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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (103414)	3/29/2007 10:58:55 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361421

In corn belt, ethanol boom a bust for ranchers The alternative energy source has turned around dying towns, but the high price of corn makes it hard to raise livestock. By Amanda Paulson \| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Page 1 of 2 IOWA FALLS, IOWA - In ethanol-happy Iowa, where presidential candidates are falling all over themselves to support the corn-based fuel additive and farmers are reveling in corn prices double those of a year ago, Joe Kerns sometimes hands out bumper stickers that read: "Ethanol: A complete waste of otherwise perfectly good corn." It is not a popular opinion. "It's tough to be the lonely voice out in the desert when there's a party going on," acknowledges Mr. Kerns, director of purchasing for Iowa Select Farms, the state's largest pork producer. "But I've had enough of [ethanol]." In the past six months, agriculture in America's heartland has been turned on its head. Corn is selling at $4 a bushel, ethanol plants have turned around dying towns, and land values and rents are soaring. It's a boom time for farmers who haven't had a really good year in several decades, but not everyone is benefiting. Livestock producers like Kerns, for instance – who depend on cheap corn for their feed – are feeling the pinch. Agricultural economists and forecasters, meanwhile, are struggling to sort out the new dynamics. They debate whether the new fuel demands on corn are sustainable and what impact they might have on food supply. "The whole world for agriculture here in Iowa and in the Midwest has changed," says Mike Duffy, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. The effects vary widely for farmers, he says. "Depending on the point of view, I've heard ethanol described as the good, the bad, and the ugly." Bill Couser is one who sees it as an unequivocal good. A corn producer who farms about 10,000 acres in Nevada, Iowa, he's thrilled about the price of corn. As the owner of one of Iowa's few cattle feedlots, he can take advantage of the cheap ethanol byproducts that cattle can eat instead of corn better than can beef producers located far from ethanol production. And as an investor in a local ethanol plant, he's looking ahead to healthy returns. "It seems like a farmer gets one or two home runs in his career," says Mr. Couser, sitting in his office surrounded by John Deere paraphernalia and hats from cattle shows. "Is this our home run? I think so." Moreover, when he looks around his town – at the new elementary school, swimming pool, police station, and the thriving main street – he sees a local economy that's benefiting. Sixty percent of the financing for the ethanol plant he helped start came from small investors, and they've given almost all the jobs to locals. Page 1 \| 2 \| Next Page csmonitor.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (103414)	3/29/2007 1:41:37 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361421

NEWS: Texas-size piece of Antarctica melting 'Rapid changes' seen in Antarctic basin Amundsen Sea ice shelves thinning, raising fears of sea level rise MSNBC staff and news service reports Updated: 7:47 a.m. MT March 29, 2007 URL: msnbc.msn.com HOUSTON - A Texas-sized area of Antarctica is thinning and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly in the long-term, polar ice experts said in wrapping up a three-day conference. "Surprisingly rapid changes" are occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, an ice drainage system that faces the southern Pacific Ocean, the experts said in a statement, adding that more study was needed to determine how fast it was melting and how much it could cause sea levels to rise. The warning came Wednesday at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin. The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that are causing warmer waters to flow beneath the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea. The shelves hold back ice that is grounded on the continent and known as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Should the shelves collapse, grounded ice would start flowing into the sea much more rapidly, raising sea levels. The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability. The thinning in the two-mile-thick West Antarctic Ice Sheet is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain in the remote region, they said. "The place where the biggest change is occurring is the Amundsen Sea Embayment," said Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. "One, it's changing, and two, it can have a big impact," he said in a Webcast with a number of conference participants. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough grounded ice to raise world sea levels close to 20 feet, the scientists said. Other parts of the continent also were losing ice, Blankenship said, but generally not as quickly. The much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet is considered much more stable. The statement listed a number of consensus points reached at the workshop, among them: "Satellite observations show that both the grounded ice sheet and the floating ice shelves of the Amundsen Sea Embayment have thinned over the last decades. "Ongoing thinning in the grounded ice sheet is already contributing to sea-level rise. "The thinning of the ice has occurred because melting beneath the ice shelves has increased, reducing the friction holding back the grounded ice sheet and causing faster flow." "All of the ice on Earth contains enough water to raise sea level over 200 feet, with about 20 feet from Greenland and almost all of the rest from Antarctica," the scientists said in their statement. "Although complete loss of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is not expected, even a small change would matter to coastal populations." The experts stressed that further research should be made a priority, noting that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its landmark report last February, "could not provide a best estimate or an upper limit on the rate of sea-level rise in coming centuries because of a lack of understanding of the flow of the large ice sheets." Background on the conference is online at: www.jsg.utexas.edu/walse/ URL: msnbc.msn.com