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  • From: Keith Johnson <keithdj@mindspring.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Interesting challenge to ethanol thinking
  • Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 01:40:30 -0400

Addition to the list

Scott Vlaun wrote:
A few things come to mind.

Lack of real accounting of the energy used to create and transport the fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and seed corn for the corn crop.

Damage to the environment from the above factors.
Damage to the ocean by: the creation of huge dead zones; death of coral reefs due to CO2 induced acidity; devolutional shift to a jelly-fish, red tide, and toxic slime-dominated ocean ecology as fisheries collapse; huge gyres of plastic trash clogging vast areas of the Pacific, diminished brain function and seizeures in marine mammals and other creatures due to toxic algae thriving on ag pollutants.
Damage to soils from chemically intensive corn production.

Depletion of aquifers to irrigate corn and water cattle.

Damage to the ozone from the methane that doesn't get captured from all that manure.

This might be a good way to partially mitigate the disaster of modern feedlot agriculture, but I doubt it will be the silver bullet that allows us to go on being energy gluttons for the indefinite future.


Scott Vlaun
Moose Pond Arts+Ecology
Design Solutions for a Sustainable Future

On Oct 3, 2006, at 2:10 PM, Bill McDorman wrote:
An interesting challenge to some commonly held assumptions about
biofuels in the latest issue of Wired Magazine:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/ethanol.html

I would be interested in other comments.

bill
-- __o
_'\<,_
___________(_)/ (_)_______________
Bill W. McDorman
Seeds Trust, High Altitude Gardens
PO Box 596
Cornville, AZ 86325
928.649.3315
bm@seedsave.org
--
Keith Johnson
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516
Bloomington, IN 47408
(812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting



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