Sunday, February 22, 2015

Biofuels: the anti-Vaxxerism and faith healing of the climate crisis

Let's be clear, the folks who refuse vaccinations for their children are not intentionally or willfully exposing their own children and communities to the return of dread, often lethal or crippling diseases. 

Same with the poor benighted souls who are so brainwashed by their particular brand of faith that they refuse modern medicine to their children, leading to horrendous and agonizing outcomes as child sized corpses pile up, mute testimony to the efficacy of faith healing.

In the climate realm, these people have their match in the biofuels adherents, the folks who blend huge dollops of wishful thinking with the paranoid view of Big Oil -- blissfully unaware that there is nothing Big Oil welcomes more than a debate about how much money to throw at locking in the liquid fuels/internal combustion paradigm even further. 

Big Oil plays Bre'r Rabbit -- oh please, don't throw me in that briar patch -- but they are only too happy to see states lining up to shovel money into heaping subsidies atop subsidies, all in the name of supposedly hitting at Big Oil.

"Low carbon" standards might have been a meaningful step in 1988, when Hansen first testified to Congress; right now, they're worse than trying to shut the barn door after the horses escape -- a low carbon fuel standard gives preference to the immoral biofuels scam and delays action on the real issues, which come down to taking emergency action against coal, fracked fossil fuels, and all the horrors of the alt fuels -- tar sands, shale oil -- that will rapidly drive CO2 through the planetary redline and beyond.

The low-carbon fuels scam is wishful thinking turned into policy at its most destructive. Biofuels are nothing more than a Rube Goldberg system for using vast areas of land to convert fossil fuels into disguised fossil fuels, while extracting a fortune in money, at the cost of mass mining of irreplaceable topsoil and creation of biological dead zones precisely where life was once most abundant. In a world where hunger and collapse of biological diversity already loom, organizing things so as to further expand biofuel-driven mono cropping will only accelerate mass species extinctions.

The more we pretend that we can supplement fossil fuels with these disguised fossil fuels (petroleum and nat gas energy converted to corn to be converted back to hydrocarbons, with subsidies and toxic pollution galore), the more we are preventing the transition away from fossil fuels.

An important graphic about biodiesel that everyone concerned about a livable planet needs to see.
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/bob.html

So the advocates of the low carbon fuels standard are, like their cousins in the anti-vax movement and the faith healing cults, not intending to do harm. But they do great harm anyway.

If you want to strike back at Big Oil, don't buy into the fantasy that we can keep living in Big Oil's kind of world -- a world where even the poorest among us have cars and must drive them everywhere -- without paying for our fantasy.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Oregon Public Empowerment News (Oregon PEN) - New Newspaper Launched!

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Just in time for the announcement to be obliterated by the ex-Gov's stepping down, Oregon PEN launched on Oregon's 156th Birthday!

The publisher is Oregon Public Empowerment Network LLC, one of those new-fangled "B" Companies -- private companies, but formed specially to be able to take account of the public interest rather than acting solely for profit. 

The OPEN LLC mission is to publish Oregon PEN, a weekly all-digital online newspaper to empower and engage Oregonians in making Oregon better. 

Oregon PEN will be an "all signal, no noise" newspaper, sifting through the flood of information competing for your attention and helping you spot the most significant issues and meaningful trends, and giving you the information you need to make your voice heard on those issues.

All proceeds above expenses will be go to support organizations and entities that provide for critical needs, such as Legal Aid Services of Oregon, or that make Oregon better for everyone.
 

OregonPEN.org. Weekly email Oregon issues/legal newspaper.
All signal, no noise, fluff or filler. Seriousness without solemnity.