Grand Potentate
Supporter of Possible Sexual Deviants
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Welcome to the environment thread. All global warming, science, and related shit that's coming out recently has be morbidly depressed, so I figured it was worth collecting so that I can ruin everyone else's fucking day.
Lets start with our lying jerkoff-in-chief and his stupid fucking ethanol policies:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-dirty-cost-obamas-green-power-push-0
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/12/ap-obama-s-ethanolpolicyravagestheenvironment.html
Lets start with our lying jerkoff-in-chief and his stupid fucking ethanol policies:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-dirty-cost-obamas-green-power-push-0
The secret, dirty cost of Obama's green power push
CORYDON, Iowa (AP) — The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
- by DINA CAPPIELLO and MATT APUZZO
- original
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. When President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and contaminated water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have been converted on Obama's watch.
Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.
Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, polluted rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.
The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative consequences.
All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president's push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.
In some cases, such as the decision to allow wind farms that sometimes kill eagles, the administration accepts environmental costs because they pale in comparison to the havoc global warming could ultimately cause.
In the case of ethanol, the administration believes it must encourage the development of next-generation biofuels that will someday be cleaner and greener than today's.
"That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."
But next-generation biofuels haven't been living up to expectations. And the government's predictions on ethanol have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.
That makes the hidden costs even more significant.
"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a Democratic member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, Iowa, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon town pharmacy.
The numbers behind the ethanol mandate have become so unworkable that, for the first time, the EPA is soon expected to reduce the amount of ethanol required to be added to the gasoline supply. An unusual coalition of big oil companies, environmental groups and food companies is pushing the government to go even further and reconsider the entire ethanol program.
But the Obama administration stands by the mandate and rarely acknowledges that green energy requires any trade-offs.
"There is no question air quality, water quality is benefiting from this industry," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told ethanol lobbyists recently.
But the administration has never conducted studies to determine whether that's true.
Fertilizer, for instance, can make drinking water toxic. Children are especially susceptible to nitrate poisoning, which causes "blue baby" syndrome and can be deadly.
Between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than a billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but conservative projections suggest another billion-pound increase since then.
In the Midwest, where corn is the dominant crop, some are sounding alarms.
The Des Moines Water Works has faced high nitrate levels for many years in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, which supply drinking water to 500,000 people. Typically, when pollution is too high in one river, workers draw from the other.
"This year, unfortunately the nitrate levels in both rivers were so high that it created an impossibility for us," said Bill Stowe, the utility's general manager.
For three months this summer, huge purifiers churned around the clock to meet demand for safe, clean water.
Obama's support for ethanol dates to his time as a senator form Illinois, the nation's second-largest corn producer.
"If we're going to get serious about investing in our energy future, we must give our family farmers and local ethanol producers a fair shot at success," Obama said in 2007.
From the beginning of his presidential administration, however, Obama's environmental team saw corn ethanol as a dubious policy. Corn demands fertilizer, which is made using natural gas. What's worse, ethanol factories typically burn coal or gas, both of which release carbon dioxide.
Then there's the land conversion, the most controversial and difficult-to-predict outcome.
Digging up grassland releases greenhouse gases, so environmentalists are skeptical of anything that encourages planting more corn.
"I don't remember anybody having great passion for this," said Bob Sussman, who served on Obama's transition team and recently retired as the Environmental Protection Agency's senior policy counsel. "I don't have a lot of personal enthusiasm for the program."
There was plenty enthusiasm at the White House and at the Department of Agriculture, where officials argued to the EPA that ethanol was cleaner than it thought. The EPA ultimately agreed.
The policy hinged on assumptions that corn prices would not go too high and farms would get more efficient. That way, there wouldn't be much incentive to plow untouched areas and destroy conservation land.
But corn prices climbed to more than $7 a bushel, about twice the administration's long-term prediction. Suddenly, setting aside land for conservation was bad economics for many farmers.
"I'm coming to the point where financially, it's not feasible," said Leroy Perkins, a farmer in Wayne County who set aside 91 acres years ago and let it grow into high grass.
Losing millions of conservation acres was bad. Plowing over untouched prairies was worse.
Using satellite data — the best tool available — The Associated Press identified at least 1.2 million acres of virgin land in Nebraska and the Dakotas that have been converted to corn and soybean fields since 2006.
"The last five years, we've become financially solvent," said Robert Malsam, a farmer in Edmunds County, S.D., who like others in the Dakotas has plowed wild grassland to expand his corn crop.
The government could change the mandate or demand more safeguards. But that would pick a fight with agricultural lobbyists and would put the administration on the side of oil companies, which despise the ethanol requirement.
Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol lobbying group, said there's no reason to change anything. Ethanol is still cleaner than oil, he said.
These days, when administration officials discuss ethanol, they often frame it as an economic program for rural America, not an environmental policy.
When Obama gave a major speech in June on reducing greenhouse gas, biofuels received only a passing reference.
With the government's predictions so far off from reality, scientists say it's hard to argue for ethanol as global warming policy.
"I'd have to think really hard to come up with a scenario where it's a net positive," said Silvia Secchi, a Southern Illinois University agriculture economist.
She paused, then added: "I'm stumped."
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/12/ap-obama-s-ethanolpolicyravagestheenvironment.html
Report: Obama's ethanol policy has ravaged the environment
Boost in corn grown for ethanol has wiped out 5m acres of conservation land, polluted water, finds AP investigation
- Nov. 12, 2013
- original
Topics:
Environment
EPA
USDA
Corn is harvested near the southern Illinois town of Cobden. Scores of farmers throughout the region have benefited from pulling millions of acres of farmland out of a federal conservation program and putting it back into corn production, partly to profit from grain prices sent higher by America's demand for ethanol.
Jim Suhr/AP
When President Barack Obama gave a major policy speech on reducing greenhouse gases last June, he didn't once mention ethanol, an alcohol-based fuel that’s a byproduct of distilled corn. Biofuels in general, which are extracted from sugar, grasses or rapeseed oil, received a brief, passing reference.
But when the Iowa political caucuses were on the horizon in 2007, Obama, a presidential candidate, made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when former President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today, an Associated Press investigation found. As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies.
Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, the Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama's watch, according to Agriculture Department figures.
What’s more, between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than one billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but because of the huge increase in corn planting, even conservative projections by the AP suggest another billion-pound fertilizer increase on corn farms since then.
Some of that fertilizer has seeped into drinking water, contaminating rivers and boosting the growth of enormous algae fields in the Gulf of Mexico, which eventually decompose and leave behind a huge dead zone, currently covering 5,800 square miles of sea floor where marine life can't survive.
The dead zone is one example among many of a peculiar ethanol side effect: As one government program encourages farmers to plant more corn, other programs pay millions to clean up the mess.
Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.
The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America's demand for it.
"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.
The investigation drew a sharp response from the ethanol industry before the findings were even published.
According to AP, ethanol producers, corn growers and its lobbying and public relations firms have criticized and tried to alter the story.
The Agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, told the Des Moines Register that the project included "a number of inaccuracies and errors." He also said farmers were engaged in other conservation practices, including wetland reserve programs, wildlife incentive programs and EQIP, a program that helps farmers adopt conservation practices.
Industry officials distributed letters and emails to newspaper editors saying the AP project "rife with errors," and calling the report a "smear," "hatchet job" and "more dumpster fire than journalism."
The industry said the primary driver for losses of conservation land was Congress lowering the number of acres allowed in conservation, not ethanol.
It also cited a Dutch study, which was not peer-reviewed, which found that urban sprawl internationally was responsible for greater loss of grassland than biofuels.
The Dutch study that the industry cited, which AP did not mention, noted that in the United States "biofuel expansion is the dominant cause of agricultural land use loss."
Department of Agriculture officials note that the amount of fertilizer used for all crops has remained steady for a decade, suggesting the ethanol mandate hasn't caused a fertilizer boom across the board.
But in the Midwest, corn is the dominant crop, and officials say the increase in fertilizer use — driven by a rise in corn planting — is having an effect.
"This is an ecological disaster," said Craig Cox with the Environmental Working Group, a natural ally of the president that now finds itself at odds with the White House.
But pulling the plug on corn ethanol, Obama administration officials fear, might mean killing any hope of these next-generation fuels.
"That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said in a recent interview with AP. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."
