Category: Social/Environmental

In the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today, they printed a story about Black Jatropha a poisonous shrub that produces seeds with the potential for use as a biofuel.  It needs no fertilizer unlike corn (and soy), needs little water, and yields more oil than soybeans.  Why the hell do we worry about switch grass when there’s a…

Everything’s not all rosy for ethanol.  First there are concerns about the amount of petro-chemicals it takes to grow the corn in the first place, then there’s the concern about using the food supply as fuel, and now this: Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has concluded that switching from present-day cars to vehicles powered…

Chiggers and Ticks and Lice, Oh My…Seems like I hear more and more about little blood sucking insects being on the rise, like Chiggers, and Ticks, and Lice, and Bedbugs.Are we making the planet uninhabitable for everything but vermin?

An article in Red Herring’s 9-Apr-2007 issue, Playing with Pond Scum says that algae could be a better source of biodiesel than any other plant, if only they can figure out how to grow it in sufficient quantities, and make sure it doesn’t complete with local algae if accidently released in a non-native area.

Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wrote in a report this year, is based on “the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel.”Ken Silverstein, Barack Obama Inc., Harper’s, November 2006, Pg. 40

Since producing most domestic ethanol requires large amounts of fossil fuel, and regular gasoline provides about 30 percent more mileage per gallon than E85, it’s arguably preferable from a conservation standpoint to drive a stand gasoline car rather than a flex-fuel vehicle.Ken Silverstein, Barack Obama Inc., Harper’s, November 2006, Pg. 32