Energy Crops--BTUs Per Acre

Photo Wikipedia

When it comes to energy produced per area of food cropland usurped, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are the worst options available. If you want to obtain energy from the sun, your best option is to grow a crop of solar panels.

The solar farm above covers 150 acres. It nets sixty times more BTUs of energy per year than a corn crop used for ethanol and about 120 times more than a soy crop used for biodiesel. And you could still graze livestock around these panels to keep the weeds down. From a land use perspective, siting these on farmland is certainly suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as converting food stock into liquid fuels.

I received an email the other day from someone who is an expert on certain market impacts of government policy:

The Connecticut General Assembly last week passed a bill requiring biodiesel to be blended with heating oil starting next year.(1)

He was perplexed by one of the provisions in this bill:

Before the mandate takes effect, the state commissioner of consumer protection, in consultation with a Distillate Advisory Board to be created under this bill, will determine whether there's enough in-state production of biodiesel to comply with the legislation.

Biofuel issues usually revolve around transportation because the portability and energy density of liquid fuels are best suited for things that move around. In this case it involves homes that use oil for heating. It makes no sense, environmentally or economically, for state governments to force citizens to purchase biofuels regardless of cost. If biodiesel cost less, consumers would already be using it. In the summer of 2008 biodiesel was selling for $6 a gallon. This is essentially a hidden tax on citizens and a form of wealth redistribution to farmers. Biofuel lobbyists have obviously gotten the ear of some politicians.

No politician would dream of increasing taxes at this point in time to fund something like this. So, instead, the cost is hidden in consumer fuel bills.

If global warming is the real concern, there is much more bang for the buck in solar or even better yet, home weatherization.

Connecticut is not known as an agricultural powerhouse, so this does not make a whole lot of sense the way it might in corn and soy growing states, where such legislation is being used by politicians to buy votes. The public is largely unaware of the futility and wastefulness of trying to displace oil by turning food into a liquid fuel.

Maria Cantwell recently introduced legislation in my home state to reinstate the dollar per gallon blending subsidy for biodiesel to placate the biodiesel refinery here. A back-room deal was struck where they would pretend to use oil grown in Washington State instead of importing the cheapest oil as the original business plan dictated (and why it is built on a port).

I recently attended a talk sponsored by the Northwest Biodiesel Board. An Eastern Washington professor, who was raised on a farm and had attempted his own biodiesel business, explained that politicians had not considered the Washington State farmer's ability to competitively grow corn and soy. The climate here favors other higher value crops like apples and cherries.

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Why We Comb Our Lawns and Fertilize Our Hair

Photo courtesy of roel1943 via Flickr

Ah, did I get that backwards? Brace yourself. Here comes another of my thought exercises, again inspired by my latest reading of The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. Another word of warning--random bursts of dripping sarcasm can be found in places you may not always expect it.

Ever wonder why we feel compelled to comb our hair and fertilize our lawns?

We do it to look presentable of course, but why do we want to look presentable?

So others won't think poorly of us of course, but why do we care about what others think of us?

Because people are less likely to cooperate with other people who they don't like, for whatever reasons, duh.

In short, we comb our hair because we are social primates and cooperation is written into our genetic code--lone wolves tend to have harder lives.

Although evolution is based on competition we cooperate within groups to compete against other cooperating groups. A war between two armies is the ultimate competition but within each army you will find the ultimate in cooperation.

It doesn't matter if you wear a powdered wig or dye your hair green. What matters is that your hair conforms to whatever is considered acceptable for whatever reasons in whatever group you identify with.

Enough about hair. Lawns are what interest me and because lawns are largely a man's domain the rest of this essay will be mostly from a heterosexual male perspective.

Study after study has shown that women are rarely attracted by wealth and power. No, they are attracted to rippling abs, tight buns, and robust genitalia. They could care less if a man has a job. It is a mystery why men expend so much time working and maintaining their lawns and homes when they should be at the gym ...wearing spandex to highlight their packages.

Ahem ...lawns (as well as houses in general) are a form of status display. They tell others a lot about you. That brown weed patch juxtaposed next to a perfectly manicured green lawn tells passerby that the owner:

A) Does not care what you think about his lawn.

B) Does not have the means or energy to maintain it.

You can spot where the octogenarians (and drunkards) live in my neighborhood by the state of their lawns and houses.

Women may not realize it, but all men are engaged in an endless battle of one-upmanship. My planter strip (that area of grass between Seattle sidewalks and the street) had gotten out of control over the years. I'd one-upped my competitors years ago by dumping river rock on it and planting pampas grass in the middle of the pile. Boom! No mowing, no fertilizing, no watering, and I received a lot of compliments (from women) on how nice it looked.


However, over the years the pampas grass grew to take over the whole area, preventing people from getting out of their cars and filling the street with shed grass stems, thus degrading my stature. It was time for a new game plan.

Yards and houses as status displays can be a double-edged sword. One runs the risk of inadvertently displaying one's lack of creativity and smarts, which is why rich people hire others to design and maintain their homes.

My neighborhood is filled with examples of attempts to create attractive, yet low maintenance planter strips that back-fired badly. Instead of saying "Wow, this guy is creative and energetic," these planter strips say "Wow, this guy must be an idiot."

This is why rich people seek neighborhoods with covenants that forbid creativity. Best to let people suspect you have no creativity than to do your own landscaping and remove all doubt.

While working on my new planter strip, I was often visited by the other silverbacks in the neighborhood who offered pearls of advice as well as consolation, for the task that lay before me was not trivial. A gas powered weed eater with a saw blade on the end took care of the pampas grass, a pickax took care of the roots, and an ad in Craigslist got rid of the river rock.

I was of course leery of their advice, knowing full well they may be trying to trip me up. I think my new landscaping job is a success because I've notice that the other silverbacks have been spending a lot of time lately working on their planter strips. At a mostly subconscious level, men are a lot like male bowerbirds and lawns are their chick magnets.

So, what gives a manicured lawn higher status than a weed patch? I think it's because it displays one's ability or even willingness to control one's environment. Altering and controlling the environment is the hallmark of Homo sapiens. We alter our environment to suit us rather than adapt to an environment. Beavers do the same thing on a much smaller scale.

Wealthy or powerful individuals are able to commandeer the energies of other people to do their bidding. There are undoubtedly some octogenarians in my neighborhood who are wealthy enough to hire an army of gardeners and others to maintain their yards and homes and because of that I am unable to spot where they live.

This all relates to males attracting females. Human males tend to be mildly polygamous, given the chance. Some guys may fantasize about having a harem, but anti-polygamy laws are a good deal for the majority of men because rich guys historically tend to hog up all the women. Assuming you would not be the odd man out means you probably would be.

I recall watching an investigative piece on television where they visited a town in Utah where some wealthy individual had about a dozen wives. They interviewed another guy who had moved there so he could have multiple wives. Much to his chagrin, after years of trying, he was still single. He just didn't get it.

In the distant past, high-status, rich, powerful people had more children. That's not true anymore but the genes that promoted that behavior still reside inside of us, goading us to do strange things like, maintain our lawns and comb our hair.

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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.