Hurting the Planet

Recently, Bill Ritter went to Lamar to participate in the ground breaking ceremony for the sixth biofuels production plant in Colorado.

If you are an advocate of green energy, you must be applauding that action. Perhaps you shouldn’t be.

Newsweek, one of the most liberal main stream magazines available printed an article it called “Doing it Wrong.” It is subtitled “A new study finds that the biofuels craze may be adding to our climate woes.” In it, David Tilman, a scientist whose paper was quoted in the respected (and peer reviewed) journal Science:

We found that there was a period of time where you do break even, where the biofuel started providing an advantage. The longest was 400 years and the shortest was 17, but the average was half a century. It might give us a benefit 50 years later, but it's not a very wise environmental policy [ in terms of CO2 going into the atmosphere as a result of clearing forests ].

There are many things we can do to use fossil energy more effectively, but it's not ethical to try to deny people in developing countries the right to clear their land to grow food and feed themselves.

If you look at a tree, and get rid of the water in it, half of the dry weight of the tree is carbon.

Every time Bill Ritter or Mark Udall promotes more ethanol, they are very likely pumping more Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere than they are ever, in their lifetimes, going to take out.