The Biofuel Sleight of Hand
Timothy Birdnow
If anyone wants proof that the environmentalists want not just an end to fossil fuels but to restrict our energy usage, George Moonbat, er, Monbiot provides the evidence.
http://www.rense.com/general70/carb.htm
Monbiot essentialy argues that biodiesel, that penultimate of alternate fuels, is worse than oil and should be stopped by the full force of law. From the article:
"Last week, the chairman of Malaysia's Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.
"The demand for biodiesel," the Malaysian Star reports, "will come from the European Community.... This fresh demand...would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia's crude palm oil inventories"(7). Why? Because it's cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.
In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. "Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia"(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia."
End excerpt.
This echoes complaints about sugar cane growth in Brazil; it takes up land better used to grow food crops.
In point of fact, the sky-high price of conventional fuels has led to a rash of grease theft.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24729484/ns/us_news-environment/t/used-cooking-oil-stolen-biodiesel-pirates/
Where once restaurants had to pay waste companies to haul their used cooking oil away, now they have to lock up their grease to avoid it being pirated by people who will turn it into fuel.
People are unwilling to go backward; nobody is going to choose to ride the bus or train when they have a perfectly good automobile in their driveway. The environmentalists want them on those trains and buses (despite the inconvenience) because they want them under control. See my essays here http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/political_power_flowing_from_t.html and here http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0708/0708drillingconsright.htm
And to force them onto those public conveyances they have to find a way to get people to stop driving. How? Make private vehicles too expensive to operate.
The sad fact is that alternative energy is no more wanted than fossil fuels; if they show enough promise they will be demogogued to death. What is wanted is a less energy-intensive lifestyle, a world where people stay put, where people eat what they are told, do what they are told. It is a world where people do not use air conditioning, where people use light sparingly, where Man can return to that pastoral paradise of which the gang green dreams. It is the opinion of many in the environmentalist movement that civilization has alienated Man from nature, and that nature is inherently good, so Man's suffering is caused by his civilization. Break it! Once the evil western lifestyle is destroyed Man can rebuild on a foundation in tune with the natural.
Of course, the natural was not and will never be there for Man's benefit; we are fitted to it, it is not fitted to us. How many starry-eyed adventurers have wandered off into the bush to live off the land, only to die of starvation or from exposure to the elements? Take the famous case of Chris McCandless; a young and angry man, he spent time tramping around America for several years before heading into the wilderness in Alaska. He was found dead from starvation in an abandoned school bus.
http://www.christophermccandless.info/
McCandless had survived in the lower 48 states as a parasite, feeding off of the refuse of civilization and the kindness of strangers. Once in the true wilderness he found the going not so easy. Nature did not care about him one way or another. There was no natural paradise.
He made a natural mistake; he believed what he read by liberals. A huge devotee of Thoreau and Jack London, McCandless believed the liberal utopian vision (London was a communist, although he did portray Alaska as brutal) and had it in his mind that he was "destroying the false being within" which is nonsense to the natural world. But his unhappiness in the world of his parents led him to seek paradise in the world, something that nobody will ever find. He left civilization, which is the world created by men to protect them from the really bad things that nature entails, and met his end.
He is hardly alone in this; people have been finding it impossible to survive in the wild for a long time.
There was a guy named Dick Proenneke who went to live in isolation in Alaska and succeeded - and he became a folk hero to the back to the land movement. But they were shocked by the fact that he hunted animals to survive; they thought surely he must be vegan, or at least vegetarian. But man cannot survive in the wilderness - especially that far north - without killing and eating animals. Nature is sharp of tooth and claw, and Man must be the sharpest or he will perish. There is a reason why Homo Sapiens is the only surviving member of the species hominid. Even Neanderthal Man, a very bright and capable species, is extinct (although it is believed they interbred with Cro-Magnon, so many of our liberal friends are likely decended from them). Humans are pretty incompetent in nature; we need the tribe around us, which means we need some sort of civilization. Life in the wild without it is painful, uncomfortable, hungry, cold, hot, and short.
But Proenneke was different; he was friends with a brush pilot who came on a regular basis, delivering supplies without which Proenneke would have starved. Proenneke needed all manner of things, and received them on a regular basis. He used tar paper and polyethelyne for the roof of his cabin. He used gasoline for his lights. He imported bullets for hunting. He purchased clothes, tools, canned goods, bulk food items. He was a part of civilization; he just hid himself. He did not try to go it alone.
McCandless and many others tried to do this and failed.
So, Man needs civilization. If nothing else, civilizations protects us from predators including other people. Yet the fundamental goal of the Greens is to dismantle that civilization on the theory that things were better under the tyranny of nature. This utopianism bespeaks a fundamental sense of paradise lost. The Apostle Paul spoke of this when he said that man was condemned regardless of being told about God, because nature speaks to us; there is a moral code, as C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, and that code cannot be said to derive from any natural causes (read the book to read the arguements; I don't have time for it here). At any rate, the utopian left feels in their gut that something is fundamentally wrong with us and our condition, but instead of seeking answers in religion they seek it in a quasi religion, in a form of nature worship. Even the atheistic left does this, worshipping science as God because they BELIEVE there must be answers somewhere. They simply cannot accept that there is a judge, and they won't accept that nature is so unkind.
The only answer the Gang Green can find is in the Nature that has so spurned us; if man is inherently good and perfectible, it must be our civilization that is bad. They simply will not question that fundamental assumption. Christianity says Man is not inherently good, nor is nature.
But that way lies either God or madness, so the liberal will not face it. He prefers to live in a fiction, a world of his own making, one where his labors eventually bear the fruits of the Garden of Eden, only this one without God or the serpent. An eden of his own making. He has to "destroy the false being within" and to do that he has to destroy the false being without.
The process of becoming can be awfully destructive.
But getting back to the subject of biofuels, there is no more desire for them than for oil or gas among liberals; it was a will-of-the-wisp designed to trick the masses into abandoning our current fuels. Once those fuels are gone the bios will be targeted. This is about control, nothing more.
If anyone wants proof that the environmentalists want not just an end to fossil fuels but to restrict our energy usage, George Moonbat, er, Monbiot provides the evidence.
http://www.rense.com/general70/carb.htm
Monbiot essentialy argues that biodiesel, that penultimate of alternate fuels, is worse than oil and should be stopped by the full force of law. From the article:
"Last week, the chairman of Malaysia's Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.
"The demand for biodiesel," the Malaysian Star reports, "will come from the European Community.... This fresh demand...would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia's crude palm oil inventories"(7). Why? Because it's cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.
In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. "Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia"(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia."
End excerpt.
This echoes complaints about sugar cane growth in Brazil; it takes up land better used to grow food crops.
In point of fact, the sky-high price of conventional fuels has led to a rash of grease theft.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24729484/ns/us_news-environment/t/used-cooking-oil-stolen-biodiesel-pirates/
Where once restaurants had to pay waste companies to haul their used cooking oil away, now they have to lock up their grease to avoid it being pirated by people who will turn it into fuel.
People are unwilling to go backward; nobody is going to choose to ride the bus or train when they have a perfectly good automobile in their driveway. The environmentalists want them on those trains and buses (despite the inconvenience) because they want them under control. See my essays here http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/political_power_flowing_from_t.html and here http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0708/0708drillingconsright.htm
And to force them onto those public conveyances they have to find a way to get people to stop driving. How? Make private vehicles too expensive to operate.
The sad fact is that alternative energy is no more wanted than fossil fuels; if they show enough promise they will be demogogued to death. What is wanted is a less energy-intensive lifestyle, a world where people stay put, where people eat what they are told, do what they are told. It is a world where people do not use air conditioning, where people use light sparingly, where Man can return to that pastoral paradise of which the gang green dreams. It is the opinion of many in the environmentalist movement that civilization has alienated Man from nature, and that nature is inherently good, so Man's suffering is caused by his civilization. Break it! Once the evil western lifestyle is destroyed Man can rebuild on a foundation in tune with the natural.
Of course, the natural was not and will never be there for Man's benefit; we are fitted to it, it is not fitted to us. How many starry-eyed adventurers have wandered off into the bush to live off the land, only to die of starvation or from exposure to the elements? Take the famous case of Chris McCandless; a young and angry man, he spent time tramping around America for several years before heading into the wilderness in Alaska. He was found dead from starvation in an abandoned school bus.
http://www.christophermccandless.info/
McCandless had survived in the lower 48 states as a parasite, feeding off of the refuse of civilization and the kindness of strangers. Once in the true wilderness he found the going not so easy. Nature did not care about him one way or another. There was no natural paradise.
He made a natural mistake; he believed what he read by liberals. A huge devotee of Thoreau and Jack London, McCandless believed the liberal utopian vision (London was a communist, although he did portray Alaska as brutal) and had it in his mind that he was "destroying the false being within" which is nonsense to the natural world. But his unhappiness in the world of his parents led him to seek paradise in the world, something that nobody will ever find. He left civilization, which is the world created by men to protect them from the really bad things that nature entails, and met his end.
He is hardly alone in this; people have been finding it impossible to survive in the wild for a long time.
There was a guy named Dick Proenneke who went to live in isolation in Alaska and succeeded - and he became a folk hero to the back to the land movement. But they were shocked by the fact that he hunted animals to survive; they thought surely he must be vegan, or at least vegetarian. But man cannot survive in the wilderness - especially that far north - without killing and eating animals. Nature is sharp of tooth and claw, and Man must be the sharpest or he will perish. There is a reason why Homo Sapiens is the only surviving member of the species hominid. Even Neanderthal Man, a very bright and capable species, is extinct (although it is believed they interbred with Cro-Magnon, so many of our liberal friends are likely decended from them). Humans are pretty incompetent in nature; we need the tribe around us, which means we need some sort of civilization. Life in the wild without it is painful, uncomfortable, hungry, cold, hot, and short.
But Proenneke was different; he was friends with a brush pilot who came on a regular basis, delivering supplies without which Proenneke would have starved. Proenneke needed all manner of things, and received them on a regular basis. He used tar paper and polyethelyne for the roof of his cabin. He used gasoline for his lights. He imported bullets for hunting. He purchased clothes, tools, canned goods, bulk food items. He was a part of civilization; he just hid himself. He did not try to go it alone.
McCandless and many others tried to do this and failed.
So, Man needs civilization. If nothing else, civilizations protects us from predators including other people. Yet the fundamental goal of the Greens is to dismantle that civilization on the theory that things were better under the tyranny of nature. This utopianism bespeaks a fundamental sense of paradise lost. The Apostle Paul spoke of this when he said that man was condemned regardless of being told about God, because nature speaks to us; there is a moral code, as C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, and that code cannot be said to derive from any natural causes (read the book to read the arguements; I don't have time for it here). At any rate, the utopian left feels in their gut that something is fundamentally wrong with us and our condition, but instead of seeking answers in religion they seek it in a quasi religion, in a form of nature worship. Even the atheistic left does this, worshipping science as God because they BELIEVE there must be answers somewhere. They simply cannot accept that there is a judge, and they won't accept that nature is so unkind.
The only answer the Gang Green can find is in the Nature that has so spurned us; if man is inherently good and perfectible, it must be our civilization that is bad. They simply will not question that fundamental assumption. Christianity says Man is not inherently good, nor is nature.
But that way lies either God or madness, so the liberal will not face it. He prefers to live in a fiction, a world of his own making, one where his labors eventually bear the fruits of the Garden of Eden, only this one without God or the serpent. An eden of his own making. He has to "destroy the false being within" and to do that he has to destroy the false being without.
The process of becoming can be awfully destructive.
But getting back to the subject of biofuels, there is no more desire for them than for oil or gas among liberals; it was a will-of-the-wisp designed to trick the masses into abandoning our current fuels. Once those fuels are gone the bios will be targeted. This is about control, nothing more.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 6:38 AM
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