This from Patricia Cohen writing for The New York Times touches on a sense of things that has bothered me for some time, but was not sure how much of it was simply my own limited perceptions. Unfortunately, the condition seems to have been noticed by others, as well.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she [Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”] said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

We’re doomed.

Read The Complete Article

Rick Shenkman follows up with his report “How Ignorant Are We?”

Looks like the answer is unfortunately pretty ignorant.

George Monbiot, one of the most intelligent and lucid writers today delivers these insightful and sobering questions and analysis of the state of the condition we are collectively in today.

Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties’ policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters move behind them. We won’t be prompted by the media. The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

Read The Full Report

On a related issue is Monbiot’s excellent work from 2006 on ‘The Denial Industry’, the corporate PR efforts to disseminating distracting, misleading and sometimes downright false information into the public sphere in regards to climate science.

While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.

Read more Here

(This isn’t so much an issue of government control of agriculture as it is of business’s control of our government - USTV Media)

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By Jack Hedin
Rushford, Minn.
New York Times Contributor
March 1, 2008

If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables - if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 - for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced - for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.

Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this - whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.

Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets - without the federal government actively discouraging them.

Jack Hedin is a farmer.

George Monbiot of the Guardian U.K. reminds us Here of a little history lesson while calling it like it is in regards to the ever-increasing dangers being posed by global climate change.

Though one can applaud Al Gore’s recent efforts on behalf of crusading for awareness regarding the necessity of confronting man-made climate change on our planet, confronting the unpleasant truth of the systemic nature of American intransigence in the face of making the necessary efforts and sacrifices towards resolving these problems also involves some serious responsibility and culpability on Mr. Gore’s part. He also identifies in one line the single most important reason why wholesale political change in the United States isn’t simply a matter of partisan political interest, but is in fact a necessary step towards the survival of life on planet Earth as we know it.

America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system

‘After 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session.”

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11, 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

This is all pretty depressing, and shameful, stuff.

Read The Full Report

This is a pretty interesting story. Not sure how many have heard about this, and because MSM isn’t going to touch it, and can be hard to get any kind of corroborating evidence on it. There are some questions regarding details in it as well, such as the claim there was 4 tons of coke on this thing, when I don’t know what the payload level of this craft is, but my guess is it is impossible for it to carry 4 tons of cargo. That said, it could simply be a misreading of the volume of contents, and not a fatal flaw in the thrust of the story itself. The fact is, there is quite enough smoke around this incident to give one serious reason to be suspecting fire. And a big one, too. After all, its not like we haven’t had years of ample evidence over the decades of the CIA running all sorts of criminal and black operations by funding through drug running. Most notable and infamous is the Iran-Contra scandal, many of whose main players involved happen to be, lo and behold by coincidence, embedded deeply into the foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration today. People like Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte come immediately to mind. (and don’t forget Bush’s attempt to put Adm. Poindexter in charge of his Total Information Awareness program).

Read The Report

Some pretty sobering analysis Here by one of the better analysts and writers of history out there, Gwynne Dyer. He says that while the global middle class has had the benefit of lower food prices, three converging factors are driving food prices up with no relief in sight. Dyer says the reasons are an increasing population, biofuels and increased consumption of meat.

Read The Report

This provides for some rather entertaining perspective on what the writer’s union strike is about, from some of The Daily Show crew. Pretty good agitprop and a decent use of the internet (from which they aren’t making any money from as it is, so might as well use it for something, I guess).

Watch The Video

I’m not sure how many people are paying attention to what has been going on in Burma lately (or could even if they wanted to, thanks to the anemic state of journalism in this country anymore). But as a point of democratic resistance to authoritarian control, it is one of the most dramatic and important stories taking place.

This article originally published on Truthout contained the following point which I found particularly interesting and helpful in understanding what is likely an important and key aspect to truly effective democratic action….

“According to reports from pro-democracy groups inside the country, there are too many layers of leadership for the regime to attack simultaneously. The mass movement in Burma is unlikely to be defeated by removing its most visible components because they have organized themselves around a conceptualization of power that does not depend on the guidance of just a small group of people. The resistance is based on the notion of people-power, a genuinely bottom-up form of authority that finds its strength in numbers and scope, not in the charisma or strategy of one or two key individuals. So, the more the regime attacks, the more likely it is that movement’s numbers will actually increase.”

This is big news over in that region of the world, and the level of awareness and solidarity of support amongst the Buddhist community strikes me as rather impressive and an important factor in the tipping point of events potentially being reached there. The organizing taking place there also provides a point of emphasis to the critical flaw of any movement for democratic action overly-relying upon a ‘leader’, becoming distracted by the potentially distorting (and dependency-creating) influence of charisma and ‘cult of personality’, and the dangers of personal ego trumping the needs of the work at hand. It is why it is of real importance to find that effective balance between a universally coordinated strategic plan and the application of localized action and the provision for bottom-up initiatives and tactics.

Come to think of it, in regards to the situation in Burma, I wonder how much of a role Buddhism itself, what with the underlying nature of its philosophy and its pre-eminent influence and importance there, actually plays in the crafting of this kind of societal/political response to the criminal regime that we are currently seeing there?

And here are a couple more articles of note on this topic, including a posting by Matt Stoller on the role of the internet and independent bloggers in getting some of the information out on what is going down in Burma these days (excuse me, Myanmar, as the military junta had it renamed some years ago).

Burma’s Uprising: People Power, Not Political Puppetry

Internet Freedom and Burmese Bloggers

Burma’s Junta: Too Late To Turn Back The Clock

And just as an aside of absurdity, I find it darkly humorous that the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign of 2004 had a number of their campaign items such as hats, shirts, etc… manufactured in Burma. How fitting. Literally.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

A thought-provoking piece on George Monbiot’s blog. This is better than any environmental article I’ve read all year.

Perhaps we’ve not seen this so much in Dayton, but green consumerism is the trend. Liberals embracing pro-consumptive green choice behavior as if it were making a difference in the environment or real people’s lives. In Toronto, the most popular billboard in the city is the huge face of renowned environmental scientist David Suzuki holding a glowing CFB with the statement “You Have the Power.” It’s a good idea, because people who really understand get the reminder. But it gives the impression that David thinks this is enough for you city dwellers. See Treehugger.com for a cutting blog on this.

Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith’s book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less.

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk. Over the past six months, our coatpegs have become clogged with organic cotton bags, which, filled with packets of ginseng tea and jojoba oil bath salts, are now the obligatory gift at every environmental event. I have several lifetimes’ supply of ballpoint pens made with recycled paper and about half a dozen miniature solar chargers for gadgets I donít possess.

————-

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation ñ a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

The middle classes rebrand their lives, congratulate themselves on going green, and carry on buying and flying as much as ever before. It is easy to picture a situation in which the whole world religiously buys green products, and its carbon emissions continue to soar.

As ever, Monbiot is the one to tell us straight up. Let’s see how far this message gets out there.

Read Monbiot’s Full Posting

- Posted by Peter Jones for USTV Media

Just another scam being perpetrated by the Corporate State looming on our global horizon? The effects are already being felt by force feeding this energy agenda onto the policy docket, and the results don’t look like they are going to be too pretty.

This Associated Press article below also conveniently omits the glaring issue of the level of consumption that our society is currently engaged in. The underlying premise here is that consumption must be not only maintained but increased (which is a requirement for the capitalist economic modality of ‘growth’). Ethanol’s problem is that it won’t be able to effectively do it. News flash for the AP: There is nothing that is going to be able to provide for continued ‘growth’ on our planet using current economic measurements.

NEW YORK (AP) — America is drunk on ethanol. Farmers in the Midwest are sending billions of bushels of corn to refineries that turn it into billions of gallons of fuel. Automakers in Detroit have already built millions of cars, trucks and SUVs that can run on it, and are committed to making millions more. In Washington, politicians have approved generous subsidies for companies that make ethanol.

And just this week, President Bush arranged with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for their countries to share ethanol production technology.

Even alternative fuel aficionados are surprised at the nation’s sudden enthusiasm for grain alcohol.

“It’s coming on dramatically; more rapidly than anyone had expected,” said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

You’d think that would be good news, but it actually worries a lot of people.

The problem is, ethanol really isn’t ready for prime time. The only economical way to make ethanol right now is with corn, which means the burgeoning industry is literally eating America’s lunch, not to mention its breakfast and dinner. And though ethanol from corn may have some minor benefits with regard to energy independence, most analysts conclude its environmental benefits are questionable at best.

Proponents acknowledge the drawbacks of corn-based ethanol, but they believe it can help wean America off imported oil the way methadone helps a junkie kick heroin. It may not be ideal, but ethanol could help the country make the necessary and difficult transition to an environmentally and economically sustainable future.

There are many questions about ethanol’s place in America’s energy future. Some are easily answered; others, not so much.

WHAT IS ETHANOL?

Ethanol is moonshine. Hooch. Rotgut. White lightning. That explains why the last time Americans produced it in any appreciable amount was during Prohibition. Today, just like back then, virtually all the ethanol produced in the United States comes from corn that is fermented and then distilled to produce pure grain alcohol.

WILL MY CAR RUN ON IT?

Any car will burn gasoline mixed with a small amount of ethanol. But cars must be equipped with special equipment to burn fuel that is more than about 10 percent ethanol. All three of the major American automakers are already producing flex-fuel cars that can run on either gasoline or E85, a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. Thanks to incentives from the federal government, they have committed to having half the cars they produce run on either E85 or biodiesel by 2012.

HOW FAST IS ETHANOL PRODUCTION GROWING?

About as fast as farmers can grow the corn to make it. According to the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group, ethanol production has doubled in the past three years, reaching nearly 5 billion gallons in 2006. With 113 ethanol plants currently operating and 78 more under construction, the country’s ethanol output is expected to double again in less than two years.

IS ETHANOL BETTER THAN GASOLINE?

For all the environmental and economic troubles it causes, gasoline turns out to be a remarkably efficient automobile fuel. The energy required to pump crude out of the ground, refine it and transport it from oil well to gas tank is about 6 percent of the energy in the gasoline itself.

Ethanol is much less efficient, especially when it is made from corn. Just growing corn requires expending energy — plowing, planting, fertilizing and harvesting all require machinery that burns fossil fuel. Modern agriculture relies on large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which are produced by methods that consume fossil fuels. Then there’s the cost of transporting the corn to an ethanol plant, where the fermentation and distillation processes consume yet more energy. Finally, there’s the cost of transporting the fuel to filling stations. And because ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline, it can’t be pumped through relatively efficient pipelines, but must be transported by rail or tanker truck.

In the end, even the most generous analysts estimate that it takes the energy equivalent of three gallons of ethanol to make four gallons of the stuff. Some even argue that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than you get out of it, but most agricultural economists think that’s a stretch.

BUT AREN’T THERE ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS TO ETHANOL?

If you make ethanol from corn, the environmental benefits are limited. When you consider the greenhouse gases that are released in the growing and refining process, corn-based ethanol is only slightly better with regard to global warming than gasoline. Growing corn also requires the use of pesticides and fertilizers that cause soil and water pollution.

The environmental benefit of corn-based ethanol is felt mostly around the tailpipe. When blended into gasoline in small amounts, ethanol causes the fuel to generate less smog-producing carbon monoxide. That has made it popular in smoggy cities like Los Angeles.

WHAT ABOUT ETHANOL’S ECONOMIC BENEFITS?

Making ethanol is so profitable, thanks to government subsidies and continued high oil prices, that plants are proliferating throughout the Corn Belt. Iowa, the nation’s top corn-producing state, is projected to have so many ethanol plants by 2008 it could easily find itself importing corn in order to feed them.

But that depends on the Invisible Hand. Making ethanol is profitable when oil is costly and corn is cheap. And the 51 cent-a-gallon federal subsidy doesn’t hurt. But oil prices are off from last year’s peaks and corn has doubled in price over the past year, from about $2 to $4 a bushel, thanks mostly to demand from ethanol producers.

High corn prices are causing social unrest in Mexico, where the government has tried to mollify angry consumers by slapping price controls on tortillas. Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, predicts food riots in other major corn-importing countries if something isn’t done.

U.S. consumers will soon feel the effects of high corn prices as well, if they haven’t already, because virtually everything Americans put in their mouths starts as corn. There’s corn flakes, corn chips, corn nuts, and hundreds of other processed foods that don’t even have the word corn in them. There’s corn in the occasional pint of beer and shot of whisky. And don’t forget high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that is added to soft drinks, baked goods, candy and a lot of things that aren’t even sweet.

Some freaks even eat it off the cob.

It’s true that animals eat more than half of the corn produced in America; guess who eats them? On Friday the Agriculture Department announced that beef, pork and chicken will soon cost consumers more thanks to the demand of ethanol for corn.

It’s also true that there’s a difference between edible sweet corn and the feed corn that’s used for ethanol production. But because farmers try to grow the most profitable crop they can, higher prices for feed corn tend to discourage the production of sweet corn. That decreases its supply, driving the price of sweet corn up, too.

In fact, many agricultural economists believe rising demand for feed corn has squeezed the supply — and boosted the price — of not just sweet corn but also wheat, soybeans and several other crops.

America’s appetite for corn is enormous. But Americans consume so much gasoline that all the corn in the world couldn’t make enough ethanol to slake the nation’s lust for transportation fuels. Last year ethanol production used 12 percent of the U.S. corn harvest, but it replaced only 2.8 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption.

“If we were to adopt automobile fuel efficiency standards to increase efficiency by 20 percent, that would contribute as much as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol,” Brown said.

ISN’T THERE A BETTER RENEWABLE FUEL SUBSTITUTE FOR GASOLINE?

Most experts think it will take an array of renewable energy technologies to replace fossil fuels. Ethanol’s main drawbacks come not from the nature of the fuel itself, but from the fact that it is made using a critical component of the world’s food supply. Ethanol would be more beneficial both environmentally and economically if scientists could figure out how to make it from a nonfood plant that could be grown without the need for fertilizers, pesticides and other inputs. Researchers are currently working on methods to do just that, making ethanol from the cellulose in a wide variety of plants, including poplar trees, switchgrass and cornstalks.

But plant cellulose is more difficult to break down than the starch in corn kernels. That’s why people eat corn instead of grass. Plus it tastes better.

There are also technical hurdles related to separating, digesting and fermenting the cellulose fiber. Though it can be done, making ethanol from cellulose-rich material costs at least twice as much as making it from corn.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE BEFORE CELLULOSIC ETHANOL IS COMPETITIVE WITH CORN ETHANOL AND GASOLINE?

Some experts estimate that it will take 10 to 15 years before cellulosic ethanol becomes competitive. But Mitch Mandich, CEO of Range Fuels, thinks it will be a lot sooner than that. The Colorado-based company has started building a cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia that converts wood chips and other waste left behind by the forest products industry. Another company, Iogen Corp., has been producing cellulosic ethanol from wheat, oat and barley straw for several years at a demonstration plant in Ottawa, Canada.

HOW MUCH MORE EFFICIENT WOULD CELLULOSIC ETHANOL BE COMPARED TO CORN ETHANOL?

Studies suggest that cellulosic ethanol could yield at least four to six times the energy expended to produce it. It would also produce less greenhouse gas emissions than corn-based ethanol because much of the energy needed to refine it could come not from fossil fuels, but from burning other chemical components of the very same plants that contained the cellulose.

HOW MUCH GASOLINE COULD CELLULOSIC ETHANOL REPLACE?

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the United States could produce more than a billion tons of cellulosic material annually for ethanol production, from switchgrass grown on marginal agricultural lands to wood chips and other waste produced by the timber industry. In theory, that material could produce enough ethanol to substitute for about 30 percent of the country’s oil consumption.

A University of Tennessee study released in November reached similar conclusions. As much as 100 million acres of land would have to be dedicated to energy crops in order to reach the goal of substituting renewable biofuels for 25 percent of the nation’s fuel consumption by 2025, the report estimated. That would be a significant fraction of the nation’s 800 million acres of cultivable land, the study’s authors said, but not enough to cause disruptions in agricultural markets.

“There really aren’t any losers,” said University of Tennessee agricultural economist Burton English.

REALLY? NO LOSERS AT ALL?

There might be losers. Simple economics dictates that if farmers find it more profitable to grow switchgrass rather than corn, soy or cotton, the price of those commodities is bound to rise in response to falling supply.

“You can produce a lot of ethanol from cellulose without competing with food,” said Wallace Tyner, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. “But if you want to get half your fuel supply from it you will compete with food agriculture.”

There may also be ecological impacts. The government currently pays farmers not to farm about 35 million acres of conservation land, mostly in the Midwest. Those fallow tracts provide valuable habitat for wildlife, especially birds. Though switchgrass is a good home for most birds, if it became profitable to grow it or another energy crop on conservation land some species could decline.

WILL ETHANOL SOLVE ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS?

Ethanol is certainly a valuable tool in our efforts to address the economic and environmental problems associated with fossil fuels. But even the most optimistic projections suggest it can only replace a fraction of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline that Americans consume every year. It will take a mix of technologies to achieve energy independence and reduce the country’s production of greenhouse gases.

“I think we’re in a very interesting era. We are recognizing a problem and we are finding lots of potential solutions,” said David Tilman, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota.

But if we’re serious about achieving energy independence and mitigating global warming, Tilman and other experts said, one of those solutions must be energy conservation.

That means doubling the fuel economy of our automobiles, expanding mass transit and decreasing the amount of energy it takes to light, heat and cool our buildings. Without such measures, ethanol and other innovations will make little more than a dent in the nation’s fossil fuel consumption.

Like Kenneth Boulding once said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”