Re: OT: Rant over "I now bliefe in Gobal Worming"

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:39:11 -0800 (PST), Rune Allnor
<allnor@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 23 Jan, 13:19, jim <"sjedgingN0sp"@m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Eric Jacobsen wrote:
Global warming was used as an excuse to pour funding into replacing
fossil fuels with ethanol, which requires large amounts of water to
produce.

That is completely false. Burning ethanol produces CO2. And as far as I
know, nobody considers  using ethanol instead of petroleum to result in a
reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

For some reason my news reader is missing Jim's post to which Rune is
responding. Regardless, if Jim's responding to the paragraph that I
wrote that he's quoted above he missed my point. Even if ethanol has
a net benefit in C02 reduction (which we don't know it does or whether
that's even really a good thing or not) it exacerbates a water supply
problem in a big way. Trading a decrease in consumption of fossil
fuel for a water crisis seems to me to be a bad trade.

Ah, you are missing a key argument: There is "beningn" CO2 and
there is "malicious" CO2. (I said "an" argument, not that it makes
sense!)

There is this belief that CO2 originating from fossile fuels is
"malicious" while CO2 originating from plants is "beningn".
I have no idea what the difference is, but based on this
some people have proposed the idea of "biofuel", that is,
petrol or diesel produced from plants. Since this "biofuel"
is "benign" incenties have been put in place to have farmers
grow corn or whatever is used for basis for this "bening"
fuel.

So farmers started growing fuel instead of food, with the
result that food prices rocketed, driving some 100 million
people world wide, into 'official' poverty over the past
couple of years. That is, that peopl no longer are able
to pay for a minimum amount of food. This was all over the
news last year. It got so far that the EU even considered
postponing or even cancelling future requirements of
biofuel being mixed into fuel supplies.

Now, when did you last see a poliitcal body consider
changing a previous legislation?

The unintended consequences of the political actions are the real
issue, IMHO. My worry is that they're foreseeable by many, but
likely not by the political decision makers.

Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms
Abineau Communications
http://www.ericjacobsen.org

Blog: http://www.dsprelated.com/blogs-1/hf/Eric_Jacobsen.php
.

Relevant Pages

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