this might be old news for the better informed among you, but we have been sold a lie.

i've often had the casual thought that it should be a relatively simple thing to develop a clean, renewable source of hydrocarbon-based fuel to continue to energize our internal-combustion-driven society... i mean, plants fix carbon into all kinds of fabulous molecular shapes all the day long, so why can't we - the dominant species on the planet - find a way to make this happen in an artificial, sustainable fashion?  you take a simple hydrocarbon, force it into an aromatic conformation, and presto, you can make your own aromatic hydrocarbon in one gazillionth of the time that it takes to convert dinosaur meat into texas tea. maybe genetics and bacteria could do this for us.

the escalating price of oil over the past few years have enabled and encouraged all kinds of research into alternate sources of fuel - accelerated by an increasingly isolationist prerogative of north americans towards foreign oil and energy supply chains.  our zeal to relieve ourselves of the dependency on the massive oil reserves of the middle east have inadvertently caused a global crisis that has compounded the very problem that environmentalists are seeking to counteract.

biofuels are supposedly a cleaner source of hydrocarbon energy - since they are grown naturally as plant crops and contribute to an agrarian society, the prospect of deriving fuel from the sun and the soil seems so much more sensible, warm and fuzzy, than digging up the earth, mining coal and burning it into the atmosphere, or in smashing uranium atoms and creating indelible heavy water wastes.

but here are some numbers that are worth considering, courtesy of an alarmist (admittedly left-leaning) report from TIME magazine:

• 365: the number of days one person could be fed on the corn needed to fill an ethanol-fuelled SUV;
• $100 billion: estimated size of 2010 biofuel market;
• 300,000: hectares of Brazilian rain forest lost in the last six months of 2007.

i'm not going to try and distill down all of the terrifying text that shook me to the core as i read this article into a stupid blog entry, but it seems to me that economics once again has completely failed to intrinsically navigate mankind in the direction of a sustainable solution.  here's what i mean:

"U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon... The price of soybeans goes up... and the forest comes down."

in a nutshell, the drive to improve the environmental-friendliness of our petrol-driven economy is driving the world to radically devalue one of the most valuable environmental assets we have to safeguard - standing tropical forests.  and of even greater concern - farmland that could be utilised to feed the ever-increasing population of the world is instead, going to feed our ever-increasing need to get in our cars and drive somewhere or transport something that we could grow locally.  we are crippling our planet's capacity for dealing with greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming, depleting our planet's food reserves, and ethanol-powered consumer vehicles aren't even in wide-spread production yet.

i can't even continue with this analysis, because i've had a hard day and i need to focus on work.  the picture to the left says everything to me.  growing up on the prairies of alberta, i'm used to huge sections of land allocated to growing only the hardiest of grain crops.  i never thought that i would see the day that the most lush and fruitful earth on the planet - home to the most greatest degree of biodiversity known to man - would be consumed with homogenously growing such a nutritionally vacuous products as fucking corn.  i don't even eat corn.  the photo is of a "tiny slice of preserved transitional rain forest ... surrounded by soybean crops in Brazil's Mato Grosso state."  it makes me want to vomit.

this adds credibility to my belief that regardless of the problem of survival facing our species, and tragically in spite of the sincerity and earnestness of the people charged with finding a solution, mankind will almost certainly make matters worse for himself until mother nature (or some disgruntled super-villain) finds a way to smack him down and make it right.

- g

song of the day for getting SUPER PISSED OFF at how we've mishandled our environmental responsibilities: beds are burning, midnight oil