Slashdot Mirror
Biofuels Coming With a High Environmental Price?
DurandalTree writes "With the spectre of global warming on the horizon, biofuels have been touted as the solution to motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. But with biodiesel use on the increase, it appears a distinctively environmentally unfriendly footprint is being left behind by some of its prime sources; affected food prices are surging out of reach of the poor and rainforests are being destroyed to create larger plantations."
To avoid saying the market is always right, I will simply say it's right 99% of the time. So when a special intrest group imposes it's will upon everyone, by coersion instead of persuasion, then the converse principal comes into play, that monopolies are always bad, or at least 99% of the time.
1) Spread FUD about competitors
2) Buy legislators, or wait for FUD saturation to accrue to the point where shameless politians will knowingly doing the wrong thing because it will appear that they are "caring" or "taking action"
3) Monopoly Profit!
For example, take the "alternative" bag industry, spreading FUD about plastic bags being bad for the enviroment. They fail to mention that the total paper process actually mixes more chemical contaminints into the enviroment, but somehow people start believing the overly simplistic "plastic bad" and "paper good" mantras. What follows are monopoly laws that force everyone to fuck the enviroment, in order to line the pockets corporations, so that the ignorant populace can continue to feel sanctimonious over the "evil" deniers.
My personal opinion is not to blame the corrupt polititians, they aren't dictators, they were elected by people. And not to blame corporations, they can't make you buy their products, their products are purchased by people. But to blame the people that are content being ignorant so they can continue to follow their "faith" (enviromentalism, communism, appleism, liberalism, islamo-fascism, etc...) And last but not least, some blame for the rest of us that tolerate all the intolerant behavior of the preceding groups of religious nuts.
After watching Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode on genetically-altered foods here, I can tell you this shouldn't be a problem, but people want to trash good solutions because corporations automatically == evil to them.
So we develop tech that allows us to throw some "solar nets" up into space and transfer the energy back to earth. Put them in the L4 and L5 Earth-Solar Lagrange points and we'll be in energy heaven for quite some time.