The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!

The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!

As our politicians drill the human food supply for energy

by Christopher Calder On December 19th, 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the "Energy Independence and Security Act" (summary pdf 107kb), which mandates that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be produced in the United States every year by 2022, a nearly fivefold increase over 2006 production levels. Ethanol (vodka minus H2O) and "biodiesel" (a.k.a. cooking oil) are made from food or inedible crops which displace normal agricultural activity. Biofuel crops include corn, soybeans, rapeseed (canola oil), sugarcane, palm trees (palm oil), and cassava, as well as experimental "second generation" crops such as switchgrass, jatropha, giant reed, hemp, and algae. [see picture of George W. Bush holding bottle of ethanol]

In 2007, 54% of the world's corn was grown in the United States, and an ever increasing percentage of that crop ended up in gas tanks instead of stomachs. The corn required to fill the 18.5 gallon gas tank of a Toyota Camry with ethanol could feed one human being for 270 days. Ethanol production took only about 6 to 7% of American corn in 1998, but has grown as a cancer on our food supply, taking somewhere between 30 to 38% by 2008. Readers should be warned that it is difficult to get honest figures on exactly how much US corn is currently being turned into ethanol, as Secretary of Agriculture Edward Schafer has effectively turned the USDA into a propaganda machine for the biofuel industry. President Bush's Katrina style mishandling of America's food supply is a disgrace, as any responsible president would appoint a Secretary of Agriculture concerned with food supply security, not with the profits of ethanol manufacturers.

The US is also diverting increasing amounts of soybean and rapeseed oil to biodiesel production, and world supplies of cooking oil are getting tight. Corn, soybeans, and rapeseed are the foundation of America's food supply because they feed our farm animals which give us dairy products, eggs, and meat. When the cost of animal feed is pushed up by biofuel production, the price American families pay for those food items also rise. [see corn price chart] Biofuels require massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizers to produce, and the price of fertilizer rose by more than 200% in 2007 alone. Nitrogen fertilizers are largely made from natural gas, which experienced little overall price gain in 2007, so the main driving force of fertilizer price hyperinflation is undeniably biofuel production. Biofuels are pushing up the cost of all foods that require fertilizers, including rice, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli.

NEWS - Scientists warn of lack of vital phosphorus as biofuels raise demand

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, global food prices rose an incredible 40% in 2007, which qualifies as hyperinflation. The World Bank states that the cost of staple foods rose by 83% during the 3 year period from 2005 to 2008. The United Nations warns that 82 countries face food emergencies because cereal stocks are at an all-time low. Unfortunately, few consumers understand exactly why food prices have risen so dramatically, and even our most respected politicians do not comprehend the magnitude of the global food crisis which they themselves helped create.

WARNING - From Barack Obama's campaign website - "Obama will require 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be included in the fuel supply by 2022 and will increase that to at least 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol by 2030."

NEWS! - Obama links to ethanol industry exposed by NYT - Obama's ignores warnings from scientists and food advocates and "wants to shovel $150 billion over 10 years into biofuels."

Kay Bailey Hutchison proposes a sane energy plan that will actually produce new energy!

The United Nations states that its charity programs can no longer afford to feed the starving peoples of the world because of the high cost of staple foods created by biofuel production. Mr. Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, repeatedly denounced biofuels as "a crime against humanity," and warned that “This is an imminent massacre.” Ziegler explained that families in the United States and the European Union spend only about 10 to 20% of their budgets on food, but those in poor countries are forced to spend 60 to 90%, so “It’s a question of survival.” The new UN food envoy, Mr. Olivier De Schutter, has also called for U.S. and E.U. biofuel targets to be abandoned, and said the world food crisis is "a silent tsunami affecting 100 million people."

Food banks in the US are running low on supplies, and many families who use to contribute food are now in need of help themselves. When farmers plant more corn in order to cash in on high prices created by biofuel mandates, they reduce production of other crops such as wheat. The USDA stated that in May, 2008, US wheat supplies were lower than at any time since 1948, in part because 16% of US farmland formerly planted in wheat and soybeans was planted in corn for ethanol instead.

The increased cost of oil has pushed the price of all products higher, but biofuel production has amplified an expected food price rise by shrinking food supplies, thus turning a manageable cost problem into a global humanitarian disaster. Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has! The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat because we grow biofuel crops using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor we use to grow food. As massive new biofuel mandates have only recently been signed into law, the world should be warned that the biofuel food price spiral has only just begun. [see Parallels - Biofuels and Mao's "Great Leap Forward"]

The ideology of biofuel production sounds wholesome superficially; a kind of green, health food store way of producing energy, and that is part of the reason biofuels have an almost cult-like following in our scientifically undereducated United States Congress. US biofuel plans are based on selfish political calculation and hype, without legitimate ecological or economic justification.

Ten reasons to oppose the Obama-Pelosi-Bush biofuel plan

1) Starvation - Globally, biofuel production will contribute to the early, avoidable deaths of at least between 10 and 20 million people in the year 2008 alone. With 100 million of the world's poorest put in jeopardy, the body count could climb much higher. The more we artificially push up grain prices by manufacturing biofuels, the more people we kill. 4 billion of earth's 6.66 billion human inhabitants live in poverty, yet our politicians wish to starve people to feed cars.

The poor of the Third World, the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, and all those living on low fixed incomes are the hardest hit by high food prices. News reports show people in Haiti resorting to eating mud because American biofuel mandates have made grains unaffordable. Most Americans do not realize that global food reserves are at historic lows, while proven global oil reserves are at historic highs. With biofuels you pay twice; once at the pump and then again at the supermarket, which effectively makes biofuel production a massive new tax on food.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) calculates that biofuels are responsible for at least 30% of grain price hikes. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul put the figure at between 30 and 70%. A detailed analysis by Don Mitchell, an internationally respected economist at the World Bank, states that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%! US Congressman Jim McGovern admitted that "If there was a secret vote (on biofuels), there is a pretty large number of people who would like to reassess what we are doing.”

2) Higher cost - Biofuels increase our federal budget deficit because they depend on large subsidies just to exist. Without federal and state subsidies and political mandates, there would be no significant free market demand for biofuels in the United States. Ethanol contains 33% less energy than gasoline, so it takes 15 gallons of pure ethanol to travel the same number of miles that could be traveled using just 10 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline. Our politicians have effectively mandated that we all get lower gas mileage at a time we are paying record high prices at the pump. Ethanol fuel blends increase engine maintenance costs and lower engine reliability, a particularly significant issue for light aircraft owners.

To calculate the true cost of biofuels you must add together all of their negatives; the high direct cost of producing the fuel itself, increased cost of food worldwide, loss of water used for irrigation, and increased damage done to the environment. Judged in total, biofuels are tremendously more expensive than using gasoline and diesel fuel made from oil. Economist Ronald Cooke estimated that just the production and food penalty costs of ethanol was close to $6.89 a gallon back in February, 2007, before recent spectacular corn price rises. By contrast, Shell Oil physicist Harold Vinegar believes that by the year 2015 oil can be extracted from shale for about $30 per barrel. Colorado alone has massive shale reserves reported to contain more oil potential than the entire Middle East did before the British began drilling in Iran in 1908.

Corn hit $6 a bushel on April 3, 2008, up 30% in only 3 months, and up 300% in two years. Corn then rose to over $7 a bushel on June 12th, 2008, due to Midwest flooding. Barack Obama claims we can gradually switch from corn to cellulosic ethanol and thus save food supplies, but three agricultural economists at Iowa State University state that ethanol made from cellulose will never be economically viable. Switchgrass, crop waste, and wood chip ethanol schemes are too expensive to help. [study pdf 180kb]

3) Environmental damage - Biofuel production harms the environment by eroding topsoil and encouraging the destruction of forests, which are desperately needed to soak up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the major greenhouse gas that causes global warming, and the two great sponges of carbon dioxide are the oceans and the forests. The oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2 as they are becoming increasingly acidic due to pollution, so if we also destroy our forests global warming will accelerate that much faster. Biofuel schemes speed up global warming because the entire biofuel production process, from beginning to end, releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while destroying native forests which naturally clean and rejuvenate the air we breathe.

Roland Clift, a senior science advisor to the British Government, stated that British plans to promote biofuels are a "scam." The demand for biofuels is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm trees (palm oil) and similar crops. “We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70 to 300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction.” Biofuel production transports carbon into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered (trapped) in soils and native vegetation. In gaseous form these carbon based molecules, such as carbon dioxide and methane, act as a automobile windshield and hold in heat gained from solar radiation.

Biofuel advocates ignore the fact that when we pump up grain prices through biofuel production, we raise grain prices all over the world which gives other countries a strong financial incentive to burn down rainforests in order to plant more food. U.S. corn subsidies are currently driving the rapid destruction of the Amazon basin. The last thing we should be doing is encouraging nonessential agricultural activity, which vastly enlarges our heavy human footprint on earth and speeds desertification of the planet. Jatropha, the new biofuel crop being promoted in tropical countries, is effectively a giant toxic monster weed which will have a destructive impact on wildlife and biodiversity, and will be almost impossible to get rid of once planted, thus destroying the future farming potential of the land.

The highly respected journal SCIENCE published the Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change, which states that the production of biofuels from grains or switchgrass greatly increases the release of greenhouse gases and is far worse for the environment than using gasoline. The authors found that "Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%." [Also see Biofuels: an unfolding disaster pdf 514kb]

Scientists point out that nitrogen fertilizers, which are made from natural gas, coal, and mined minerals, react with soil to unleash large amounts of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas estimated to be 296 times more effective at trapping the earth's heat than CO2. Farming contributes more to global warming each year than all land, sea, and air transportation combined, so growing vast amounts of biofuels crops will heat up the earth's atmosphere faster than if we only used imported oil. A recent study says corn ethanol biofuel production will cause a 10 to 34% increase in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers due to fertilizer run-off, thus increasing the size of the DEAD ZONE in the Gulf of Mexico. [study abstract]

4) Water shortages - Biofuel crop production causes water shortages because irrigation water is taken away from our shrinking supplies of safe drinking and agricultural water. There is not enough salt free water in the world to grow biofuel crops and still provide essential utility water for our homes and to grow sufficient food for humans to survive. It takes 9,000 gallons of water to produce just 1 gallon of biodiesel made from soybeans, so we obviously need to save our very limited supplies of ground water to grow food, not fuel. In California water is now so precious that some farmers want to sell water instead of food, and water rationing is being considered as officials fear a long term drought. Even without biofuel production, we are turning vast areas of land into desert every year through loss of topsoil due to farming for essential food.

5) It's a lie - The Obama-Pelosi-Bush "biofuel energy independence plan" is a scientific hoax and an economic fraud because all current US production methods use more energy to create biofuels than they yield in the form of biofuel itself. Biofuel advocates often distort energy efficiency calculations by leaving out essential energy inputs required to make fuel. The average American does not understand that when you pour nitrogen fertilizers on crops, you are literally pouring on fossil fuel energy. Nitrogen fertilizers are so full of chemical energy potential that they are used to make explosives, so when you grow biofuels only part of the plant's energy accumulation comes from sunlight, and the rest comes from the fossil energy we feed them. Rather than use natural gas to make fertilizer to grow biofuel crops, it would be much more efficient to alter our cars to run on natural gas directly.

"The following are the major energy inputs to industrial corn farming: nitrogen fertilizer (all fossil energy), phosphate, potash and lime (mostly fossil energy), herbicides and insecticides (all fossil energy), fossil fuels used = diesel, gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and natural gas (LG), electricity (almost all fossil energy), transportation (all fossil energy), corn seeds and irrigation (mostly fossil energy), infrastructure (mostly fossil energy), labor (mostly fossil energy). Corn produced at a large expense of fossil energy is then transformed, with even more fossil energy, into pure ethanol." - Tad W. Patzek, Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel Cycle. [833kb pdf]

Politicians hope that second and third generation biofuel crops will generate more energy than they take to produce, but those schemes have yet to be proven in the real world. Congress has decided to mandate science fiction now and prove their hypothesis later. Even proposed second and third generation biofuel plants do not eliminate the tremendous environmental damage that massive biofuel production creates.

Biofuel advocates falsely claim that ethanol is a "clean fuel" that will reduce air pollution. Ethanol blended fuels burn cleaner on a per gallon basis, but not on a miles traveled basis, because ethanol contains 33% less energy than gasoline. Ethanol blended fuels actually emit more CO2 per miles driven than ordinary gasoline in addition to emitting far more CO2 during their manufacture. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, ethanol increases the production of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 4 to 7% over gasoline. Ethanol use will increase the number of premature deaths caused by toxic exhaust gases, with deaths counts currently estimated in the thousands. Despite all this bad news, biofuel fans and many television news anchors mindlessly repeat false claims that ethanol is "green" and "renewable." If we dramatically speed up global warming by producing ethanol, soon we won't be able to "renew" much of anything.

6) It's politics and greed - The biofuel hoax was created by domestic American politics and corporate greed. Both the Democratic and Republican parties want to get the "farm vote" in the politically strategic states of Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. Our leaders, and most significantly farm state Senator Barack Obama, have put political gain ahead of the world's starving poor, the elderly on fixed incomes, and the welfare of the American middle class. It should be noted that Tom Daschle, national co-chairman of Obama's campaign, serves on the boards of three large ethanol companies. Obama himself is often flown around the country at reduced rates on corporate jets owned by the giant corn-ethanol corporation, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

Wealthy politicians can afford to pay the dramatically higher food bills that biofuel production creates, and they have decided to throw science to the wind and charge blindly into what will inevitably be branded as one of the most destructive political fiascoes of the 21st century. Ambitious young biofuel entrepreneurs and giant agricultural corporations smell the money to be made, and have lobbied our Congress in hopes of turning the farm belt into the Saudi Arabia of "renewable energy," even if the energy they supply comes at the cost of human starvation and accelerated environmental damage.

7) The outlook for biofuels is dismal - All present and future biofuels have the same problems. Biofuel crops are all too low in energy, too light in weight, and thus too bulky and expensive to transport to be of any real value. They all require vast amounts of sunlight to grow and take up too much land, water, and fertilizer resources to be economically beneficial. By contrast, coal has been successful as a valuable fuel because it is very heavy, high in energy content, and thus makes energy sense to transport. Coal already exists in the ground so you don't have to grow it, water it, or fertilize it. All biofuel schemes, planned or imagined, will never amount to a hill of beans (excuse the expression) because of the basic limitations of their solar based production process. A requirement for vast amounts of sunlight will always equal a requirement for vast amounts of land area to collect that sunlight, thus solar power schemes can never replace the massive concentrated energy reservoir of fossil fuels.

Growing switchgrass to produce ethanol from lignocellulose has most of the same drawbacks as making ethanol from corn. We will use land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor to grow switchgrass that will be diverted from food production, with soaring food prices the result. If we grow switchgrass on land currently used to graze cattle, we will reduce beef and milk production. If we grow switchgrass on unused "marginal" prairie lands, we will soon turn those marginal lands into a new dust bowl, which they may turn into anyway due to global warming. Computer models for the progression of global warming show the America Midwest and Southwest getting hotter and dryer, with much of our farm and grazing land turning into desert. We know that biofuel production will actually speed up global warming, so why are we pinning so much hope on an environmental battle plan that any fool can see will blow up in our face over time? We won't be able to produce enough biofuels to run our cars or enough food to fill our bellies.

Switchgrass and other biofuel weeds will be grown by ordinary, profit motive driven farmers, not by environmentally trained scientists. Farmers will grow switchgrass on land that could be used to grow corn, wheat, or soybeans, and farmers will want to maximize yield, so they will use lots of fertilizer to increase output. The plans biofuel idealists are trying to sell the American public will never produce the kind of "green," food friendly energy source they promise. The next great scandal will be how to get rid of all the millions of acres of invasive, deep rooted biofuel weeds once society inevitably realizes that even growing "second generation" biofuel crops is a tragic mistake.

In practical terms, there is not enough usable land area to grow a sufficient quantity of biofuel plants to meet the world's energy demands. According to professors James Jordan and James Powell, "Allowing a net positive energy output of 30,000 British thermal units (Btu) per gallon, it would still take four gallons of ethanol from corn to equal one gallon of gasoline. The United States has 73 million acres of corn cropland. At 350 gallons per acre, the entire U.S. corn crop would make 25.5 billion gallons, equivalent to about 6.3 billion gallons of gasoline. The United States consumes 170 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually. Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7% of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15% of the demand." (see The False Hope of Biofuels).

Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity. Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands. Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy. The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka. If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results. [see Shell Oil's algae research]

Using "agricultural waste" to make biofuels has its own problems (see soil scientist report). Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all; nitrous oxide. Much of the residual crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion will increase dramatically. If we mine our topsoil for energy, we will end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire. Without topsoil, the world starves!

Using wood chips to make ethanol or biodiesel sounds like a good idea until you remember that we currently use wood chips to make fuel pellets for stoves, paper, particle board, and a thousand and one building products. Every part of the trees we cut down is used for something, including bark which is used for garden mulch. The idea of sending teams of manual laborers into forests to salvage underbrush for fuel would be prohibitively expensive. Our forests are already stressed just producing lumber without tasking them with producing liquid biofuels for automobiles. Such a scheme would inevitably drive up the price of everything made from wood, creating yet another resource crisis. Making fuel from true garbage, such as used cooking oil and winery waste, is fine. Those usable true waste resources are very limited, however, and not a major energy solution for a country that uses 8 billion barrels of crude oil every year.

8) Political instability - Dramatic food price inflation created by biofuel production is causing political instability around the globe, because food products are sold in a worldwide marketplace just like oil. There have already been mass protests and/or food riots in many countries, including Mexico, Haiti, Bolivia, Morocco, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Hungary, and Italy. Some newspapers report that there have been food riots in 37 countries, and it is a full time job just keeping up with all the latest food riot news. In the United Kingdom, anger over biofuels has led to numerous street demonstrations by environmental groups. Food rationing has hit stores in the US for the first time since World War II. The great call of ordinary people around the world is for FOOD SUPPLY SECURITY, not for biofuels. Our governments are "sleepwalking into crisis" as most American television networks understate the destructive role of biofuels and often parrot pro-biofuel propaganda put out by farm state politicians and biofuel manufacturers.

9) Illegal immigration - Barack Obama imagines the United States growing and harvesting more than 60 million acres of corn and switchgrass to make ethanol, and the low paying agricultural jobs needed for this work will undoubtedly come from an expansion of illegal immigration. Unlike the smaller number of high paying skilled jobs required for nuclear energy, coal to diesel conversion, or shale to oil conversion, corn and switchgrass production is mainly a labor intensive, low paying endeavor which will be an unstoppable magnet for illegal immigrants. The more we starve the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will want to come here.

10) It's a strategic national security disaster - In the years before biofuel production, the US had large food reserves kept in storage due to the excess bounty created by modern agricultural technology. Those days are long gone, and global food reserves are now at historic lows. In earth's history there have always been great natural disasters that periodically cause poor crop harvests, such as crop diseases, insect plagues, droughts, floods, impacts of asteroids and comets, and volcanic eruptions that throw up so much dust and noxious gas into the atmosphere that sunlight is reduced for a year or longer. The eruption of the island of Krakatau in 1883 produced a 1.2 degree Celsius global temperature decline that did not return to normal until 1888, and caused poor crop harvests around the world.

When America's giant Yellowstone volcano inevitably erupts again, there will be disastrous effects on agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere. By using agriculture to produce energy for both transportation and human caloric intake, we have eliminated our strategic cushion of food reserves. When global disaster strikes, starvation will set in quickly because of government biofuel mandates. If we use nonagricultural energy sources for producing fuel for transportation, we will not suffer the double systemic insult of food and fuel shortages. Large scale biofuel production, which depends on normal climactic conditions to grow crops, is a severe threat to our national security.

We go nuclear, or we go extinct!

British scientist James Lovelock, father of the living earth Gaia theory, has stated that nuclear power is the only way to have a large human population on planet earth without causing global warming and destroying the environment. Please read James Lovelock's public statement on nuclear energy, Nuclear power is the only green solution. Lovelock states that "We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger." Nuclear power is the only technology that can produce an extremely high volume of energy using just a tiny amount of land and at reasonable cost, all without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases.

Every year the human race burns the equivalent of 400 years worth of total planetary vegetation in the condensed form of fossil fuels, so it is obviously impossible to replace all of that concentrated biomass energy by growing a relatively small volume of biofuel crops. The one and only energy source large enough to replace that massive fossilized energy reservoir is nuclear power. The mass of an atom is in its nucleus, not in its electrons, and as E=MC2 the nucleus is where the really BIG energy is stored. The tiny energy potential created by bonding and unbonding electrons through chemical reactions in the growth of vegetation must be amplified over centuries by the gradual process of fossilization in order to make it strong enough to power a heavily populated, industrialized planet.

We can slow global warming by creating an infrastructure based on nuclear energy, improved electric car battery technology, and the use of new technology to make superior quality, sulfur free gasoline and jet fuel from atmospheric carbon dioxide. [see Green Freedom 1.8mb pdf] This new energy scheme is cheaper and more practical than using hydrogen as fuel, because it is completely compatible with current vehicles and our existing energy distribution infrastructure. Intense heat from lower cost, higher temperature helium cooled prismatic block and/or pebble bed reactors is used to break down carbon dioxide into its component parts, carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide can then be combined with water in a catalytic process to make either pure hydrogen gas or more easily transportable liquid synthetic fuels that can be burned in ordinary automobile engines. Initially, the viability of this scheme could be demonstrated by using electrolysis of water to produce the needed hydrogen gas, using electricity generated from lower temperature water cooled nuclear reactors.

Nuclear power currently produces only 19.4% of our nation's electricity, so we need to build more nuclear power plants now using mass production techniques if we want to slow global warming. Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed over and over again, because only a tiny portion of the nuclear material is actually used up during each fuel cycle. When you reprocess fuel there is very little high level waste that needs to be stored at the Yucca Mountain Repository because the "waste" is reused as fuel. If you consider current stockpiles of nuclear fuel leftover from weapons programs, the amount of uranium easily available in the earth's crust for mining, the use of abundant thorium as fuel, and the benefits of using breeder reactors for recycling, then the world has enough nuclear fuel to last for at least 10,000 years.

Current nuclear power plants efficiently output 93 times more energy than they consume over their lifespan, including the energy used in their construction and decommissioning, but even that impressive figure can be improved upon. The art of nuclear power plant design has the potential to advance by leaps and bounds, becoming more efficient, cheaper, and safer. [see Generation IV nuclear power plant concepts] Even beyond the latest fourth generation nuclear power plant designs, there are credible proposals to use nanotechnology to achieve the direct conversion of nuclear energy to electricity without the use of turbines, making nuclear power plants stable, essentially solid state devices that run cold and have few moving parts. These advanced design concepts include electronically controlled nuclear reflectors for ultra-light radiation shielding, which would reduce the size and cost of nuclear reactors to a tiny fraction of today's designs. These developments could eventually lead to a portable 1 gigawatt or larger reactor that could be constructed in a factory and shipped to site on a single truck. [See Nanomaterial turns radiation directly into electricity (more details)]

The fears Americans have about civilian nuclear power plants are largely unfounded. One lone disaster that occurred at an obsolete Ukrainian reactor is insufficient reason to be eternally afraid of all nuclear power plants across the board. The old Chernobyl reactor used a dangerous design that has never been used in the West, and which did not even have a containment vessel. The 1986 Chernobyl accident was caused by Soviet engineers conducting irresponsible experiments that were unrelated to normal civilian power production, and which would never be allowed in the West. The Chernobyl accident killed a total of 56 people, a great tragedy, but not a nation killing disaster.

Nuclear power plants in America have an excellent record for safety and pollution free operation. By contrast, the over 600 coal burning power plants which produce 49% of our nation's electricity unleash tremendous pollution. They emit acid rain creating sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen, tons of toxic mercury, and an enormous skyward bound river of carbon dioxide gas which represents 10% of all CO2 emissions worldwide. Coal power plants also spew out thorium and uranium (see article), both radioactive metals which naturally accumulate in coal. Incredibly, the potential nuclear energy value of these trace metals far exceeds the energy value of the combustible carbon content of the coal itself. Coal power plants release microscopic particulate matter, which clogs the lungs and is attributed to causing approximately 24,000 premature deaths in the United States every year; 428 times the Chernobyl death toll!

Prismatic block and pebble bed reactors are inherently meltdown proof due to the basic laws of physics. If the reactor's cooling system should fail, the core temperature automatically lowers itself to safe levels without mechanical intervention. Building new, more efficient standardized nuclear power plants using mass production techniques for major structural and control components can make nuclear power a bargain. Just like manufacturing television sets, the more you build using the same proven design the cheaper they become. If we build enough standardized reactors, it is conceivable that we could cut the cost of nuclear power in half, which could mean an essentially endless supply of sulfur free synthetic gasoline that sells for $2.00 a gallon at the pump.

Other positive ideas to consider

Solar and wind power are positive developments, but they can only hope to satisfy perhaps 20% of our energy needs because they tap into natural energy sources that are far too diffuse and fluctuating to power an advanced, industrialized nation. How much solar and wind power can we generate on a still, windless night? Solar power advocates have suggested that we could satisfy 69% of United States electricity needs for the year 2050 by covering 34,000 square miles of our beautiful Southwestern desert with solar panels, thus turning much of our nation's "living desert" into a vast DEAD ZONE. Alternative energy sources currently produce only 2.4% of America's electricity, so even an increase to 20% would be a heroic undertaking. If we wished to make solar and wind power our prime energy sources, we would have to revert to a horse and buggy economy and intentionally kill off the majority of the earth's human population. William Tucker's article, Food Riots Made in the USA, explains in easy to understand terms why solar and wind power can never compete with nuclear energy.

To lower energy costs in the short term, we should begin drilling in the Alaska ANWR oil reserve, which will do far less environmental damage than plunging ahead with biofuel production. Drilling on the proposed 2,000 acres of ANWR's 19.6 million acres will have inconsequential impact on vegetation and wildlife. [see The costly symbolism of ANWR] The Bakken Oil Formation, which runs from North Dakota through Saskatchewan and Manitoba, holds billions of barrels of recoverable oil, which we can extract without driving up the cost of food. Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming have massive oil shale deposits that are suitable for extraction using newly developed "in-situ" (in ground and in place) oil recovery techniques. The United States has large oil deposits off both coasts that can be tapped if Congress starts taking the energy crisis seriously (Poll shows 74% support coastal drilling). Converting cars and trucks to run on cheaper natural gas can help reduce our dependence on oil products, and this can be accomplished comparatively quickly.

General Motors has made unsubstantiated claims that it has an economical way to make ethanol from garbage, including old tires. If true, then their new process does not need government subsidies because market forces alone will make it profitable. Building large numbers of nuclear power plants now is a good idea no matter what the future holds for transportation fuels, because we will always need more electricity for homes and industry. Phasing out old coal burning power plants should be a top priority, as they produce the most greenhouse gas and unleash the most pollutants.

The crime of the century that you can stop

The Obama-Pelosi-Bush biofuel scheme is a prescription for planetary suicide. It dramatically shrinks the human food supply while rapidly accelerating global warming and aggravating water shortages. As a politically concocted man made disaster, it is reminiscent of Chairman Mao Tse Tung's 1958 Five Year Plan, known as "The Great Leap Forward," in which China's agriculture based economy was forcefully shifted to greater industrial output at the expense of food production. Mao's well meaning ideas ended up killing millions through starvation.

If you do not want food prices to continue their wild inflationary spiral, write your political representatives and ask that all biofuel mandates and subsidies be ended. If we stop biofuels now, food prices will start declining instead of rising, your local food banks will become full again, and the United Nations and other charitable organizations will be able to meet their moral obligations to help feed the poor. We can then concentrate on the authentically productive energy sources, such as oil, oil shale, clean coal technology, and ultimately synthetic fuels made from carbon free nuclear energy. Those who continue to promote biofuels are on the wrong side of science, economics, morality, and history.

Christopher Calder email = calderhouse at yahoo.com my home page

Notice: Feel free to repost or publish The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis! You can contact your federal political representatives here. You can also digitally sign a petition to end all biofuel mandates, and a petition to drill for oil on American soil.

See: Shocking biofuel world food crisis news

See: Biofuelwatch

Christopher Calder is an advocate for world food supply security with no financial interest in any energy related business. This webpage was created on December 19th, 2007, and is being continuously updated and revised as events unfold.