I agree completely with a rant by Eric Reguly in the June 18 Globe + Mail, titled "Unfolding crisis shows fault in putting biofuels before food." He highlights the irrationality of continuing to subsidize the production of biofuels using food crops as the danger of widespread famine resulting from the war in Ukraine increases every day. He points out that this procedure is a terrible waste of food. And he argues convincingly that producing biofuels from food crops has almost no effect on carbon emission reduction – a fact I alluded to in the following blog post from December 2017:
Canada is gradually improving its ranking in environmental opinion
polls, but we’re still subject to some derision, focusing on the Alberta
Oilsands, which critics refer to as ‘tarsands that produce the world’s dirtiest
oil.’
They may be right, but I think if we paid higher carbon taxes we could
pay for whatever research it takes to clean up this energy source. And this
would be far better than going to war over oil in the Middle East or using food
to make biofuels.
In the meantime, I thought I’d present this
‘blot on the landscape’ as a ‘cleaned up’ semi-abstract design. As for making sense of the rest of the overlaid
haiku, Googling ‘climate change preparation’ will get you over a million
results to read...
Tomorrow I will re-publish my own Renewable
Energy Rant, originally posted on this blog in April 2021.
