Star-Crossed Biofuel Lovers Overcome by Gasses

Years ago, the most popular ice-breaker line when a couple first met was, “So, do you come around here often?” As astrology developed into a cottage industry, awkward moments were made less excruciating when couples began asking, “So, what’s your sign?” For today’s romantics, a generation of global warming/climate change lemmings, the new ice-breaker (literally) seems to be, “So, can you believe this global warming? What are you doing to reduce greenhouse gasses?” My eco-pulse has quickened by merely writing a brief description of such an encounter!

Not only is that question a unique conversation starter, it also demonstrates a keen awareness of the hip sociopolitical phenomenon sweeping the globe. The War on Terror or Operation Iraqi Freedom are mere bylines compared to what many believe is the most pressing story of our time. The following headlines from today’s news coverage are only a small sampling of the countless global warming/climate change stories dominating global media outlets each day:

“Global Majority Wants Action on Climate Change.”
“Global Warming Leaves Russians Cold.”
“UN Chief Urges Immediate Climate Action.”
“Schwarzenegger Urges UN to Move on Climate Change.”
“Rising Seas Threaten US Historical Sites.”

Could anything send a more convincing message of responsibility and commitment to a prospective “soul mate” than passionately expressing a lifelong dedication to reducing one’s greenhouse gas emissions? Any woman will embrace a man’s efforts to control his gaseous emissions of any kind, but particularly those pesky greenhouse gasses that are allegedly going to be the death of us all one day. To global warming devotees, bulging biceps or bounteous beauty take a back seat to biofuel usage as desired mate traits.

Yet what will happen to the star-crossed eco-lovers when they learn that a trait once held as a treasured virtue is actually a vice? Such love spell breaking news appeared yesterday in an article by Times (London) reporter Lewis Smith titled, “Study: Biofuels May Produce More Greenhouse Gas than Oil.” The thump you would have heard, if more media outlets had published the story, was the sound of millions of collective environmentalist jaws hitting the floors of their hybrid vehicles as they realized how lovingly and blindly they had embraced biofuels that now appear to be uglier than their declared nemesis, big oil. As our farmers rapidly convert their fields to accommodate the burgeoning ethanol industry rather than food production while millions starve in agriculture-poor African nations, the scientific revelation that ethanol and rapeseed biofuels produce high levels of nitrous oxide should be particularly disheartening to ethanol-enchanted environmentalists.

It’s not as if the study was part of a global conspiracy by big oil to further its allegedly insidious interests. The study was a collaborative effort of British, American, and German researchers, one of which was a Nobel Prize-winning expert on ozone. Before you buy a hybrid vehicle or applaud your congressman for working to expand ethanol production as a means to save the world from global warming catastrophe, pause a moment and examine what renowned scientists, rather than Alarmist Al Gore, discovered about those bewitching biofuels (bold emphasis added by Capital Cloak):

A renewable energy source designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions may be contributing more to global warming than fossil fuels, a study suggests.

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from rapeseed and corn have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save.

Other biofuels, especially those likely to see greater use over the next decade, performed better than fossil fuels, but the study raises serious questions about some of the most commonly produced varieties.

Rapeseed and corn biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 percent and 50 percent more greenhouse gases, respectively, than fossil fuels.

The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realized.

…The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution.

"One wants rational decisions rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon because superficially something appears to reduce emissions," said Keith Smith, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and one of the researchers.

Corn for ethanol is the prime crop for biofuel in the U.S., where production for the industry has recently overtaken the use of the plant as a food. In Europe the main crop is rapeseed (one variety of which is canola), which accounts for 80 percent of biofuel production.

"The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto," Smith told Chemistry World magazine.
…But they concluded that the biofuels "can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O [nitrous oxide] emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings."

The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review.

The research team consisted of scientists from Britain, the U.S. and Germany, and included Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone.

…Dr. Dave Reay, also of the University of Edinburgh, used the findings to calculate that with the U.S. Senate aiming to increase corn-ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation will rise by 6 percent.

In their rush to gain the political favor of environmentalists, congressmen are tip-toeing through and around a growing body of expert scientific research that is debunking the hysteria over greenhouse gasses almost as fast as Al Gore produces them jetting around in gas guzzling private aircraft or keeping cool in his palatial homes.

Devotion tends to blind one to the faults of his or her beloved. Environmentalists enjoyed an energetic elopement with ethanol and other plant-derivative biofuels. Now that the flaws of their betrothed have been exposed by a Nobel Prize winner and an international team of environmental experts, the relationship they so cherished with biofuels may soon wind up wrecked on the rocky shoals of reality. The honeymoon with ethanol has led only to a mournful rendition of “Love on the Rocks.” Neil Diamond proved prophetic with his second line, “Ain’t no surprise.”

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Biofuels, Ethanol, Rapeseed, Greenhouse Gasses, Global Warming, Climate Change, Al Gore, Nitrous Oxide, Greenhouse Emissions

Bush is Warming Whimp Next to Klaus

It is rare for a the president of a nation to write a guest column for a newspaper. It is even rarer for a president to openly challenge, in an international publication, the prevailing politically correct view of a controversial issue that appears to be dictating the policies and actions of many governments worldwide. Yet perhaps because an issue is in fact dictating in a manner that reminds Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus of another oppressive form of public thought control, communism, he chose to warn the world of the dangers of climate change hysteria. President Bush relishes his image as a “cowboy” president, a man who talks tough, talks straight, and never runs from a fight, but when it comes to confronting the increasingly alarmist radical political movement that surrounds “global warming,” President Bush is no match for President Klaus. While President Bush attends summits and pays verbal homage to man’s contributions to global warming, President Klaus adopted the true cowboy swagger and spoke his mind about climate change and the flawed science behind this hysterical phenomenon.

In a guest opinion column in the Financial Times last week, President Klaus offered the following view of global warming, quoted here in part:

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

…Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).

…I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:
■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.

President Klaus in this column demonstrated courage and common sense to a degree that is lacking, on this issue of global warming, in the leaders of both American political parties. Democrats embrace global warming like lemmings, prepared to follow the pied-piper of the day, Al Gore, off the environmental cliff without considering any of the voluminous contradictory evidence. Republicans, including the President and Newt Gingrich, concur that it is politically inadvisable to question the existence of global warming as a man-made phenomenon and thus are out on the speaking stump proposing solutions for a problem many scientists do not believe is a problem at all. A Republican who bows at the altar of global warming should be sacrificed upon it when voters choose the Party’s nominee for 2008. Blindly following any form of hysteria is a sign of poor judgment that is not worthy of one who would lead the strongest of the world’s free nations.

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe provided the free world with an influx of people starving for liberties and thirsting for freedom, and they, better than many unappreciative and apathetic Americans, recognize threats and intrusions on freedom. President Klaus sees such danger in the global warming movement. The world tends to ignore lone voices in the wilderness, but it would do so at its peril if it chooses to set aside the advice of Vaclav Klaus, a true straight-talking president.

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Vaclav Klaus Global Warming Czech Republic Climate Change Al Gore Hysteria Communism Environmentalists