Corn Ethanol Propaganda Blitz Backfires

For the full effect, turn your speakers on and click on the box with four arrows in the lower right-hand corner of the video before playing it.

I see it has already drawn a video response from a company that retrofits cars to run on E-85. I cringe at the thought of the hateful comments this video will elicit. Human nature can be an ugly thing to behold.

I put the above video together as an example of anti-propaganda propaganda. The truth is complex; propaganda is simple. The $13.7 billion number in the concluding Google search applies to all lobbying in the united states, not just corn ethanol or biofuels.*

About $8 million was spent on lobbying by various biofuel groups in 2009.

Also note that my title is, ah, presumptive and with a little time may grow into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Propaganda hit its zenith during the World Wars. All sides used it to garner support from the public by fanning the flames of xenophobia. Germany's propaganda in particular was appallingly effective at this.

The concept of evil is all in our minds. In reality, everyone thinks they are the good guys. Here's a recent article on that subject.

Growth Energy has launched this $2.5 million dollar campaign to secure an additional $30 billion in subsidies in the next five years and to get the amount of ethanol blended into our gas increased by 50%, oh, and they are also planning to get our government to fund a dedicated ethanol pipeline to the coasts (so they can export it) making corn ethanol too big to fail.

General Wesley Clark is one of the main players behind this blitz. He has a typical militarist's "us against them" worldview, which I'm guessing overrides the rational, scientific, environmental, and economic arguments against government support of corn ethanol.

IMHO, he's being used by the corn ethanol industry, which would happily export every drop of corn ethanol if they could get a higher price for it overseas as the biodiesel producers were doing (before being slapped with countervailing import duties). And if he protests when they start doing that he will more than likely have to find a new job because this is not really about national security; it's about profit. He just doesn't know that yet.

The following is a screen shot of a Google search I did yesterday on "food vs fuel:"



Note at the top the three sponsored links meant to deflect what you will find with this search term. Is Google being used as a propaganda mill by the highest bidders?

Go here to their $2.5 million dollar propaganda blitz er, ad campaign you have probably already seen on television (note that the word "corn" never precedes the word "ethanol" even though 99.8 percent of all ethanol produced in the United States comes from corn and that the word "food" is also conspicuously absent):

ETHANOL has not shipped a single job overseas--AMERICA'S "ECONOMIC" FUEL--Growth Energy

Well, that's not entirely true. The fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel fuel used on farms and the trucks that transport ethanol, and many of the components in farm equipment as well as the ethanol refineries came from overseas.

I'm not a big fan of fossil fuels but let's be honest here. Which fuel is worse? Imported oil is refined in America, creating many jobs. Saudi Arabia imports its refined gas and diesel. Oil does not send jobs overseas, although buying a Prius or any computer certainly does.

We don't have to wait millions of years to replenish our ETHANOL reserves--AMERICA'S "RENEWABLE" FUEL--Growth Energy

Roughly 75% of the energy contained in a gallon of corn ethanol came from non-renewable fossil fuels. Not to mention, the corn is wholly dependent on fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels. You can't call a fuel that is utterly dependent on fossil fuels renewable. Well, I guess they just did, but not with a straight face.

ETHANOL has contributed $0 to the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela--AMERICA'S "SENSIBLE" FUEL--Growth Energy

Here they are fanning the flames of xenophobia to hawk their product. Last time I checked, Saudi Arabia was our ally in the Gulf war and even paid for half of it. We still have five air bases located there.

We have not imported oil from Iran for decades. Note, however, that they still manage to sell every last drop to someone. That's because the world is now flat and oil is highly fungible (look it up). We can't crush our "evil" enemies by not buying oil from them.

No wars have ever been fought over ETHANOL--AMERICA'S "PEACE" FUEL--Growth Energy

...yet. Corn ethanol only represents about 2% of our supply. Using all of our cropland for corn ethanol would replace maybe 12%. To replace all of our imported oil with ethanol will require a lot of imports from places like South America where sugarcane ethanol is about ten times more energy efficient to produce.

The "NO WAR FOR OIL" bumper sticker was invented by big biofuel. If you have one on your car you are a dupe. Corn ethanol is not a ticket to world peace and note that our military budget has not been impacted by increased ethanol production.

Our efforts to maintain peace in the Middle East has to continue, oil or no oil, because the world is now flat. Mutually interdependent trading partners are the best chance for maintaining world peace. An energy shortage that brings our trading partners down would bring us down with them, as our banking and housing debacle just did to them.

No U.S. soldiers have been deployed to defend our ETHANOL reserves--AMERICA'S "INDEPENDENT" FUEL--Growth Energy

...yet. According to George W. Bush, our soldiers were deployed to root out weapons of mass destruction and to punish the guy responsible for bringing the Twin Towers down (who actually had nothing to do with it). Is Growth Energy saying our president lied to us? Are they saying he really went to war to protect our oil "reserves?" I'm stunned.

No beaches have been closed due to ETHANOL spills--AMERICA'S "CLEAN" FUEL--Growth Energy

...yet. Remember, corn ethanol only represents about 2% of our supply. Ethanol tanker spills have been causing their share of damage already. The largest fish kill in Illinois history occurred last year when a train pulling corn ethanol tankers derailed. The year before that 25,000 fish were killed and an entire population of an endangered mussel species was wiped out when another biofuel refiner dumped waste into a river in Missouri.







*I tried to replace the words "total spent on lobbying 2009 ...$13.7 billion" with something less potentially misleading like "$30 billion in subsidies, a 50% blend increase ..." in an updated video but was abruptly censored by somebody at Google (who I suspect is a big corn ethanol proponent) with the message, "We're trying to keep these appropriate for everyone ..."

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Finally, a Handy-dandy Species Extinction Calculator

Pile of bison skulls collected from prairies to be used for dye and fertilizer

...to go with your Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter.

An article over on Mongabay titled, Turning to the matrix: a more accurate way to predict extinction, discusses a new computer model to help biologists predict extinction rates based on how badly a bipedal carnivorous predatory ape species has devastated a given area of the planet.

You can use your mouse to twiddle the various dials to predict how many species your children and grandchildren will never hope to see alive thanks to us.

Click here for single landscape.

Click here for multiple landscapes.



I'm sure you've seen Avatar, but did you catch the film Call of Life (not to be confused with Call for Life) by The Species Alliance?

Follow the YouTube link to the film's trailer and you will find a single comment:

"What a bunch of delusional crap!"

How poignant. It comes with a link (not provided by me) to an anti-wolf film by a stereotypical Homo sapiens male. His preferred form of recreation is hunting and he hates wolves (because they compete with him for for his status symbols--trophy kills). He also loves to hunt them, which is icing on his cake.

Click here to see the most popular feature films released so far this year. They are almost exclusively focused on two things: sex and violence.

This is what we are. We won't find solutions pretending the world is populated by women. The only thing that keeps you and your family safe at night is the threat of violent force by our sanctioned and regulated police force.

You could safely bet your first born that the person in your backyard wearing that ski mask is not a female. Without a police force to protect the planet's biosphere, it will continue to be destroyed, eventually taking billions of people with it.

The world needs the equivalent of a UN peace keeping force--heavily armed Ranger Ricks--to protect designated nature preserves. Let's call it Ecosystem Protection International (EPI).

See Depopulation may be harming the Amazon rainforest for evidnece that the only thing standing in the way of other groups who want to profit from resources are other groups.

I have a hypothesis. Most people are not particularly concerned when told that billions are going to perish because the thought brings them a measure of anxiety relief (subconscious pleasure). If so it would be a relic from our pliesticine evolution when elimination of another group would free up resources for your own group's use.

Of course, everyone assumes that they won't be among those who will perish. The fact that we are also driving much of the rest of the life that we share this planet with to extinction does not even register with most people. In the past we were only capable of driving isolated ecosystems to extinction (with the attendant human population crashes). What we are witnessing is just the same old, same old on a planetary scale.

Update [5/6/2010] Check out this TED talk found on Treehugger.

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Climate Debate Apogee

Foil hat image from Wikipedia Commons.

Climate Gate was inevitable. For a while there the lay press and television news was rife with headlines about various and sundry climate science "hoaxes." I dutifully chased down one claim after the other, which all turned out to be hoax hoaxes. Luckily there are a few blogs out there that serve as liaisons to climate scientists, conveying explanations to the general public. Most researchers are not real interested in engaging the ignorant masses (and who can blame them). They just want to do their research.

Climate Gate reinforced my opinion that climate change is real. Nothing more convincing than watching three or four front page hoax claims go down in flames in quick succession. You would think that a line of debunked claims stretching past the horizon would dampen a skeptic's enthusiasm but then again, the majority of Americans don't buy the theory of evolution.

Climate Gate had the opposite impact on many people, reinforcing their suspicion that climate change is a hoax. The difference being that some sought out and read science-based sources to get the real scoop and others stuck with what they last saw in their local newspaper, or most likely, television news. Television is the backbone of ongoing adult education in America. Read "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" then rent the movie Idiocracy ; )

The game is over. Public interest is rapidly waning. Most have made up their minds. Not that it matters. It is unlikely that our government is capable of solving the problem--not real sure they should try. There is a very real chance they would only make things worse as witnessed with corn ethanol. Hopefully, solutions will arrive "despite" government, as sometimes happens. It is possible that a green energy meme has been set in motion as happened with family size in the past. Time will tell.

If we are to replace fossil fuels with something better, it will happen for reasons unforeseen at this time. The future is notoriously hard to predict. I once thought that personal computers in homes were a fad that would eventually give way to cheap word processors (which was actually starting to happen) and machines dedicated to computer games (which is happening). Then the Internet came along.

There are still quite a few sputtering armchair climatologists out there (a subspecies of Internet Baboon) participating in the skeptic echo chamber. One great explanation I've seen for their existence (on top of my contention that people are capable of and willing to believe anything they want) involves an aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm not sure how seriously to take parts of this study. The authors were the recipients of the prestigious Ig Nobel prize (get it, ignoble?). The Dunning-Kruger studies are sometimes used (wrongly) to beat debate opponents about the head and shoulders with the claim they are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

It isn't about stupidity (whatever that is). It is about ignorance. We can be too ignorant to know just how ignorant we are. You see this a lot in comment fields.

I read the book Superorganism by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson. It must weigh five pounds and represents the tip of an iceberg. Who would have dreamed that there is so much to know about ...ants. Imagine the equivalent of today's armchair climatologists engaging Wilson in debate on the subject of sociobiology, or ants for that matter.

I recall the time I used the Great Wall of China as an example of government waste in an article only to be called on the carpet by a scholar who studies great walls around the world (and apparently there are many such walls). In another article about rhino poaching I attracted a specialist in rhinos with similar results.

I also recall a beer commercial where the engineer put the finishing touch on the business jet he just designed (closing the radome). Miller time! The person who wrote that commercial had no idea what it takes to design a jet, or a radome for that matter ; ).

[Update 4/12/2010: A short, relatively respectful debate ensued in the comment field from which I drew a few more insights. What motivates the armchair climatologist? Some apparently see themselves as purveyors of truth and justice, struggling against the "establishment." This suggests to me that whatever it is that motivates the stereotypical conspiracy theorist is also at work here in the climate skeptic blogs.

In this case my nemesis used the bacterial-ulcer link and continental drift as examples where the established science was overturned by armchair versions of geologists and medical researchers. I love analogies but a bad analogy is worse than no analogy. For starters, my debate partner got it ass-backwards. The new science is climate change. The old guard is saying that there is no anthropomorphic climate change. He's defending what was once thought to be true.

The continental drift theory had been kicked around for centuries and was not particularly controversial. A concerted attempt to debunk it was made by a physicist as late as 1953 and his arguments would have looked very sound to armchair plate-techtonisists. I'm sure he would have had a large following had the internet existed.

The bacterial link to ulcers was discovered by researchers using the scientific method and peer reviewed publications.

All new theories, evolution, relativity, you name it, are met with resistance by other scientists The scientific method works because it meshes with human nature. Scientists love to prove their competitors wrong, which can also be an easy ticket to fame and glory. Finding flaws in a theory or hypothesis is much easier than forming a new one.

The UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is Always Right

Photo courtesy of silkegb via Flickr

Self-described as an organization of "citizens and scientists for environmental solutions," their chosen name almost demands respect--a union of scientists who are concerned. But they don't hide the fact that they are not all scientists, so, in theory only two of them have to be scientists to keep the name legitimate, and in any case nobody knows exactly what a scientist is.

The fact that other scientists often disagree with their positions (as scientists always do) is problematic as well.

Are they always right? That can't be possible.

Does every member of UCS agree with every other member on every topic (are they really united)? Well, of course not.

Is their work peer-reviewed and published in science journals? No [Most of] it is not. [Most of] their research is as subject to subconscious bias as anything else. [Update: See comment from UCS press secretary, Aaron Huertas in the comments and this link for official stance on Nuclear.]

Once you take a scientist out of his or her lab, they are no wiser or more knowledgeable than anyone else. Ask a nuclear physicist to paint your portrait or rebuild your brakes and watch what happens.

It is the scientific method that makes science work, not so much scientists.

I like the UCS because they do a good job of sifting the chaff from the wheat. You still have to take their positions with at least a small grain of salt because there is still some chaff left.

Their position on biofuels has changed considerably as research has rolled in over the years. I am qualified to critique that subject and their positions on it are for the most part accurate but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Their positions on nuclear energy tend to be heavily biased, and there are plenty of very high ranking physicists and scientists who disagree with them.

Here is a UCS response to a claim that the reprocessing of nuclear waste reduces waste.

I'm not qualified to refute the physics but this raised my right eyebrow precipitously, while simultaneously lowering my left one.

Why do most other first world nuclear powers melt their long-lived waste into handy dandy blocks of glass if not to reduce its volume, make it easier to handle, transport, and store?

You never know with the French, but it seemed unlikely to me that they process their waste to "increase" their disposal problems. Which led me to wonder why fuel is reprocessed in the first place. I found the answer here:

Over the last 50 years the principal reason for reprocessing used fuel has been to recover unused uranium and plutonium in the used fuel elements and thereby close the fuel cycle, gaining some 25% more energy from the original uranium in the process and thus contributing to energy security. A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste to about one fifth. In addition, the level of radioactivity in the waste from reprocessing is much smaller and after about 100 years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself.

And here is more from The American Physical Society:

Rather, waste management is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste—the fission products—to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.

The UCS downplayed the fact that by creating more of the short-lived, less problematic stuff, reprocessing reduces the amount of the much more problematic long-lived stuff.

Information about the technical and economic viability of renewable energy is also growing. At some point the UCS is going to have to soften its stance on nuclear energy. As a student of human nature I suspect that will not happen without a power struggle inside the UCS because people are swayed less by strong rational argument than they are by strong emotions.

We will need every weapon at our disposal to displace coal. Renewables can't do it alone. See my article Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy

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Domesticated Dogs--Mutualists or Parasites?

Photo courtesy of Dog Tag Art via Flickr

This thought exercise was motivated in part by my second reading of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (by Matt Ridley) while on a trip to Argentina. The book covers parasitism's role in evolution. While in Argentina I noticed the stark difference between the urban mostly purebred lapdogs in Buenos Aries and the often malnourished mutts found in rural areas. Here are some Wikipedia links to the terms parasitism and symbiosis for reference.

Look at the picture of that blue-eyed, smiling beauty. Is that a smile? It's like the false eye patterns that have evolved on some moth wings. The false eye patterns are an illusion to scare off predators and just maybe that false smile is an illusion that works to tweak human emotions. The moth can't close its false eyes anymore than this dog can stop smiling. Dogs have evolved ways, both physically and behaviorally to endear themselves to us (elicit chemical reactions).

Most of us would not be best buds with another person who has bad breath and a tendency to pant while their huge dripping tongue hangs out of their gaping mouth, but dogs have to do that to regulate body temperature. Rather than evolve another way to manage body temperature, have some managed to get us to look past that rather unique and bizarre cooling system by placing a (simulated) smile behind it?

I'm not a dog hater. But I'm also not a "dog person." I consciously resist attributing more to a dog's behavior than is really there. The dog wants my resources but will do nothing to move my genes into the future in return for them (help me provide food and protection for my family), which is one definition of a parasite.

The dog will make me feel good the way a cigarette makes a smoker feel good (a case for tobacco plants manipulating us), whereas my natural affinity toward the opposite sex evolved specifically to move genes into the future. And of course dogs don't really consciously scheme in this way. The laws of mathematics and natural selection are simply moving things in this direction.

For 98 percent of our shared history, our relationship with dogs could be viewed as a form of mutualism, where both species benefited. This remains true where dogs are still used as biological burglar alarms, defenders of and even herders of livestock, and for hunting. All of these activities served indirectly to help move human genes into the future by helping to keep us safe and fed.

However, it's easy to see a trend, especially in cities, where dogs have lost most if not all of their usefulness when it comes to gene propagation (from an evolutionary perspective) and may actually be hindering human reproductive success. I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing. I'm just saying...

Clearly we have impacted dog evolution, and they have impacted ours although we tend not to notice or acknowledge that fact. Evolution is a response to our environment and clearly dogs have been a major part of that environment long enough to have impacted us genetically.

Most dogs today in first world countries are used almost exclusively for companionship. By companionship I mean the good feeling (chemical reactions) derived from the company of someone you like who also likes you. Feelings (chemical reactions) like that evolved in social primates to motivate the formation and maintenance of groups or monkey troops for mutual benefit.

Dogs are commandeering for their own gene propagation our companionship chemical pathways (feelings). Your dog is programmed to like his owner. The fact that everyone's pet dog seems to love its owner and vice verse is some evidence to suggest that this happens automatically, without conscious effort or thought--to like its owner regardless of who it is and for the dog owner to like their dog even if it is an ugly, snarling, stupid, untrained, hand-licking, crotch-sniffing, carpet-pooping, hair-shedding, smelly abomination. And that goes for cats as well:


My neighbor's cat--with summer hair cut

Given time, your dog would develop the same affinity with a new owner, and you with a new dog. This tendency probably evolved to enhance our past mutualism, but once this relationship evolves away from "mutual" propagation of genes, you have by definition, a parasite.

Grandparents can contribute mightily to the welfare of grandchildren, which may help explain our ability to live so long past our reproductive age. It's easy to see how a lapdog could not only divert physical resources from that role, but reduce the motivation to spend the time and energy to seek out those grandchildren by meeting those needs (feelings, chemical reactions) for those grandparents, especially now that most of us don't live in three generation households.

The antics of the grandparent's lapdog hanging out on a couch has become a ubiquitous stereotype and endless source of material for the TV show called America's Funniest Videos. These lapdogs might be viewed as genetically modified biological endorphin generators (tranquilizers).

Another ubiquitous stereotype is the guy in a pickup truck with his best friend hanging out the passenger window, a big (false) smile on his face, tongue flailing in the wind. Instead of a real person, man, woman, child, uncle, brother, parent, or in-law who might help care for or defend a family, you find a dog sitting there making his owner feel good inside. One could argue that chicks dig dogs and the dog will therefore attract a mate, but you can't argue that all chicks dig dogs. Chicks that do not dig dogs have been eliminated from that guy's list of potential mates the way cigarette smoking would have limited it. A tradeoff many smokers and dog owners are perfectly willing to make.

There is a trend among some street persons to keep a pit bull in their company, much to the chagrin of government officials and anyone else that feels obligated to cross to the other side of the street rather than cross a potential alcoholic, mental patient, or drug addict in possession of a dog bred to fight to the death.

And finally we have the young mom with her stroller and one, two, or three young kids along with two golden labs out for a leisurely stroll. Do those dogs add to the extensive energy and time required for child care? I have on more than one occasion seen parents who actually give deference to the family dog over their kids, within limits.

Most of today's lapdogs started out as hard working rat dogs, which today is considered a derogatory term. They were bred to chase and kill, and even to go into the burrows of various rodent pests, rats in particular.

Today, dogs bred to hunt bears, or foxes, or wolves, or game birds, or water fowl, or to herd and protect livestock, are caged up in cramped dark houses all day with nothing but a bowl of dried dog food and maybe a chew toy for company. They get to go outside on a leash twice a day to crap in a planter strip, or if they are really lucky, fill the backyard with their poop. Zoo animals have it better. What's wrong with this picture?

Dog owners quite simply rationalize away this grim reality so they can continue to get their fix. Their dog is ecstatic to see them when they walk through the door (after having spent the day alone in mind numbing isolation) and just look at that smile on his face!

The backyards in American cities are literally open sewers. This mountain of poop accounts for much of the degradation of bodies of water in and around cities. The news headline while I was in Buenos Aires was that a parasite spread by dogs had been found in the grass and soil of every park in the city.

Our dog and cat rescue and shelter facilities are bursting at the seams. Having saturated homes with rescue animals they have started rescue foster animal programs. It's starting to get ridiculous.

From an environmental perspective, consider keeping only lapdogs, dogs bred specifically as companion animals instead of larger, higher status breeds bred for other jobs. They did not evolve (albeit artificially) to live in a house environment. A dog's ability to elicit endorphin releases from your brain is not dependent on its size.

One environmental argument in favor of dogs is that a dog (poop issue aside) will do far less damage when substituted for children. That's a valid point but it also supports the contention that some dogs, by intercepting energy, resources, and feelings from owners, have moved from mutualist to parasite, which from an evolutionary perspective is neither good or bad, it just is.

Parasites, you gotta love 'em, or at least some of them.

[Update 5/9/2010] My eldest daughter pointed out that it has become popular for single young guys to own cute lapdogs, which she suspects are being used to get the attentions of women. If she's right, then using lap dogs as chick magnets would not qualify them as parasites ; )

[Update 11/21/2010] I watched a film called Dogs Decoded last night. Here is the transcript near the end of the show:

NARRATOR: But when we treat dogs as if they were children, do we sometimes allow them to replace our children?

MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: They are, essentially, moving our focus away from having children onto having pets.

PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: I think we can think of little puppies brought home as parasites. They don't do anything useful, they're not perceived as a food source, they're not perceived as a guard dog. They are simply brought home for fun.

The cuckoo is perhaps quite a good analogy because the baby cuckoo, of course, being planted in somebody else's nest, prompts mother bird to look after baby cuckoo, even though there's nothing in it for the mother bird at all.

MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: I think it's safe to say that dogs have, evolutionarily, been very successful. If you compare them to wolves, you will see that wolves are now an endangered species, while dogs, of course, are all around the world.

NARRATOR: Whether they are viewed as parasites or as beloved companions, no one can deny the evolutionary success of the domesticated dog.

In fact, there are over 400 million, worldwide. And humans have created over 400 genetically distinct breeds.

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