Thinking globally, who traditionally does the subsistence farming? Who carries the water increasing distances as water tables shrink? Fetches firewood from ever further away? Do you know which gender tends to die preferentially as a result of large-scale natural disasters?

Thinking about Oxfam (always a left-wing project) I get the feeling that many of the commenters have not worked on charitable projects for a length of time. It seems a very natural progression to want to change the setting within which your beneficiaries live, so campaigning becomes part of what you do.

No hope here – environmental scientists are mentioned twice…Oy Veh!

(if that was a misprint, I apologise!)

“I’m not a detractor. I’m all in favor of new innovations in any sector. The difference here is that these technologies are being shoehorned in when they’re not ready to take on the pressures they’ll be under. It’s like forcing people to buy a certain type of shoe whether it fits them properly or not.”

I agree 100% with this comment. The current mandate from Congress is that we will increase our production of ethanol by 4-5 times. Of course this is because Congress is in the pocket of the ethanol crowd and they want the uninformed to believe they are taking action. This mandate was pushed through even in light of all the recent reports exposing that Ethanol from corn does not make economic sense, requires huge amounts of precious water, and in fact is harming the environment more than fossil fuels.

A paper revently presented at the National Academy of Science by Prof Goldemberg from Brazil provided the relative energy production from making ethanol from various feedstocks: corn, wood and other celluosic feedstocks, and sugar cane. Corn rated about 1, cellulosic feedstocks 2, and sugar cane 9. The Department of Energy is aware of these problems. To address the poor energy production from the current feedstocks the government has recently let out $10 billion in grants to various organizations to develop more productive feedstocks. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

So wood and similar feedstocks are only slightly better than corn, it appears we have Congress spending huge tax dollars on the wrong technology. Does this surprise you? Also it should be noted that no one has yet manufactured large scale commercial ethanol from wood, etc. with the pyrolysis or gasification processes currently being touted. Even forgetting the economics, there are huge technology hurdles that need to be overcome. Finally don’t be deceived about how clean these processes are. Wood, etc has many of the same nasty tramp elements that coal has in it. Making it clean will be a challenge.

While reasearch for new fuels is needed, it will not work as long as Congress has it’s fingers in the pie.

I read the daily biofuels digest almost ever day and am shocked at the amount of $$$ being handed out by our governments to develop what appears to be the wrong technology. If you are interested, sign up for their e-mail.
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/est,
One recent grant caught my eye since it will provide funding to develop a computer model for technology that does not make sense to me.
“In New York, Cornell University has received a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation for its new Institute for Computational Sustainability that will, among other goals, provide computer-based modeling and forecasting for ethanol production. The Institute will bring together environmental scientists, computer scientists, mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists who will model a variety of sustainability issues including the balance of food and fuel production. ”

Hope this model is better than the AGW models!
I seriously dobt that the current approach is going to get us off foreign oil in 20 or 30 years!!

That’s a hot one. (Has he ever read a line of Chinese history in his life?)

That is a whole lot of paper, ink, electricity etc that could have been saved; this report is likely to have been printed off a number of times during the draft and checking phases as well as after the final version was agreed.

There are a lot of schools in developing countries crying out for paper, ink – isn’t that who Oxfam allegedly try and help?

Now, I don’t think that amount of atmospheric carbon is harmful in the first place, but talk about adding insult to injury! Sheesh!

I do agree with Ox on that.

But I also think that killing the wealth will harm the poor nations of the world far more than any warming (if indeed there is any warming). The cure is worse than the disease–if there even is a disease in the first place.

Ray:

The idea that it takes more fuel to make ethanol is a sham from the BigOil to prohibit every farmer to produce cheap alternative fuel… and food!

Ray, both the Economist and Consumer Reports [in their October, 2006 cover story] state the same thing: it requires .7 gallons of fossil fuel — and 1,700 gallons of fresh water — to produce just one gallon of ethanol.

FatBigot:

Oxfam ceased to be a true charity more than 20 years ago, since then it has been an overt campaigning organisation for global-government socialist idealogues who cannot gain power through the ballot box.

Fat Bigot is right. I have subscribed to the Economist for more than 30 years. I remember the first small Oxfam ads that appeared. They grew and expanded. Now, the Economist routinely runs very expensive half and full page Oxfam ads, which clearly indicate that Oxfam and the UN are joined together hip and thigh, in an unholy globaloney alliance. Oxfam is a parasite feeding off of the UN — and the UN is a parasite feeding off the U.S., the British Isles, and Western Europe. Everyone else gets a free pass, including China, Russia, India, Brasil, and a hundred+ smaller countries.

Ray:

That reminds me of the story where a woman asks W.C. Fields:

Woman: “Why don’t you drink water?”

W.C. Fields: “Because fish piss in it!”

[Ray, "piss" wasn't the word that W.C. Fields used. He was referring to fornication.]

Oxfam has a tremendous amount of influence. My question: Who elected Oxfam to speak for the entire world?

And: where does Oxfam get its multi-$millions from?

Oxfam has teamed up for this with the President of the Maldives, suddenly a defender of human rights after having run the country as “Dictator” for 30 years

The same dictator who so poorly managed his island that the erosion from the mining of the protective reef has people screaming “rising sea levels” when in fact it’s nothing of the sort.

Having worked for a very large NGO, I can tell you that there are large departments in the main offices of the larger NGO’s which have the designation – Advocacy. Some of the people in these departments are made up of marketing people whose research consists of trolling the internet and then writing up diatribe such as written by this above article writer.
A balanced approach and real on the ground research are not considered – preconceived ideas are the real agenda.

By the way, I was in the supermarket again today (buying lots of tasty, and I’m glad to say thoroughly unsustainable food) and thought I’d glance at New Scientist mag. In a momentous week for science which saw the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, I wondered what their cover and lead story would feature. Of course it would be the LHC…

But it was: “A bowl of cereal has the same carbon footprint as a 7-kilometre journey in a 4×4. A steak is equivalent to driving 30 kilometres”.

Sad, very sad.

I was really tempted to buy some steak after that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents