Calling biofuels "a bad idea" just doesn't do it justice. I think Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, got it about right: it’s "a crime against humanity."
Ziegler’s reasoning will be familiar to many members of this community. It is often more lucrative to turn crops into gasoline for the rich than into food for the poor. Likewise, it often pays more to use arable land for growing biofuel than for growing food. So biofuels have helped push the price of food to record levels. Millions of Americans who had been experiencing "food insecurity" are now experiencing, er, greater food insecurity. And things are worse in parts of the third world.
Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
Remember, filling an SUV’s tank with gas requires using roughly enough corn to feed a person for a year.
It’s a broken world.
Meanwhile, the Amazon is being burned to make room for plantations growing biofuels. Of course, the biofuels are then called "carbon-neutral."
According to a studies published today in Science Magazine (as reported in the Independent)
Growing crops to make biofuels results in vast amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and does nothing to stop climate change or global warming, according to the first thorough scientific audit of a biofuel's carbon budget.
Scientists have produced damning evidence to suggest that biofuels could be one of the biggest environmental con-tricks because they actually make global warming worse by adding to the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide that they are supposed to curb.
It’s a broken world.
Much of the demand is driven by Government policy in the US and Europe. The deforestation and famine in the third world are caused by policies designed to help the rich world navigate the energy crisis.
It’s a broken world.
Not that I have any right to get on a high horse about biofuels. I understand that compromises on some issues are necessary. Take the 2007 Energy Bill; it was a tradeoff. It contained a lot of good stuff (replacing subsidies for oil with subsidies for solar, wind and efficiency), some harmless stuff (increasing CAFÉ standards to be only a couple of decades behind the rest of the world) and a crime against humanity (a massive requirement to create more ethanol).
I helped organize the DKos part of the effort to pressure congress to pass the bill. (1, 2, 3, 4). In writing those diaries, and interacting with the community, I learned some things that will help the next time round. And I was immensely grateful for and proud of the community’s response at helping to flood congress with calls.
Unfortunately, our efforts weren't enough. As the Bill progressed, the Dems naturally caved on all the good parts. But the mandate and subsidies for massive ethanol expansion remained in there, with strong bipartisan support.
It’s a broken world.
Here’s some more of Luria’s teaching, with emphasis on the new bit:
as God poured the Light into the vessels, they catastrophically shattered, tumbling down toward the realm of matter. Thus, our world consists of countless shards of the original vessels entrapping sparks of the Divine Light.
Many people can see that Light. Duke Ellington sure could
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people passin' by
I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do
They're really saying, I love you.
I hear babies cry, I watch them grow
They'll learn much more, than I'll ever know
But I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
I’m not bold enough to share much of my personal life here, but I will say that the first two lines of that last stanza have particular meaning to me. There are some babies whose growth I watch quite closely:
They’ll learn more than I’ll ever know.
This is the remarkable part: things are getting better. Much, much better.
Even as Rabbi Luria studied Kaballah with his students in 16th century Russia, 1000 miles away
In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth...
Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution--all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
And war? Well, as the Economist recently noted:
The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005... In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s.
Think today’s economy sucks? Imagine living several hundred years ago, when job titles included Galley Slave, Serf, and Emptier of Chamber Pots for Those Who Enjoy Carbonizing Cats.
And then there’s the day-to-day stuff. When King Solomon’s tummy started rumbling in the middle of the night, he probably found it hard to get a hot midnight snack, let alone a bowl of ice cream. Many of his kids died in infancy, and some of his wives and concubines probably died in childbirth. He never talked to a friend on the other side of the continent, never heard a Mozart symphony and never read a novel. He never understood why the stars shine, nor the reasons for the colors of the rainbow.
I learned why the stars shine.
I learned about the colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky. I learned much more than Solomon ever knew.
So has nearly everyone else with a college education.
Humanity is moving in the right direction
Here’s the final bit of Luria’s teaching:
Humanity’s great task involves helping God by freeing and reuniting the scattered Light, raising the sparks back to Divinity and restoring the broken world.
Jews call this Tikkun Olam—healing the world.
(Digressing a step from the sublime to the, er, less sublime, let’s look at this site. Yes, Kos is a bit broken now. The primary wars are rough; a lot of good people are leaving, and it’s tough to get a word in edgewise through the "Obama/Clinton will save us/destroy us!!!" crowd. This too shall pass—possibly within a few weeks. Looking at the big picture, the site is getting less broken. As a community, we are broadening and deepening, forming ties, learning about how to try to influence congress and campaigns, meeting each other, learning how to learn those things about the world that the media won’t tell us. I doubt that DailyKos has a divine origin or once had a perfect state but—-if it did, we are restoring it.)
Yes, the process of healing the world has setbacks-- one glance through the headlines of this accursed century proves that. Some future setbacks might be far larger—I have no idea how many of us will survive Global Warming, and I have no idea how many of the world’s poor will survive the rich world’s "solutions" (like biofuels) to the energy crisis.
Some reversals might be permanent. A judgment error, a megalomaniac, or a computer malfunction could lob a few missiles over the Pole, leading to a permanent end to humanity. Even Luria’s shards are not indestructible.
But I believe that, overall, we are putting the shards back together. We are creating (Luria would say restoring) types of beauty our ancestors literally could not imagine. We are removing sharp, jagged edges from our world. We stopped using slaves to grow cotton; one day we will stop using arable land in a hungry nation to grow biofuels. Today, we still dump gigatons of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere which are melting the Arctic and will kill countless species; but one day, we will stop carbonizing our biosphere even as it screams in agony, just as we stopped carbonizing cats.
It’s a broken world. We are fixing it.
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