Palm oil day laborer in Sumatra, Photo by David Gilbert/RAN

Fortunately the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took into consideration the complexity of the issue in its latest ruling about biofuels derived from palm oil. Late last week, the EPA excluded palm oil biodiesel from the U.S. renewable fuel standard—a small yet significant reprieve for Indonesia’s rainforests, where palm oil plantations are a major cause of rainforest destruction.

The EPA found that biofuels derived from palm oil aren’t a good choice for the climate because, once the carbon footprint of palm oil production is factored in, they can no longer meet the 20% emissions-reduction standard for biofuels.

It’s encouraging that the EPA sees the terrible toll the industrial production of palm oil biodiesel has on the environment. Indonesia is already the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S. Some 85% of Indonesia’s emissions result from clearing rainforests and draining carbon-rich peatlands, activities driven heavily by the rapid expansion of the palm oil industry.

Widely considered a “clean” agrofuel, palm oil has more environmental implications to consider than just the emissions it produces when burned. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, biodiesel from palm oil grown on peat has a 200 year carbon debt. This means it would take 200 years of production for these palm oil plantations to replace the carbon lost from land conversion. And once you consider the amount of fuel used for palm oil cultivation and transcontinental shipping, palm oil can be one of the worst fuel sources for the climate.

Looking at the harsh and immediate realities of today’s climate science, it’s clear that a 200-year turnaround is 200 years too late. There are already too many demands on Indonesia’s rainforests coming from the palm oil industry.

The report also finds that if we don’t take action to rein in the rapid global expansion of agrofuels we will in fact be making these problems worse. Particularly when expanding in rainforest regions, the carbon debt accumulated by agrofuels will take decades or sometimes centuries to pay back.

April 2009: Activists protest agrofuels in California

Read the full report at: http://ran.org/fileadmin/materials/comms/mediacontent/reports/Agrofuels_White_Paper.pdf

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing.

The basic question before us, “how bad does it have to be before we pull out?” ought to excite a passionate and principled debate, but we’ve traveled so far from environmentalist fundamentals that we can manage only flaccid, enervating exchanges. As our major organizations ready themselves to swallow nuclear power in a Boxer-engineered Senate compromise, the few points of eco-logic in this drab, grey landscape are lit by leaders and organizations mostly outside mainstream environmentalism. MoveOn.org campaigns against gutting the Clean Air Act, Green Party leaders and community health advocates offer an articulate challenge to Waxman-Markey, and the wave of support building behind 350.org puts organizations in my home state, like the Mass Council of Churches and Sustainable Business Network, far out in advance of mainline green groups. Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace are the only nationally known environmental organizations honest enough to acknowledge that the king has no clothes.

It seemed clear from the get-go that U.S. environmentalists would eventually find ourselves in such a jam, where the imperatives of pragmatic politics and seductions of techno-solutions would warp our better judgement, unless we stuck to a very clear interpretation of the precautionary principle. Bill McKibben recently remarked that, having already lost the arctic, we’re past the point of precaution; it’s now a stark matter of survival. True enough, but the core logic of the precautionary approach is valid and stands in counterpoint to our present pathway – a fundamental cognitive clash between scientific realism and political pragmatism.

There is no simple answer, but the Faustian Senate bargain before us is so antithetical to environmentalist principles that it ought to cause even the most hardened Hill advocate to pause. In such quiet, personal moments of uncertainty, I suggest it is worthwhile to consider what those trained in the Nader/PIRG tradition call the “problem/solution statement.” The point of the exercise is to maintain an absolute standard of reference for the immensity of the challenge before us and scale of the solution it demands.

Problem Statement. Differences in opinion on the bright line for averting cataclysm (1.5º vs. 2.0ºC limit on temperature increase and 275 vs. 300-350 ppm cap on carbon concentrations) are relatively small in light of overall trends, and our institutional support for the nominal CASE 450 ppm target is a concession we would not make left to our own devices.

The conceptual divergence in taking the next step from temperature/carbon concentration, however, is significant. Our entire enterprise is based on a single metric—emissions. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are absolutely correct in identifying the pollution prevention mindset as a roadblock to understanding the problem. If we conceive climate in terms of smokestacks and tailpipes, we are dealing with the last step in a long series of choices and the solutions we contemplate are thereby cramped. It is seldom acknowledged that fossil fuel interests also promote the pollution prevention paradigm as a fall-back to denial (with the apogee in our simpatico thinking reached when environmentalists agreed to measure oil companies by their success in cutting plant emissions, while ignoring their main business). Relative investment in fossil fuels vs. renewables, as Ted and Michael suggest, is a better method of understanding the problem because it takes in the long lead time in capital investment (and, in their view, pits a positive green future head-to-head against a dirty, inefficient and regressive society of the past).

The better measure, I think, was conceived by Greenpeace International climate campaign Bill Hare and presented in his brilliant, prescient 1989 paper, The Carbon Logic.  Hare, who remains an adviser to Greenpeace, and co-author Malte Meinshausen, both researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published an updated analysis of the Carbon Logic in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature, Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C, which concludes that “less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C).”

An upcoming post will present a solution statement commensurate with this definition of the problem, but that analysis is not necessary to conclude that Waxman-Markey, with its explicit promotion of fossil fuels, stands in flat contradiction to the imperative before us, which is to halt exploration for new fossil fuel deposits and cap extractions at 1/4 of known reserves. If environmentalists do not acknowledge this reality, we are doing nothing but dreaming up imaginary ladders.

“I’m more of a party crasher than someone who gets an engraved invitation. Certainly so when the party is the shareholder meeting of a billion-dollar multinational corporation like Bunge, one of the largest argribusiness and food companies in the world and a major force in the devastation of South American rainforests. I’m used to getting chucked out of these meetings for sneaking in and then challenging CEOs in front of their board and shareholders while people try not to make eye contact. Aaaawkward.

But this time was different in some surprising ways. First of all I was actually allowed to be there and participate in Bunge’s annual general meeting at the posh Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan today, and while I was expecting to have to practically grab the mike and race through a statement on their destructive practices, I was able to have a ten or twelve minute open discussion with their CEO Alberto Weisser while shareholders on either side of me smiled or gave me little thumbs up. After the meeting several shareholders wanted to talk about sustainable development, and thanked me and Rainforest Action Network for bringing up these issues in the meeting.

Nobody wants to be Scrooge McDuck funding things that are wrong or bad. And people are becoming especially aware of issues of sustainability and our interconnectedness as the our financial systems tumble and our planet begins to groan under the weight of climate change and prolonged abuse. Every shareholder I met in that room wants to be part of something useful and positive and Bunge’s corporate line certainly feeds into that.

They talk about feeding the world and had a whole packet enumerating their values of integrity, citizenship and environmental stewardship. Mr. Weisser spoke at length about working with local growers in South America and investing in social projects. I’m all for a business culture that values “integrity and citizenship”. The problem lies in the space between Bunge’s rhetoric and Bunge’s actions.

- While Bunge insists it is working to curb greenhouse gas emissions; it has continued to expand its operations in Brazil, which has become the fourth largest greenhouse gas polluter in the world with deforestation accounting for three quarters of its emissions. Soy expansion by companies like Bunge is the leading cause of deforestation.

- While Bunge talks about funding social programs in communities, it is still responsible for the human rights disaster of displacing Indigenous peoples throughout its South American operations

- While Bunge stresses a commitment to farmers and its employees, the expansion of soy forces small farming communities off their lands, providing just one job for every 11 subsistence farmer it displaces.

The CEO was adamant about the necessity for this kind of aggressive expansion based on the statistic that “in order to feed the world’s population we will have to double the amount of food we produce through 2050″. Now that’s a scary thought and the impulse to feed hungry people is certainly a noble one; however, much of the soy grown in these operations goes toward feeding European or Chinese livestock, or out of the food chain entirely into bio-fuels. Under this model I wonder if Mr. Weisser’s expecting we’ll have to mow down every bit of remaining rainforest to utilize its arable land potential. And if we continue to use the land we raze so irresponsibly, will that even be enough? I mean if we’re talking about a global food crisis, shouldn’t we be thinking about sustainable agriculture and low impact crops? Do we really want to test the planet’s carrying capacity over margarine and chicken feed? Really?

Considering the seriousness of the issues at stake it may seem obvious that an immediate turnaround of Bunge’s on the ground practices is the only way to cease activities wholly out of line with the core values of just about every living person, and if the shareholders do what they know is right they’ll push their company in that direction. But it was clear today that people can be so removed from the day to day realities of how a giant company like this works that it takes persistent little wake up calls be they petitions or demonstrations or people standing at microphones to keep the conversation going and the pressure on!”

thanks to Kevin Buckland for the artwork (note the carniverous cars!)

During the rally filled with chants like “No agrofuels no oil, we don’t want the world to boil” and a long list of speakers, an enormous banner that read “Agrofuels are not Low-Carbon” unfurled from the parking structure across the street. Speakers included Altacir Bunde from the Brazilian Popular Movement of Small Farmers (MCP), Brazilian documentary film maker and human rights activist Maria Luisa Mendoca, Jeff Conant from Food and Water Watch, Eric Holt Jimenez from Food First, RAN’s agrofuel program mangager Andrea Samulon, Tar sands campaigner Brant Olsen, our ED Mike Brune and others.

Afterwards we all went into the Low Carbon Fuel Standard hearing itself, with our t-shirts the read “Agrofuels are not Low Carbon”. When a representative from the ethanol industry from Brazil spoke about how clean and green ethanol from sugar cane is, many of us got up, showed our shirts and walked out. Before leaving, Maria Mendoca shouted out “He’s a liar, he’s a liar, the expansion of sugar cane for ethanol is destroying the rainforests in Brazil!”

A number of folks from our group stayed to speak, including Altacir Bunde who told the California Air Resources Board:

“The idea that the ethanol produced in Brazil is clean is not true, because in order to produce ethanol you have to burn sugar cane fields, use  toxic chemicals, dry up our ground water, clear-cut forests, and pollute what water is left with residues from the ethanol processing.   Also the production of ethanol uses more slaves than any other industry in Brazil.  Fuel production is replacing food production, and destroying communities of small farmers. Our food crisis is getting worse with the expansion of agrofuels, not only in Brazil, but around the world. Agrofuels is not a solution. We say yes to food sovereignty and no to agrofuels!”

Brant Olsen stayed back to speak  to CARB about the tar sands. He pointed out that Low Carbon Fuel standard will help keep dirty oil from Canada’s tar out of California by imposing a penalty on importers, which is great because:

a)it means California will set a global example by resisting short-sighted industry plans to dig us deeper into oil addiction

b)less tar sands should also mean less localized pollution from oil refineries down the road, since processing tar sands produces more pollution than conventional oil.

Check out our local television coverage,

our press release

our flicker site to see more photos

more online media

and an article in the Sacramento Bee

Hear Altacir Bunde and Maria Luisa Mendoca speak:

Monday April 27, 7-8:30 at UC Berkeley, 159 Mulford Hall

Tuesday April 28, 6:30-8:00 at San Francisco State, Room HSS 259

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.

“Why have efforts by conservationists failed to halt the expansion of oil palm plantations at the expense of tropical forests? We contend that part of the reason could be the aggressive public relations campaigns undertaken by the oil palm industry to promote public acceptance of palm oil and to dismiss the concerns of conservation biologists and environmentalists,” Koh and Wilcove write. “It is not unlike the campaign that some energy companies waged against efforts to curb global climate change.”

All of this is even more problematic since the new Obama administration has jumped on the agrofuels bandwagon – and plans to double our nation’s investment in so-called biofuels as part of his overall environmental strategy. Agrofuels are one of the major forces driving the increased production of palm oil in Southeast Asia and in Latin America. We need new policies limiting agrofuels and their negative environmental and social consequences, not policies requiring more of them.

Read more here.

The second thing I noticed was that McCain said some interesting things about biofuels (or, as we call them, agrofuels):

“Government spending has gone completely out of control… I know how to eliminate programs. I have fought against – well, one of them would be… a number of subsidies for ethanol. I oppose subsidies for ethanol because I thought it distorted the market and created inflation. Senator Obama supported those subsidies. I would eliminate the tariff on sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil.”

Now, I’m fairly used to routinely disagreeing with McCain on just about every issue. (After all, this is the guy who voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday and consistently opposes increases in the Federal minimum wage.) But on this one, I have to admit that I agree with the guy. Kinda.

In the 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush said that the U.S. should replace 75% of imported oil with alternative fuels – including corn-based ethanol – by 2025. Many environmentalists thought that supporting this was a no-brainer – after all, burning agrofuels is less polluting, and agrofuels don’t require any nasty wars for us to get them out of the ground and into our gas tanks.

The problem was that lots of people were only really thinking about the environmental cost of burning agrofuels, and weren’t thinking about the cost of producing them.

One of the big problems with corn-based ethanol is that U.S. agriculture is incredibly mechanized – and, thus, that producing corn for ethanol in the U.S. actually costs more in terms of carbon emissions than it saves. According to a research study by two top ecologists, a liter of corn-based ethanol contains 5,100 kilocalories of energy – but it takes 6,600 kilocalories worth of fossil fuels (diesel for the farm machinery, petroleum to make fertilizers and pesticides, etc.) to produce enough corn for that liter of ethanol. The idea that corn-based ethanol saves fossil fuels is a complete boondoggle: you’re actually using less fossil fuels if you just put gas straight into your gas tank, rather than using it even more petroleum to make the same amount corn-based ethanol.

In fact – as Old Man Grumpus pointed out in last night’s debates – corn-based ethanol production in the U.S. would be totally financially impossible if it weren’t for massive government subsidies. Already in 2006, the U.S. government handed out $5.1 billion in ethanol subsidies; rather than going to small family farmers throughout the Midwest, however, these subsidies are going to a handful of massive U.S. agribusinesses. Archer Daniels Midland alone made up 28% of the U.S. ethanol market in 2006. And as ethanol subsidies skyrocket, a handful of corporations are reaping the profits: ADM’s profits increased a whopping 107% between 2005 and 2007, while agribusiness giant Cargill’s profits increased 156% between 2006 and 2008.

So, as McCain suggested, why not just shift agrofuels production to countries in the Global South – where agriculture doesn’t use as much fossil fuels, and where you can grow crops (like sugarcane) that are more fuel-efficient?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.

The biggest problem with agrofuels isn’t that they cost a lot, or that they suck up more fossil fuels than they save. It’s that producing enough agrofuels to power our planet’s gas-guzzlers takes a heck of a lot of farmland – which results both in massive deforestation, and in displacing subsistence crops that people need in order to feed their families.

And we’ve seen this happening a lot in the last few years. Much like the U.S., the EU has decided that 10% of transport fuel needs to be made up of “renewable fuels” by 2020. But in order to produce this much agrofuels, Europe would have to convert more than half of its existing farmland to agrofuels production – which is, needless to say, impossible. So, instead, the Europeans are buying palm oil from Southeast Asia – which is fueling massive deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. (Thus, the Indonesian palm oil industry plans on expanding palm oil plantations by 40,000 square miles by 2020 – an amount of rainforest the size of Kentucky.)

And if the land being used to grow agrofuels doesn’t come from burning forests, it usually comes from displacing crops that people need in order to eat. Rising global food prices have been sparking riots and protests by poor people across the world – and yet, while the Bush Administration blames food prices on rising oil costs and China, a leaked World Bank report in July 2008 found that increased agrofuels consumption in the U.S. and Europe has caused global food prices to rise 75%. As the UK’s former chief government science adviser put it, “all we are doing by supporting [agrofuels] is subsidizing higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change.” 

The fuel to fill our SUVs with agrofuels is coming out of the bellies of poor people in the Global South (figuratively, not literally).

And that points to the part of McCain’s argument that I disagree with. It’s not a matter of switching corn-based ethanol for sugarcane-based ethanol, or palm oil-based ethanol. It’s a matter of recognizing, once and for all, that agrofuels are a false solution.

Last week the Business Ethics Network offered RAN a Commentaries spot on the Corporate Watchdog Radio show. I recorded a short piece on biofuels – a timely week for it in light of the global food crisis and riots in many countries. Listen here.

Agrofuels are being put forward as a solution to our climate crisis by agribusiness giants like ADM and Cargill, auto makers like GM, and petroleum companies like BP with their own interest and profit motive in mind. They have effectively hijacked the good intentions, true innovation, and essence of family farmers, environmentalists, and communities throughout the world that were pursuing locally produced, small-scale biofuels for local energy needs.

For this reason, Rainforest Action Network along with allies Food First, Grassroots International, Family Farm Defenders, Global Justice Ecology Project, and the Student Trade Justice Campaign, held a press conference on Tuesday (listen to it here) announcing the first official call for a U.S. moratorium on agrofuels. The call for a moratorium is part of a growing movement worldwide which recognizes that there is a need for policy makers to reevaluate the incentives and subsidies which are currently driving a global boom for agrofuels. This agrofuels boom is driving deforestation, climate change, and is linked to human rights abuses from the Gran Chaco in Paraguay to the Brazilian Amazon, to Kalimantan in Indonesia and to Papua New Guinea in the Pacific.

Civil Society groups in Europe launched a similar moratorium over a year ago, and just two weeks ago the EU environment commissioner said that the social and environmental problems caused by agrofuels are “bigger than we thought they were.” As a result, the European Union is now rethinking their agrofuels targets. And in October 2007, Jean Ziegler the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food called for a five year moratorium on agrofuels production citing the rising prices of food worldwide and the impact that this is already having on the poorest people around the world.

We believe that the growing call for a moratorium on industrial agrofuels will help refocus attention on pursuing the genuine answers to our climate crisis, and away from snake oil solutions. One thing is certain: none of the real solutions can or will come at the expense of human rights, the environment, or the world’s most marginalized people, and certainly none should make the climate worse off.

No exactly what I expected to read from Forbes. The article goes on to draw connections between increased meat consumption driving up food prices and even starts out with the startling statistic that “world’s poor spend twice what they did on food just seven years ago, yet still starve in greater numbers.”

I know, it sounds bad. But don’t worry, the article goes on to point out that “investors might find some opportunity amidst the misery.”

Oh, thank goodness.

I was worried that this horrific tale of suffering and injustice might not be good for investment portfolios. Luckily many banking giants have already reaped significant profits by investing in companies like ADM and Bunge–targets of our new Rainforest Agribusiness campaign.

Maybe the problem has something to do with our collective perverse focus on the financial profits generated by industrial agriculture rather than the importance of building a just and equitable food supply.

We’re stepping it up and we want these companies to know how serious we are. Yesterday Chicagoans opened the Tribune to find our full page ad, calling out ADM, Bunge, and Cargill for profiting from false solutions to our climate crisis. By promoting industrially produced soy and palm oil as biofuel, these companies are diverting our resources and attention away from truly renewable energy.

Our newly-launched Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign is letting these companies know that destroying the world’s rainforests for profit won’t fly. Join us. Tell the CEOs of these companies that there will be no more agribusiness as usual. Send a message to the CEOs now.

The Times does a great job of laying out the tremendous ecological and economic costs associated with large-scale ethanol production (including a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined) as well as its limited capacity of satisfying our growing appetite for food and fuel. While cutting through many of the shortfalls ethanol proponents are using to tout this alternative, it becomes clear the level of insanity brewing from the lobbyist-infested halls of our Capitol.

“The ethanol craze, like so much of U.S. energy policy, is designed more to please small but politically powerful constituencies such as corn growers and Detroit automakers than to solve the nation’s energy problems.”

Think there’s a better way? Check out what RAN is doing here and get activated.

I clicked on “What Can a Tree Be?”, wondering why being a key part of a diverse ecosystem, like providing shelter for animals, preventing erosion and producing oxygen was evidently not good enough. The next page treated me to an important looking person (you can tell because he’s wearing a suit) talking with an accent that a co-worker described as “just British enough to seem smart, but not so British as to seem foreign”. In essence, it’s the “Evil Accent” spoken by the Empire in Star Wars or the Romans in less-than-accurate Hollywood depictions.

Anyway, he admits that Weyerhaeuser looks at trees “a little differently” and urges me to click on some of the things that they’re busy turning trees into. Here are my favorites (sorry I can’t link directly, but it’s a Flash website).

• Food! Yes, they want to grind up habitats of endangered animals to create cellulose additives for ice cream. I feel that needs to be said again in italics: Weyerhaeuser wants to put trees in ice cream.
• Biofuels! Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. Do we really want to trade oil wars in the Middle East for Weyerhaeuser’s brand of clearcutting trees, jobs, and communities? Oh, and solar and wind power don’t cause homeless caribou.
• Trees! One of the things Weyerhaeuser is turning trees into is “even better trees”. That’s code for genetic engineering, my friends. Weyerhaeuser must have skipped the part in their history textbooks about monoculture farming and the potato famine, I guess. Monoculture plantations are like a baseball team with nine pitchers.

Moments after taking a chainsaw to an “idea”.

Image after image of tree technician complete with test tubes, latex gloves and safety goggles gets the point across pretty plainly. This company has nothing but contempt for nature as it is now and is completely dispassionate about twisting it into whatever will make them money. Plus, what’s so dangerous that they need safety goggles? The ice cream?

Considering how important forests (by which I mean complete ecosystems, not tree factories producing the straightest sticks modern science can muster) are to global ecology and how incredibly short-sighted it is to turn them into assembly lines to feed our overconsumption, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, quite literally, Weyerhaeuser can’t see the forest for the trees.

When I saw the cover of the most recent issue, however, I actually had to stop and crack open the magazine before stuffing it into the envelope—to read this:

Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America’s Biggest Political Boondoggles

The article isn’t news to us here at RAN, but it might be to a lot of people like my father who might never have heard about the downside of agrifuels. Good on you, Rolling Stone. But, with all due respect, I’ll still take my sharp British economic analysis over stories about washed-up hair bands.

Oh, and don’t miss this post over at R-Squared Energy Blog (the author, an energy insider, was quoted in the article).

“How did such a bad idea gain such incredible currency?” Listen and find out.

Also in the interview was Joe Brewer, a fellow at the Rockridge Institute, whose work I’ve mentioned before. Both of them have recently authored some pretty illuminating articles on the state of the biofuels debate in the US:

The Great Biofuel Hoax: Holt-Giménez discusses some of the myths surrounding biofuels.

The Coming Biofuels Disaster: Brewer explains how a re-framing of biofuels from the perspective of creating livable communities makes it clear that they aren’t a good idea.

The post discusses at length the current preoccupation with fuel rather than energy, which is something that even we in the progressive movement are often guilty of (note: cars running on hydrogen produced by coal-fired power plants would emphatically not represent an improvement). Brewer also suggests that words map onto different meanings at different points along the political spectrum. To many, he says, the word “sustainability” means the ability to sustain our way of life exactly as it is, by any means necessary (exhibit A: the ridiculous conservative backlash against the anti-sprawl movement). “Alternative” energy sources might include the environmental suicide that is coal-to-liquid technology. While I’d like to think that most people who are concerned about the environment aren’t quite so clueless, I could definitely be wrong.

Rockridge has a lot of ideas that they hope progressives will find useful in framing national debate; check out their new book, Thinking Points, available here in PDF format.