7th Gen Blog

If I could say it any better I would. But Thomas Friedman’s 9/20/06 column in the New York Times on taxing ethanol imports highlights the political and structural obstacles to common sense.

Friedman writes:

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty. Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

The question is what do we do to change this ridiculous situation? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

My recent post about roadkill and global warming generated some thought-provoking comments, among them this note from fellow inspired protagonist Kevin:

Jeffrey, if you eat meat despite the evidence that a meat-based diet is non-sustainable, how then can we have hope about the future of ethical consumerism?

To shed light on the answer, Stanford's Center for Social Innovation recently came out with an interesting report.

There may be a fundamental disconnect in the marketing of socially responsible products. It is the difference between what people say they want, and what they actually buy.

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_other_csr/

If you have the time, I would certainly appreciate hearing your response.

I was going to post my reply here simply as a comment on the original post, but then I thought that maybe it deserved to be a post of its own. So here goes…

The battle to prevent International Paper from unnecessarily dirtying Vermont's air and irresponsibly poisoning her citizens continues. This afternoon, Vermont Public Radio aired a story on the latest tire burn developments featuring our very own Scienceman, Martin Wolf (a man who knows his way around paper mill contaminants), explaining just what we've been doing about it. Give it a listen...

It’s no real surprise that scientists announced this week that America’s summer was the hottest since 1936 (can you say “Dust Bowl”?) and the second warmest since official records started being kept in 1895. It’s quite clear that the heat is on and that we humans are responsible.

So what are we gonna do about it? Here are two things I found this week that will go a long way toward pulling our climate back from the brink…