Do you want to drive or eat?

Rush hour is not happy hour  8-08-08 5:15pm

I was going to post a recipe for corn chowder, but then I read this. Sorry about the political break. I’ll post the corn chowder in a couple of days.

Speaking of corn: Is it fuel or food? Well, increasingly it’s fuel, along with a lot of other agricultural crops. Politicians and pundits have been behaving as if biofuels are the answer to our fuel crisis and some of them have been throwing the blame for high food prices on newly prosperous Indians and Chinese who want to eat meat (the same crops that are used in biofuels are used to feed livestock). This always sounded to me like demonization, and now this newly released report says it’s biofuels causing the crisis.

Now I know the question above is a false choice, due to the way our cities and towns have been planned. I also know that we are privileged enough here in the US to not really have to make that choice…yet. And I’m not trying to preach because I realize I’m lucky to live somewhere that makes it easy for me to choose to bike instead of driving. I just want to make the point that we as a society need to seriously think about this question. We cannot continue to live and get around the way we have been indefinitely.

Photo Credit: Susan Fleming

Comments

[Mikeachim]

I think it's all really messed up.

The people who are set to make lots of money from making biofuels are being very clever, and the media is being very stupid. Biofuels are only eco-friendly at a certain scale. Make bio-ethanol in a field, it's eco-friendly because it's sustainable. Sell it to fuel an unsustainable automobile industry, and you still get to call it "eco-friendly fuel".
However, stop producing food in favour of bio-fuel, or chop down forests / drain wetlands to make it, and it's definitely not eco-friendly.....but that's on the large scale. On the small scale, *it can still be called eco-friendly*.

So it all gets called eco-friendly, and the media goes ahead and puts two and two together and makes five, and calls it "the solution to the energy crisis".

It's messed up.

My gut feeling: we need to re-think everything about fuels, and more importantly, about the things that *need* fuels. And quick.