity. We could do so by showing the right way forward: use electric cars and mass transit. But then you bump into the economics of these alternatives - and they look very very bad.

So there's very few things we can do:

-a priority for the EU and the US could be to develop a hyper-efficient, ultra-low cost electric car for the developing world; transfer the technology; and then invest billions in a modern electricity grid powered by renewables, in these countries, so that the car actually works. All this while we do the same in our own countries.

This option will cost the tax payer in the EU and the US a lot of money (say 10 to 15% of the average middle class citizen's income. Very few people are willing to spend that much, especially not if the money goes straight to a developing country).

-the alternative is liquid biofuels, used in flex-fuel Tata Nano cars. If we choose this option, we should be investing billions in research into cellulosic biofuels (including FT-fuels), which are at least a tad more sustainable, and share the technology with the South. We are not doing that either.

-still another option is to try to "convince" and "persuade" the hundreds of millions of the fact that our concept of "modernity" (and mobility) is dumb and not worth aiming for. But I suspect that we won't succeed here. Modernity is way too attractive. It's an unstoppable monster that drags all people on the planet towards itself (the only ones escaping are non-existing tribes in the Amazon, and post-modern bourgeois green citizens who live the least efficient lives on the planet).

-so the big ugly monocropping evil GM-pushing megamultinationals have us cornered from all sides. In theory, they are right: there is enough land available to feed either 40 billion people, or to feed and fuel all people and cars by 2050. That's not the problem. The problem is that first generation liquid biofuels are not an efficient technology route, but definitely an economically sound one.

What can we do? Convince Indians and Chinese people not to own cars? Won't work. Invest billions into their renewables that are up to 20 times more expensive than ICE-cars powered with liquid biofuels? No option either.

I'm pessimistic. Economic rationality is cruel, and good intentions are no threat to it.

the one about cheap electric cars, fund massive renewable energy projects -- a carrot for the developed countries would be if at least initially, the wind/solar farms used developed country equipment, but they'd have to set up factories so that the developing countries could manufacture their own.

There are actually lots of slow, low-range electric cars, commonly called neighborhood electric vehicles...but I know, everyone wants an American lifestyle.

Vote Green!

It won't matter, mcbush is gonna win anyway.  four more years?  Yep.  Remember 88 and Dukakis.

The swiftboat ads are working.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

But I think that this comment needs a caveat:

The problem is that first generation liquid biofuels are not an efficient technology route, but definitely an economically sound one. [My emphasis]

Economically sound only if you have the growing conditions of Brazil. Otherwise, biodiesel is not economic in any place (if you cost the feedstock vegetable oil at the opportunity cost of the oil), and most ethanol production is uneconomic without subsidies -- either to ethanol production itself, or for agricultural inputs (like irrigation in India).

These are only my personal opinions.

I don't understand why the environmental community, in fact any community, doesn't get more excited by cars like the Reva, they go fast enough for almost all traffic, and they have a decent range, and they're here now.  According to the Wikipedia article, it's about 8,000 UK pounds, which I suppose would mean $16,000 -- maybe that's too high, I don't know.

Also, I know this doesn't help, but one of the main reasons that the American suburbs grew quickly after World War II was because the cities had not been invested in since the 1920s -- between the Great Depression and World War II, nothing went in, and they had not had a great level of investment even before then.  So "everyone" wanted to get of the crowded, dingy, depressing cities.  That may be finally turning around now, particularly as gasoline goes through the roof.

One source of funds in India -- the military.  I know, I know, politically impossible.

50% PR hogwash, 40% political and economic Machiavellianism, 9% fairy dust and 1% yield improvement.

Honestly, any public sector agronomist will tell you that genetic modification has done practically nothing to improve yields compared with 100 years worth of research and conventional plant breeding in the land grant schools. But it's all shiny and new in terms of technology (or at least techno-speak) and that's why investors keep lining up. Really put them to it, and the GMO boosters will show you the graph of crop yield improvement over the last 100 years, in which the "GMO revolution" appears as a tiny blip.

The biggest problem I see with the Monsantos of the world is the one Vandana Shiva so unflaggingly points out, time and again: corporations being able to gain complete control of the world's food supply. It is the same kind of imperialist machination that got a small percentage of oiligarchs control of much of the world throughout the twentieth century. These GM folks aren't dumb. They've seen the writing on the wall and are aware that peak oil is going to give them the power vacuum they need to push terminator technology onto the world's food producers and force them to buy seed year after year. None of this is really about fuel, or the environment--it's first and foremost about money and power--using the power that comes from taking complete control of some basic human need to extort money out of the entire world.

The environmental problem of GMOs is, in my view, a smaller one compared to the geopolitical dangers. However, the environmental problem with GMOs is, in large part, the same problem with all plant breeding: namely, narrowing an entire species down to a single genotype with the most desirable traits. The less genetically diverse your crop is, the more susceptible it is to disease. Of course the chemical companies can then exploit this vulnerability by selling farmers a fleet of petrochemicals to "protect" their vulnerable crops. But Tom, I am sure, is our resident expert on all of this. ;)

"I'm pessimistic. Economic rationality is cruel, and good intentions are no threat to it."

Everyone on this list is pretty pessimistic about everything. I don't know why most of them haven't killed themselves already.

Victory in Pattani

"anyone who has been across this hell on earth, red state, bible belt of christian jihadists, hummer lovers, chemical ag, golf courses, malls, tree farms, and parking lots knows it is not worth trying to reclaim."

I noticed that throughout this thread there was not one post anyone could describe as optimistic or positive.

You are a bunch of whining, negative, motherf@#$%

Victory in Pattani

For that matter, I seldom see a whole lot of that in any thread except in cooking threads that exchange recipes.

Victory in Pattani