Julie Quantum Leaps

Here’s my visual for the day.

Picture an animal caught in a trap. You know, the big metal claw kind of trap that bites down on the animal’s leg with the ONLY chance of escape being them chewing that leg off.

Now picture that animal, with it’s leg still in the trap, chewing off it’s other three limbs.

Call the animal a human.

THE AMAZON

So tell me, do you think we’ve gotten any closer in the battle to save the rainforests? Even one little tiny baby step closer? Nosireebob, there is no hope in sight. In fact, it’s twice as bad as you thought and guess what? It’s all because of your friendly neighborhood polar bears.

And when the number of starving humans on this planet DOUBLES, we can blame that on the polar bears too.

Ok, you’re right. I place no blame on the polar bears. They’re just living their lives. They don’t have politicians and corporations…

Let’s start at the beginning:

We drive cars that use too much gas. Fine. Does anyone remember in the 70’s during the gas crunch when we had to buy gas on even or odd days and everyone had locks on their tanks so nobody could siphon off your god-awful expensive buck a gallon gas? The Japanese carmakers were coming out with cars that got 50 miles per gallon. What happened to that technology? Helloooooo???? Over thirty years of how many millions of miles driven? How many millions of gallons of gas wasted? How many miles to the gallon does YOUR car get? Why doesn’t every car now get 50 mpg?

Peak oil.

Let’s just PRETEND we’re running out of oil. Btw, that’s what we thought in the 70’s. Yeah, 30 years ago. But for the sake of arguement, let’s say there is not one drop of oil left on this planet.

So we need a plan to be able to run our cars, or cars of some sort, on something besides oil. Oh, and don’t forget… this can’t harm the polar bears. You know, cuz they’re so damn cute.

Heyyyyy I know! Let’s run cars on… FOOD!

Well it *does* work. You can take corn and… wait, did I say corn? I’m not even going to GO there… (Montsano and the corn growers lobby) So anyway, we can take corn and make fuel that a car will run on. Well hot damn that’s just fucking brilliant.

Problem 1 – It takes twice as much ethanol as gas to run a car.

Problem 2 – Ethanol does not break down as quickly once it’s in the atmosphere as gas does. (Oh, the irony)

Problem 3 – You need land to grow corn (duh!) Are you going to just pull that land out of your ass? No. As appealing as that seems, you either have to use land that is already used for growing crops that humans can EAT or you MAKE more usable land.

WORLD HUNGER

It had been predicted that by 2025, the number of hungry in the world would drop to 625 million. That has been readjusted for the effects of biofuel to now be at a cool 1.2 billion. That’s DOUBLE!

DOUBLE TROUBLE or the soon to be savannah…

That’s not the only thing doubling. Deforestation in Brazil is going to DOUBLE this year.

We thought it was bad in the 90’s when it was the trendy thing to get upset about. All that diverse plant and animal life, up in smoke. And it’s doubling in just one year.

The freaking fires are changing the climate there and the rainforest is soon going to be referred to as the savannah.

And we think we’re the intelligent species…

So here we are, the human race, living in a world that’s changing before our very eyes; in a world that’s warming. That’s the trap – that metal claw one I described. And here we are, panicking, chewing off the wrong limbs. We’re destroying land and animals and potential disease-curing plants, and things we don’t even understand yet, in some lame attempt to use ANY other fuel, even a less efficient one as oil. We’re depleting our food sources in the same lame attempt, creating more hunger in the world. We keep chewing and chewing and we won’t have any limbs left.

And the trap remains.

Be sure to read Time magazine’s COVER article “The Clean Energy Scam“