OT: <<<The problem with producing ethanol, as was pointed out by Peter Huber in "Hard Green", and by others is that the trade-off is the requirement to put vast tracts of land into industrial production.>>>
In a lot of ways, I tend to have a beef with a lot of the concepts embraced by ecologists. You'll get the folks who live in wood homes, build platforms in trees out of plywood, in order to protest logging. You'll get the folks who eat meat with every meal who oppose slaughter house practices. And, you'll get the folks who happily pile into their cars to meet at the latest air pollution rally. IMO, they're out of touch with reality in a lot of places, and seem to have a short circuit where, "The blood on the hands of the butcher is also on the hands of the person who buys the meat.", is concerned. Most of them are the sort of folks who will build a house out in the boonies to "get in touch with nature", then they're up in arms over how "someone should do something", when the family pet gets munched by a critter living in the woods.
There is always a "trade off", and always will be as long as people insist on eating on a regular basis, enjoying shelter from the weather, being warm when it's cold, and going where they want to go when they want to go there. For myself, I happen to enjoy the comforts of modern civilization.
I'm not familiar with Peter Huber, but I'd be curious why he thinks covering the land with oil wells is preferable to planting crops to produce ethanol, aside from the fact a big chunk of what goes into landfills every year could also be recycled for ethanol production.
As close as I can figure, there isn't a single practical source of energy that some ecologist, somewhere, isn't up in arms about. So, yes, as long as there are ecologists living in wood houses, with electricity and flush toilets, there are going to be trade offs, and there's going to be a certain amount of pollution.
We could probably spent a few thousand posts bashing Bush on his environmental policies alone, but increasing the use of ethanol as fuel happens to be a concept I agree with. Wind power is all well and good, but it won't push cars, and I'm not convinced a landscape dotted with windmills is more attractive than farmland.
FWIW, I'm also a big fan of increasing the use of solar power.<g> |
