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Go rock the vote!

This is democracy at its finest people – you choose the fool and then we’ll all go challenge them to stop their ridiculous and destructive fantasies of converting land for fuel.

This is no April fools joke. If you haven’t heard, biofuels are naaaasty. People are already being displaced by big agribusiness to grow crops for fuel. And, biofuels won’t get us off of fossil fuels anyway. Replacing just 10 percent of world demand for diesel for road transport with biodiesel would require 75 percent of the world’s existing soy, oil palm and rapeseed crops. Even current government mandates for these so-called renewable fuels will create enough demand for biofuels to cause food shortages and human rights and environmental catastrophes around the world.

So go vote! www.biofoolsday.org

Nominees include:

• Linda Cook, Executive Director, Shell Oil. She says that Shell will no longer invest in wind and solar energy and focus their energy solely on liquid fuels, hugely increasing the oil giants investment in biofuels.
• Hugh Grant, CEO, Monsanto. The global biofuels rush has provided a perfect new market for Monsanto’s genetically modified plants, an inevitable ingredient of biofuel feedstocks. The agribusiness giant dismisses evidence that biofuels are harmful for the environment or have anything to do with food price spikes and shortages.
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). He says biofuels are “contributing to a cleaner environment,” ignoring the scientific evidence that biofuel production is contributing to the rapid destruction of rainforests abroad and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico here at home.
• Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD). She’s trying to separate federal forest protections from biofuels policy, claiming that prohibiting the clear-cutting of our federal forests for biofuel production keeps us dependent on foreign oil. (Is she forgetting that we are dependent on food and the planet’s biodiversity too?)
• Sen. John Thune (R-SD). A longtime proponent of biofuels, he wants to increase the amount of biofuels that can be blended into gasoline, remove forest protections and the global warming standards in biofuels policy.
• Patricia Woertz, CEO, Archer Daniels Midland. A former Chevron executive before coming to ADM, Woertz is leading the agroenergy charge. ADM is a leading importer of palm oil, a popular biofuel feedstock and a leading cause of deforestation in Southeast Asia.