Energy farming worsens global warming

Corporations — especially those manufacturing cars, selling petroleum and industrializing agriculture — hype farm fuels to confuse the public about global warming. They even persuade the political classes of the world to subsidize them. In 2007, the subsidies for ethanol and crop diesel in the United States rose to more than $7 billion.

But these giant farm companies do cause global warming. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization documented in 2006 that the livestock industry alone is responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases raising the temperature of the planet.
Despite global warming, such countries as Russia, the United States and Arctic nations are gearing up for another massive plunder of that ice region for oil.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy reported in May 2007 that the world’s energy use, especially petroleum, is likely to rise by 57 percent between 2004 and 2030. Renewable energy, including farm fuels, will be about 9 percent of what the world will use by 2030.

The obsessive addiction of industrial culture to petroleum explains why the world is ignoring global warming. U.S. farm fuel boosters use the slogan that agricultural oil refineries will make the country less dependent on the Arabs’ petroleum.

Yet the effort of extracting oil from food is wrong because farmers in the United States and Europe overproduce crops on vulnerable land.

Second, agricultural fuels are ushering another violent season for deforestation and feudalism, especially in the tropics.

Seattle PI