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Consequences
By Josh Witten | December 18th 2008 10:51 PM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Josh Witten

100% of this the rugbyologist's revenue is donated to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres). A click on one of my articles is a click that helps bring high quality medical care to the... Full Bio

Ok, so my iPod (actually, on loan from Mrs. Rugbyologist) is acting up.  So, I listened to way too much NPR today.  American Public Media featured a story about a Brazilian labor inspector, Leandro Carvalho.  Dude's day job is righting labor abuses and freeing slaves (33,000 since 1995).

Chief among the places these labor and human rights abuses are found have been sugar cane production (fields and forest clearance) and the steel industry.  That sugar cane goes to produce ethanol, which is in high demand.  That's the same ethanol that is mandated to make up 10% of your gasoline and drives demand that American ethanol production may not ever catch up to (sorry, corn-to-ethanol will never be efficient enough).  

The story was a welcome reminder that complex problems have complex solutions and complex that affect real people.  


Comments

Hank's picture
This puts a human rights face on what is already an economic boondoggle.  I get why environmentalists thought ethanol was a good idea 20 years ago (with Al Gore right at the front) but I don't get why anyone thought it was a good idea 3 years ago.  And now we are stuck, maybe forever, mandating it by force of law and then subsidizing it to make it competitive with gas.

Hank Campbell | 12/20/08 | 01:13 AM
Hatice Cullingford's picture
Ethanol is a great idea for all the plant-based waste/garbage. Let's move in that direction instead.


Hatice Cullingford | 12/20/08 | 07:01 AM
Hank's picture
There's a cost/efficienct issue people seem to miss and I keep meaning to write an article on it but never get it done.    Ethanol is an obvious waste because it produces greenhouse gases to produce.   Likewise, placeboes such as CFL bulbs make people feel better about how much energy they are saving, except they are made in China and shipped here.

Biofuels are always a great concept.  Algae is the latest rage because people ignore data and activists insist the miracle of capitalism will make it cheaper and more efficient if enough people use it - just like they did with ethanol, wind and solar power, which are all economic boondoggles.   Until it's too late, like we found with ethanol.

Hank Campbell | 12/20/08 | 11:15 AM
Hatice Cullingford's picture
Biofuels from waste/garbage are always the greatest because waste/garbage has to be dealt with. I am fond of Sweden for that also, i.e. Swedish Biogas, Swedish Biogas and Mars Missions. The matter becomes "baaaaad" in space as we observe with the ISS.

Cost/efficiency is not missed in my book. When cities have to baby-sit or ship out their waste, it is cheaper, more efficient, and cleaner to process directly at the source. I do have a couple of new articles in mind also. One problem is to get data on cities to bring home the gravity of the situation.

Ethanol is here to stay but we have to have a heart on its way. Are there merits in boondoggles? They seem to flourish all the time. Back to the heart of the matter..

People produce greenhouse gases in more ways than one, right?

P.S. Reporting from the Land of Small, briefly, how do you select 70% for the upload? And where? I tried again at image options size and ... ??? Specifically???
P.P.S. Thanks.

Hatice Cullingford | 12/20/08 | 13:08 PM
Hank's picture
P.S. Reporting from the Land of Small, briefly, how do you select 70% for the upload? And where? I tried again at image options size and ... ??? Specifically???

Let me look into that because I know other people have the same issue ith resizing through that menu.   However, if you click 'Switch to plain text editor' and change the size manually, I know it works.  I just don't know why it sometimes doesn't from our rich text editor.

Hank Campbell | 12/20/08 | 14:43 PM

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