An honest click for charity deal: $1 to Oregon Food Bank Wednesday

A Portland blogger has got an anonymous donor to pledge $1 for each unique visitor to his blog this coming Wednesday (Dec. 16) for up to $5000. So please remember to hit that blog on Wednesday from as many different IP addresses as you can.

The challenge

Don't fret, little guy. If the biofuels boys don't starve you to death, they might make you into a slave on a biofuels plantation in Africa. Image by Zoriah via Flickr

This particular piece is from the UK but every word applies even more so to the US:

The problem is summed up by Professor Janet Allen, director of research at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). "We will have to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertiliser while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions," she said.

No one said science was easy, of course. Nevertheless, the scale of the problem is striking. It is also unprecedented, says Professor Mike Bevan, acting director of the John Innes Centre in Norfolk. "We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do."

It is a staggering goal that highlights the depth of the food security crisis that Britain and the world face. Over the next 40 years Britain's population will rise from 60 to 75 million while the world's will leap from 6.8 to 9 billion. Feeding all these people will stretch human ingenuity to its limit. Crop yields will have to jump, a goal that will have to be achieved in the middle of global climatic disruption. At the same time, farmers will find many aids – in particular, chemical fertilisers – that they have come to rely on will no longer be available .

"People do not quite realise the scale of the issue," added Bevan. "This is one of the most serious problems that science has ever faced." In Britain the lives of hundreds of thousands of people will be threatened by food shortages. Across the globe, tens of millions – if not hundreds of millions – will be affected. . . .

Meanwhile, in the US, the discussion is about increasing the mandatory cut of ethanol in gasoline from 10 to 15%. Because there's no better use of land than to apply tons of fertilizers derived from fossil fuels in order to make liquid fuels for essentially no energy gain, right?

The index that needs to supplant the Dow Jones in the media

One of the most effective tools of mass stupification is the constant reiteration of irrelevant information, which has the effect of convincing people that the diversion is not irrelevant at all but, rather, is something important (or why would they be telling us this all the time)?

Thus, we get the Dow Jones average repeated fifty times a day and, even on Nominally Public Radio, have whole shows devoted to discussing it.

Here's a picture of an index that is much more important to know. Click to learn more.

The post-carbon farm

Image by Venerable Kalense via Flickr

The really revealing comments in the story are about scaling up the model. The "conventional ag" guys are the ones still caught up in the mindset of "more efficient = less people involved," as if the country had a shortage of people who need and want useful work or could afford more of what has come to be called "conventional agriculture" (which is actually fatally unconventional in that it is little more than "the use of land to turn fossil fuels into food" and is already drawing to a rapid close).

There is really very little in life that is more expensive than cheap food.

Interesting -- Roger Ebert learns of peak oil

Image via Wikipedia

Ebert reviews the movie "Collapse"

How to decide on a mayoral candidate, Part I

Which one will promises that they will not rest until Salem stops wasting money on paper, printing, and postage sending out sewer bills to people who have set up automatic payments via credit card? For a city with severe money problems, they sure like to waste it.

Cherriots slammed for not sharing system data

Working better with people trying to promote transit might be just the "cherry on top" that we need. Image via Wikipedia

Interesting post here on a new app being developed by the same people who do the great "walkscore" neighborhood walkability index.

Apparently Cherriots isn't sharing the data needed to provide such open-source utilities to make transit easier to access. Bad agency.

As you ponder Measures 66 & 67

Consider: Effective tax rates for millionaires continue decades-long slide. Hippie pro-tax group? Nope: IRS data.

Presented for your consideration

Image via Wikipedia

How does this affect this?










Or will the Salem/ODOT Road Gang continue to pretend that you can do an environmental assessment of a proposed project (one that will greatly increase greenhouse gas emissions) without looking at greenhouse gas emissions, even though the Environmental Protection Agency has finally acknowledged that they are a hazard to public health?

End of Year Tax Planning: Make a free contribution to Defend Oregon

Image via Wikipedia

If you haven't already made a $50 political contribution this year ($100 for joint filers), here's an opportunity that merits your support -- and costs you nothing, thanks to the Oregon tax credit.

If you live in or near Salem, you will pay far more than this in lost jobs and services in our community if the measures fail. This election shouldn't even be close, but the "No" campaign -- "Oregonians Willing to Tell Any Kind of Lie About Jobs to Defeat Taxes" -- will be very well-funded by precisely those few Oregonians who will see any kind of tax increase and who are happy to see services for the poor and middle class slashed rather than pay a small tax increase because it just means more power for them.