Food Riots Made in the USA

...offi cials called for a biofuels moratorium last week, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, called the whole thing “a big joke...

...It could end our energy odyssey...

...Lovins offered the domestic beer and wine industries as models of how displacing gasoline with homegrown fuels might be practical...

...That’s easy enough to estimate...

...The 16,000-megawatt Three Gorges in China, probably the last major dam that will ever be built in the world, uprooted more than a million people...

...It is enough to heat the core of the planet to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is the only form of energy that does not come from the sun...

...Meanwhile a nuclear reactor of the same size is fed by a single fl atbed truck that arrives with a new set of fuel rods once every 18 months...

...So it is with all forms of solar energy...

...When the energy independence theory started to falter, environmentalists settled on the notion that at least ethanol would reduce carbon emissions...

...The world is awash with energy...

...Why not employ some of that land to help us gain energy independence...

...And that’s where biofuels went awry...

...When an atom splits in two— which happens occasionally in nature and can be induced in a nuclear reactor—some binding energy is liberated...

...Farmers are planting corn fencepost to fencepost and bringing new land under cultivation to cash in...

...Hydroelectric dams also store solar energy...

...If it was another fi eld crop, then the carbon would have remained in the soil or the food supply or any other of the many “carbon sinks” for a long, long time...

...If we are ever going to access enough energy to run our industrial economy without overwhelming the environment in the process, we are going to have to fi nd it in the nucleus of the atom...

...Growing crops consumes energy, and since only a small part of the plant—the seed—is distilled into alcohol, there’s no guarantee of an energy gain...

...After U.N...

...First, although biofuels have been anointed as clean, renewable, and sustainable, William Tucker’s book, Terrestrial Energy, which will be published in August by Bartleby Press, can be previewed at www...

...We have 600 such coal plants around the country now—to burn wood instead would require a forest the size of Alaska...

...The radiation from the sun warms the earth and lights the day in quantities that make people say, “If only we could capture a small portion of that . . .” It has been almost the sole source of energy throughout the planet’s history (remember that “almost...

...The Science articles have caused a biofuels meltdown...

...Environmentalists and farm state senators—the great biofuels coalition—of course object...

...Terrestrial energy is the answer to all the unpleasant questions raised by solar energy, which is why the nuclear industry in this country is poised for a comeback...

...I bet if I set a bushel of corn in front of any of those [U.N.] delegates, not one of them would eat it...

...The scale of effort required does not seem unreasonable...

...Writing in the Washington Post in 2006, two former enthusiasts of biofuels, James Jordan and James Powell of Brooklyn’s Polytechnic University, noted: It’s diffi cult to understand how advocates of biofuels can believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addition...

...In light of last week’s food riots and soaring world prices, it can’t happen soon enough...

...The problem is that, except in the more concentrated form of fossil fuels, stored solar energy remains extremely dilute...

...This year somebody fi nally asked the question...

...It is everywhere around us, mostly in the form of that dread word radiation...

...The great ethanol boom is a classic case of putting First World luxuries ahead of Third World necessities...

...Let’s import ethanol from Brazil...

...Like many other “alternate” efforts, biofuels can be traced to soft-energy guru Amory Lovins’s famous 1976 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken...

...The problem is capturing and storing it...

...there has never been much evidence that they are producing any new energy...

...In fact, what being “green” really means is that they all require vast amounts of land...

...Suffi ce it to say, distilling one-third of our corn crop is replacing only 3 percent of our oil consumption...

...You make ethanol out of corn,” he told the New York Times...

...Maybe U.N...

...Those 30-story windmills produce 1.5 megawatts apiece—about 1/750th the power of a conventional generating station...

...The remaining 99.999 percent is in the nucleus...

...Even in the United States, milk prices have jumped 50 percent because so much corn is being diverted from cows to gas tanks...

...So how did we get into this mess...

...As a result, we suddenly fi nd ourselves taking food out of the mouths of children in developing nations...

...The most optimistic studies claim only a 25 percent energy profi t, and some critics—David Pimentel of Cornell in particular—claim there is actually an energy loss...

...The same holds true for fossil fuels, which are the highly distilled remains of ancient organisms...

...The amount of energy released in the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT...

...But if we burn coal or oil, we’re putting back carbon that has been underground for eons...

...The world, after all, is a very big place...

...After all, computer chips and photovoltaic cells are both made of silicon...

...It’s a matter of energy storage...

...terrestrialenergy.org...

...The amount of sunlight landing on a card table that can be converted to electricity is roughly enough to power four 100-watt light bulbs...

...The price of farmland is soaring...

...Carter pushed an ethanol subsidy through Congress in the midst of the 1979 gas shortage, and we were on our way...

...The sun heats air and sets it in motion, producing kinetic energy that can be transformed into work...

...X” article proposing the “containment” strategy of the Cold War...

...What was growing on that acreage before it was turned over to biofuels...

...The extremely dilute nature of solar energy ensures that vast amounts of land will be necessary to capture and store it...

...The Midwest has embraced this vision with a passion...

...The conceit of biofuels has always been that agricultural resources in this country were unlimited...

...Wood and biofuels are also vaults of stored solar energy...

...And the effects on land and agriculture would be devastating...

...It is still the most reprinted article in the journal’s history, surpassing even George Kennan’s 1947 “Mr...

...Jean Ziegler, a U.N...

...Photosynthetic cells use sunlight to transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into long organic molecules...

...Although solar energy is ubiquitous and almost incalculably vast, it is also very dilute...

...Radiation is the way energy travels in the universe...

...Noting that the beer and wine industries already produced 5 percent the liquid of the oil industry, Lovins concluded: Thus a conversion industry roughly ten to fourteen times the physical scale . . . of U.S...

...President George W. Bush reiterated this last week in his address on climate change...

...Farm towns are revitalizing...

...A better strategy, however, is to fi nd or create stores of solar energy that can be concentrated and used at will...

...Wind, hydro, and all the “alternate” sources of energy have been dubbed “green” because they are supposedly clean, renewable, and sustainable...

...If it were a forest—particularly a tropical forest, a great natural sink for carbon—then the net addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could be extraordinary...

...As they move up to industrial scale, however, the land requirements become staggering...

...Still, there’s something to be had there, and it is being pursued by the technology of photovoltaics— turning sunlight into electricity...

...C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two agricultural experts at the University of Minnesota, predict that by 2025 bio fuels will be responsible for 600 million more chronically hungry people...

...Another study in the same issue by environmental economist Timothy Searchinger of Princeton found that growing biofuels almost anywhere in the world will result in land being cleared somewhere else for food or fuel...

...In a January cover story for Scientifi c American, three leading solar researchers proposed meeting our electrical needs in 2050 by covering southwestern desert with solar collectors...

...offi cials don’t eat raw corn, but livestock do, and that land could easily be used to grow crops for human consumption...

...In “The Road Not Taken...

...This means that, if we could capture all the usable solar energy on every rooftop in the country, we would probably have about enough to provide our indoor lighting—except at night, of course, when it’s most needed...

...We could call it “terrestrial energy,” to differentiate it from solar energy...

...Wind is solar energy nestled in the atmosphere...

...Glen Canyon Dam, which can produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, is backed up by a reservoir 250 miles square (Lake Powell, in Arizona and Utah...

...If we burn this year’s corn crop, so the logic went, we are only putting back atmospheric carbon that was taken out last year...

...There have been “tortilla riots” in Mexico and identical disturbances in Morocco, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Cameroon, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen...

...Other forms of stored solar energy make comparable demands...

...In a position paper released only a few weeks ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the many environmental organizations that has preached biofuels for decades, continued to insist that, “done right,” ethanol can not only replace all our oil by 2050 but also “mitigate dangerous climate change...

...When we burn wood or biofuels, we break these carbon chains and release their “chemical” energy...

...This 2-million differential explains why a 1,000-megawatt coal plant must be fed by a 110-car train loaded with 16,000 tons of coal arriving every day...

...T]he entire U.S...

...That’s why we stopped building dams in the 1960s—because they were drowning scenic canyons and displacing populations...

...Time, which only two months ago was celebrating Richard Branson’s conversion of one of his Virgin Atlantic jets to biofuels, ran an April cover story, “The Clean Energy Myth...

...The 51-cents-a-gallon federal tax credit assures a market...

...cropland for cornbased ethanol production would meet about 15 percent of demand...

...Atomic energy occurs naturally in the earth with the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms...

...In the beginning, when “alternate” efforts were still fairly modest, none of this much mattered...

...The sun evaporates water, which falls and runs downhill...

...When he visited the Oval Offi ce in 1978 to advise Jimmy Carter on energy, Lovins found Soft Energy Paths sitting on the president’s desk...

...And land, after all, is also a limited resource...

...But the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington says biofuel conversion accounts for at least a fourth of this increase...

...cellars and breweries, . . . would produce roughly one-third of the present gasohol requirements of the United States...

...The nucleus of the atom is the greatest storehouse of energy in the universe...

...In February, Science published an article by a team headed by Joseph Fargione of the Nature Conservancy showing that converting virgin land into ethanol cultivation multiplies carbon emissions by a factor of 93...

...Nice try, folks...

...As for the notion that homegrown ethanol can replace more than a tiny fraction of our oil consumption— let alone do anything to ameliorate world carbon emissions— that is an environmental hallucination...

...Getting rid of this web of government intervention would now be just about as diffi cult as repealing farm subsidies in general...

...This energy release is two million times greater than any “chemical” releases that come in, say, an internal combustion engine or a coal-fi red electrical generating plant...

...corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our auto and truck transport demands...

...BY WILLIAM TUCKER In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa...

...But notice that Lovins never bothered to calculate the amount of land that would be required...

...Those numbers have barely changed...

...Therefore biofuels are “carbon neutral...

...Safety elements have been vastly improved, revamped plants are making enormous amounts of money, and the nuclear industry is chafi ng to start new construction...

...Yet the amount of matter transformed into energy at Hiroshima was about 3 grams...

...The amount of land required would be 34,000 square miles, about one-quarter of New Mexico...

...In a 2007 paper—well on its way to becoming a classic— Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University, calculated the amount of wood it would take to run one standard 1,000-megawatt electrical plant, the kind that can power a city the size of Cincinnati...

...Getting 1,000 megawatts would require a wind farm 75 miles square...

...Onethird of the American corn crop will be converted to ethanol this year...

...food expert, labeled biofuels a “crime against humanity” and called for a fi ve-year moratorium...

...The energy holding together the nucleus of an atom is called “binding energy...

...Ethanol soon became a virtual franchise of Archer Daniels Midland, the powerful agricultural conglomerate, whose scores of distilleries around the Midwest now produce half our supply...

...Ethanol distilleries are sprouting everywhere...

...If we back this water up behind a dam, we can access the stored energy at will...

...Nobody ever bothered to calculate how much land they would require...

...Haven’t we been paying farmers since the 1930s to not grow crops...

...Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S...

...Electrons have almost unlimited potential for storing information, but their ability to store energy is limited...

...True, the rising cost of energy and the perennial defects of Third World food markets are partly to blame...

...But electrons constitute only 0.001 percent of the mass of an atom...

...Although nuclear power cannot directly replace oil, it could become the basis of an expanded electrical grid that would support vehicles running on either electricity or hydrogen...

...If we run out of room, we can always move on to the tropics, right...

...Using Lovins’s own fi gures, it comes to three times the land area of the United States, including Alaska, to produce one-third of our transportation energy needs in 1976...

...Right now, we’re trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline...

...There is just one question this line of reasoning doesn’t answer...

...That may sound harsh, but it also happens to be true...

...In fact, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has been screaming the same thing for years, to no avail...

...So let’s assess the damage...

...Lovins’s article and his subsequent book Soft Energy Paths were enormously infl uential...

...Presidential nominations turn on who supports ethanol in Iowa...

...So what other possibilities remain...

...It called bio fuels “catastrophic” and “environmentally disastrous...

...But it doesn’t work that way...

...Feeding the furnace year-round would require a forest of one thousand square miles...

...Fossil fuels, on the other hand, may be bumping up against supply constraints and are creating environmental effects that will alter the earth’s climate in unpredictable ways...

...The energy stored in the nucleus of the atom is almost incomprehensibly larger than the energy stored in fossil fuels or the kinetic activity of wind, wave, or water...

...Some early enthusiasts of photovoltaics thought solar technology would be like computer technology with effi ciencies and power doubling every 18 months—in a replay of the exponential growth in computing power fi rst described by Intel founder Gordon Moore and now known as Moore’s Law...

...So for the next 93 years, you’re making climate change worse,” said Fargione...

...Windmills can run mechanical machinery or turn electric turbines—which is why whole mountain ranges are now being decorated with 30-story, propeller-driven structures that look as if they were left there by a race of giants...

...World food prices have almost doubled since 2005...