One of the farmers who organized the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's annual meeting put it nicely:
"The ethanol craze means that we're going to burn up the Midwest's last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks."
The American public is in chill mode in more ways than one. We are finally freezing our asses off in the Northeast after a supernaturally mild December and January, and the heating oil trucks are once again making the rounds of the home furnaces (and running down their inventories). But we're also chillin' on the concept that there is an energy problem per se. The public is convinced that we are one IPO away from attaining the sovereign rescue remedy that will permit us to continue running our Happy Motoring utopia.
The public is bombarded daily with feel-good news about new bio-engineered bacteria that can turn sawmill refuse into high-test gasoline, cornucopias of miracle diesel beans, lithium batteries that will take you from Hackensack to Chicago on a single charge, and still (despite all the evidence against feasibility) hydrogen-powered SUVs. The public is convinced that we will enter a nirvana of "energy independence" just-in-time — the same way that WalMart miraculously restocks it's shelves.
The truth is, we will never be energy independent as long as we remain a car-fixated society. It's that simple. If we can't let go of the sunk costs associated with Happy Motoring, we're probably not going to make it very far into the future, either as a nation or a viable economy or as an orderly society. By sunk costs I mean our previous investments in car-oriented infrastructure.
For the moment, I blame the Democrats (and I am a
registered Democrat). One shouldn't expect rational thinking from the
current generation of Republicans. The sheer fact that so many of them
have sold their allegiance to the Born Again dominionist fold, where
magical thinking rules, means that they are incapable of evaluating the
energy predicament — in fact, if they are sincere in their apocalyptic
dogma, then many of them would probably welcome a global struggle over
oil, with all the military mischief it would entail in the vicinity of
the Holy Land.
No, I blame the Democrats. The Democrats are supposed to
represent the reality-based faction of general public. They should be
able to do the math without getting sidetracked by Jesus-haunted
visions of WalMart running on biodiesel. They should be willing to tell
the public the hard truth before it's absolutely too late to make some
collective decisions that would lessen the hardship in the
circumstances we face — like allocating some federal funds to passenger
rail, or reforming codes, incentives, and subsidies that favor suburban
sprawl, or replacing the FICA taxes with a gasoline tax (as proposed by
oil man Jeffrey Brown of Dallas), or by aggressively promoting local
agriculture.
Most of the university professors in the USA are liberals or
progressives or Democrats, or at least not Republicans trafficking in
magic. University professors in the so-called "hard sciences,"
especially, have to lead reality-based lives which encompass such ideas
as cause and effect and conclusions derived from facts.
They ought to know that we are not going to run the interstate highways
on any combination of "alternative" fuels. Why are they not challenging
the politicians who would pander to the public's delusions?
How about the policy wonks in the progressive foundations? Why is Amory
Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute still trying to sell the snake
oil of a "hyper-car," when its chief effect is to reinforce the
mistaken idea that we can continue to be a car-dependent society?
This may be the Democrat's last chance to get their shit together. The
Republicans are already done. You can stick a fork in them. But the
Democrats have an opportunity to lead America back into a reality-based
channel of history's stream. They can tell the truth about climate
change, about oil-and-gas, and about the terrible misinvestments that
we have to put behind us. They can prepare the public to deal with the
new facts of life.
My guess is that this may happen with Al Gore emerging as the party's
candidate for president. The 2008 election campaign has started way too
early and the candidates who have announced so far, whatever their
merits or demerits, are liable to exhaust themselves. If Al Gore
intends to step up to the plate — and I think he will — he would be
wise to chill out and wait until at least next fall. That seems to be
what he is doing anyway.
I usually attend, and was paid-up with my dues with the PASA--Penna.'s Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Bluberry Hill Veg Farm (organic) and Wildflowers CSA...
A time can come when a war stops most all of everything. A time is here when we can't afford to not farm, and not afford to stop growing healthy farm food.
It is you who has the blog I made my first post, I think? A April 10th day of remembrance, when I placed my Mother to rest under the spring season's green sod. Purple field violets were in bloom. Thanks for what your doing. Try and stay sober. We need your good blog scribbles in the public arena. I missed PASA. darn it. PASA does excellent work in behalf of small farms. Don't support the hog-subsidized butcher's, absent, penny-loafer landowners, okay. They hire other's to drive big monster tractors and they get DUI's while driving their govt.-paid-for, cotton-pickin' SUV's...sheezee. peezee.
That explains his bio-diesel hallucinations. But it doesn't explain all the Iowa politicians who've jumped on the ethanol-and-bio-diesel bandwagon. They don't share Willie's nutty vision; they just don't know and can't envision any other way to save the region, short-term, from an economic slump of epic proportions.
The Midwest is on the Road to Perdition. Most folks out here on the acres don't know it. Them that do know it can't think what to do about it because they don't yet know what Perdition is going to look like (other than the fact that it will be brown in color). In the end, things will be as things always have been: Money will flee to greener pastures. After some months or years of confusion, the people on the ground will invent ways to cope. Then Money will come back, buy out the inventors, and use their inventions to extort more money from the people who stayed and took it on the chin. I think the process is called "The Wheel of Fortune" -- or is that a TV show?
I gotta quit reading Dickens and sink my teeth into some serious literature -- maybe The Des Moines Register or The Cedar Rapids Gazette. Then I'd know something useful and I could be a leader, like Gov. Vilsack.
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February 22, 2007
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One of the farmers who organized the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's annual meeting put it nicely: 
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