There's something quite obscene about feeding corn to cars, isn't there?
Ditto wheat, barley, sugar cane or palm trees.
Forty years ago the NFB aired a little cartoon "What on Earth!" in which Martians come to Earth and determine that cars are running the whole show.
Things have got much cornier since.
Today we have agri-biz enthusiastically promoting ethanol and biofuels though the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, with their oddly familiar-sounding slogan : "A Climate Change Solution Made In Canada".
CRFA head Kory Teneycke is a former Reform activist and was a Con strategist during the last election.
Ken Boessenkool, one of Harper's closest advisers, is registered to lobby for them. (Thank you, Holly Stick)
Unsurprisingly, last week's budget from the Cons contained $2 billion in incentives for ethanol.
CRFA members include Agricore, Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Cargill, General Motors, Monsanto, Pioneer Dupont, Suncor Energy Products, Shell Canada, and Sylvite (fertilizer).
Well, you say, what could possibly go wrong?
Just this - Ethanol is a product of food and fossil fuels.
Despite arguably burning 12% cleaner, it consumes more energy in its production than it contains, making it a negative energy source.
George Monbiot : “It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.”
Celsias : "Big industry, desperate to retain consumer dollars, is influencing government - who are in turn pandering to very destructive whims."
Celsias , a great source of resource material on biofuels, has a shocking video of horizon-to-horizon forest clearing in Sumatra to grow bio-fuels.
Link to Celsius found at DeSmogBlog, following an article on how running out of oil could worsen climate change.
I know this all sounds terribly depressing. The good news is how much more we know about how all this works now, compared to the people who first watched "What on Earth!" forty years ago.
UPDATE : Front page of YahooNews : Scientists weigh downside of palm oil.
Draining swamps and burning forests in Malaysia and Indonesia to plant palm oil crops now accounts for 8% of the world's fossil fuel emissions.
