August 1, 2007 Vol. 3, No. 15

Not a whole lot of cracking great news to impart this time out, but as always I’ve been gathering bits and pieces of
information on a few subjects with longer-term stories in mind. It’s an on-going job, of course, and you could say
that pen-pushers like me are intellectual packrats. I don’t mean to boast that we’re a wildly intellectual bunch,
hardly, rather that the things we collect are not of a physical sort. I do have thick paper files launched years ago but more recently it’s all about bulging sub-directories on my computer. Some of those sub-directories still reside only in my tiny noggin and on bits of random paper carried in my left front pocket. Every once in a while I review that pocket and discover interesting stuff. It’s an adventure in there.

Perhaps the best hunk of paper in that thick wad right now has some notes on what may be the single most interesting subject to me these days — the biofuel phenomenon, which I’ve written about in this digital space a couple of times in the recent past. I’m working toward a full understanding of where we are with this thorny issue – and I do mean thorny – and a proper story will ensue shortly.

But for the moment, alongside my sister’s new phone number, the name of a book I absolutely must get, directions to a lacrosse arena, and six ideas for other major feature stories, I see a couple of useful biofuel notes. One tells me that fully a third of all U.S. grain production will be devoted to ethanol and other biofuels when the present construction of several ethanol plants is done this year and next. A third.

And what, as I’ve asked before, will that do to the price of food?

Another note on that one piece of paper reminds me to look into the so-called ‘tortilla riots’ in Mexico earlier this
year. Until I heard a fellow called Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute speaking on CBC radio a week or so
ago, I didn’t know there’d been such unrest.

Why riots? Because the price of corn in Mexico had doubled, making the staple food of the average Mexican dude rise very sharply in price. He didn’t like it much. Why did the price rise so much? Because substantial portions of the corn crop had been diverted to making biofuel.

Remember how I wrote a while back about the price of beer in Germany going way up? The price of bread too? This is an issue, a social issue, and it will get worse.

The last note on that much-folded piece of paper tells me an extraordinary fact — that a 25-gallon tank filled with
pure ethanol would be made with enough grain/corn/soy or whatever to feed one person for a year. Holy cow.

It’s more than a little ironic, by the way, that some of the loudest campaigners against the ravages of our oil-based western economies, organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, are also fighting against uncontrolled, unplanned exploitation of farmland and forest for the production of an oil alternative.

In the U.K., Greenpeace and that lot say the government’s biofuel proposals are so incompetent that they’re in real danger of increasing global warming emissions, not reducing them.

Ed Matthew of Friends of the Earth says, “The risks are so great that biofuels should be the last option to reduce
transport emissions, not the first.”

They’re concerned generally about destroying wetlands and rain forests and the like. Like a lot of Germans, I’m
just worried about the price of beer. But I jest. Sort of.

Anyway, the point – and I dedicate this to Claude Robert, who asked me a few months ago where the heck he could get biofuel in Canada – is that this option isn’t as simple as it may look on the surface.

ON A MORE PRACTICAL NOTE, but still with fuel, I note that Kenworth has added a feature to its website – a calculator to help truck operators estimate the potential cost savings with the no-idle Clean Power system. It shows the difference between that optional feature and idling the truck’s engine to provide heating, cooling and 120-volt AC power.