And it is driving the cost of food through the roof.
Ironically, the “agricultural runoff” referred to in the article are the organo-phosphate fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. Biofuels are not the answer, but neither is shutting down the agriculture industry since the vast majority of their output is NOT for biofuels but to feed ourselves.
Finally someone calling out biofuels. I thought I was the only one that remembered the great ethanol hoax.
Don't forget, wasteful government programs don't hurt anything if :1) You are told that only the rich pay for them or 2) you get a tax cut (and don't expect #2 from Obama even though he talks about it all the time.)
Environmentalism is based on a profound nievete. It assumes that technology is inherently dirty while native traditions are inherently clean.
Because wind and sun are considered clean it must follow that energy production based on air and light are necessarily clean. Transforming light and air into energy is, however, nothing if not excesively dirty.
A sensible approach is to develop cleaner production of so-called dirty energy sources such as oil and coal.
Environmentalists, of course, want none of it. They insist that wind turbines are preferable. They do not seem to care about the tens of thousands of birds killed annually by these giant windmills. They are oblivious to the high decible hum that emanantes from these devices. Nor are they willing to admit that the production of enormous steel and aluminum structures requires vast mineral resources and a manufacturing process that destroys the environment in which these monuments to fantasy are created.
The creation of energy is a balancing act. Raw materials that can be mined cheaply with minimum impact on the environment are most desirable. Coal and oil beat air and sun hands down when the extraction tools are factored into the production equation.
Our runoff’s gotta go somwhere. As long as our deepwater rigs are about to take off for Brazil and other places, we might as well put it there.
Every year NOAA sponsors the summer SEAMAP survey for the Gulf of Mexico.
It tracks various marine life stocks, and in the end the scientists map out the yearly dead zone of the Gulf.
The Dead Zone has grown exponentialy every year since the ethanol boom, and more so since the banning of MTBE.
The nonpoint source water pollution deadzone in the Gulf is still about 7 times larger than the Deepwater Horizon deadzone.
Good scientists from Texas to Florida have been advocating against ethanol subsidies for this reason for almost a decade, they simply were ignored and or defunded by the Cult of Global Warming Sociopaths who captured the scientific communities’ levers of power in the United States.
Obama would be lying.
Biofuels cause more destruction to the planet than the people in the GOM will ever see, including this oil spill. When those who demonize oil let me know when the life and animal species in and around the Gulf of Mexico has become extinct and that the destuction of land or sea is so complete that it can never heal itself or return to its former state. Then we can talk.