Back in the so-called good old days, when American meals weren’t trendy blends of saffron and wild salmon, we ate meat and potatoes. And corn. And maybe cornbread if you lived in the South, or else this dry, flavorless, yellow cornish bread if you lived in the North. Corn was a common side dish on our plate when I was growing up and corn on the cob was a treat. Ever since this so-called biofuel star has been rising, I’ve been dreading the coming Apocalypse on corn prices. No more tasty side-dish! Now imagine if the cornerstone of your entire meal system was corn. Maybe you’d imagine yourself in Mexico, where tortillas are made of … well, corn.
A new friend I met online (and probable new student to the LTI) sent me a link to an article in Time, “The Clean Energy Scam.” The Amazon is being torn down to provide land for ranchers and crops, most of which are biofuels. Biofuels are supposed to be great because they are a renewable resource. Does anyone else see the problem here? It’s like killing babies to feed people. EPIC FAIL.
And it looks now like all the deforestation in the Amazon might be leading to a local climate shift. Instead of rain forest, it might become a savannah or desert (savannahs receive little rain, deserts less still). So these so-called green energies are leading to deforestation and potentially the destruction of the entire Amazon rain forest. Does that make global warming better or worse?
It is becoming more and more clear that anything with the label green is anything but green. They should be called brown. And the whole system rides on the back of oil: plastics in windmills and solar panels, transportation for everything that is made and moved anywhere. All of these brown products depend on oil to be made and usually at such a high cost that it takes literally decades for them to pay themselves off, far exceeding their own life expectancy. It’s not even clear that the oil cost of producing most of these things is exceeded by the carbon savings they deliver. It’s certainly not a requirement before attaching a green label to something.
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Green is just another excuse for rampant consumerism. The only good thing here is that it shows people recognize there is a problem, but as usual, corporations have stepped in and deluded people en masse. The problem escalates, and we are going to pay. In the future, the typical American meal will consist of ashes.
