"You likely drive around looking for fallen limbs, especially on natl forest land. "
If i was of a mind to do that, I'd just call Obama and tell him to have one of his rangers bring me a load.
I smoke my pot. When I get a craving for burritos, I'll go to the Mexican restaurant and order... taco salad, cuz I like that better.
"maybe you and your kids have aluminum siding (mined and smelted using massive amounts of fossil fuels) or vinyl siding (made directly from a actual fossil fuel). "
Maybe not, too. Knowing your penchant for being wrong, I'd bet against it.
"rain forests are being cut mostly today to grow biofuels you greens mandate"
Or not... they're being cut mostly for wood, minerals, Big Mac ranches, feed for Big Mac ranches and Chinese pig farms, and fuel.
The Communist Party prizes self-sufficiency in food. Most of the pigs China eats are indeed home-grown. But each kilogram of pork requires 6kg of feed, usually processed soy or corn. Given the scarcity of water and land in China, it cannot feed its pigs as well as its people. The upshot is that Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.
Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. Already in 2010 China’s soy imports accounted for more than 50% of the total global soy market. From a low base, grain imports are rising fast as well: the US Grains Council, a trade body, predicts that by 2022 China will need to import 19m-32m tonnes of corn. That equates to between a fifth and a third of the world’s entire trade in corn today.
As demand for pork rises, China’s porcine empire is sure to expand
As a result, land use is changing drastically on the other side of the world. In Brazil, more than 25m hectares of land—parts of which were once Amazon rainforest—are being used to cultivate soy (Chinese companies have not signed up to the “soy roundtable”, a voluntary association, the members of which agree not to buy soyabeans from newly deforested land). Entire species of plants and trees are being sacrificed to fatten China’s pigs. Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans—around 8m tonnes—to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates.
economist.com |
