“The earth is not getting warmer. It’s getting colder. The climate Nazis at the UN admitted this week that their claim that the Himalayan glaciers are melting away was false. I may as well have said the Great Salt Lake is going to turn to sugar.”

Jim’s put together a “Little Ice Age Portfolio” as a response to the climate change hysteria. But the investment response is secondary to the seriousness of the issue, he says. “There’s very little evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels lead to rising temperatures. It’s more likely — as temperature records show — that changes in climate are correlated to solar activity and sun cycles. Imagine that.”

“If it were true that reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the earth’s atmosphere reduced the earth’s temperature, it would be a bad idea to do it. In the Dark Ages, another period of lower solar activity, the Nile River froze. On the other hand, Rome prospered because agriculture thrived and you could grow grain in Carthage.”

“In a colder world, Canada would be an iceberg and one of the great grain growing regions of the world would disappear. People believe that because farmers plant a crop, it will be harvested and the modern world can live on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup that malnourishes people and makes them fat. But in another Little Ice age, hundreds of thousands of people would die if the world’s grain growing regions marginally declined. Billions would die if the impact was more severe.”

“The Black Death hit Europe in the Little Ice Age, too. Lower crop yields reduced the quality and quantity of nutrition available. This weakened immune systems and made people more exposed to infectious diseases. Why, if you’re a humanitarian, would you pursue a public policy that pushes a billion people who are already on the edge of starvation into outright famine?”

“If winter comes early or stays late, whole crops will be wiped out. Reducing the output of food — something that would result from a colder Earth — is evil. It’s based on non-existent science in which people forecast things that may happen centuries from now based on their ideological resistance to prosperity. They are trying to force down living standards in the Western world based on their own guilt about prosperity and income inequality.”

“Global warming just another phrase for good weather. If it’s true carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, we should burn more coal. You can tell the science is dubious because you now have a bizarre feedback loop in which warming makes the world cooler. It’s rubbish.”

“The big risk in the discrediting of the global warming crowd is that it could discredit other, more legitimate concerns about the climate, like the huge amount of harmful chemicals in our water supply. The persistence of dangerous chemicals in our recycled water is something to be really worried about. You don’t want the environment to turn into a sink for man-made chemicals.”

There was much more to report. But we’ll have to leave the rest for another day. Jim is hard at work on the January issue of Strategic. He’s analysing the possibility of a fiscal collapse in the United States, and where investors can seek refuge before it happens.

Until then…

Regards,
Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning Australia

January 22, 2010

Contrarian Climate Change was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

The story line in both Earth Stood Still movies is pretty straightforward. An alien spaceship comes to Earth and lands in Washington, D.C. in the 1951 movie, and in New York’s Central Park in the current remake. Out pops an alien with a “Take me to your leader” gleam in his eye. But in both movies, some trigger-happy soldier shoots the alien. (Although in the current remake, it could have been accidental — like what happened with New York Giants football player Plaxico Burress.)

After the alien gets shot, a giant robot appears from the spaceship and begins firing death rays at the assembled human greeters. But the wounded alien calls off the robot. Then the alien goes to a hospital, where earthling doctors try to figure out how to patch him up. Turns out that the alien looks a lot like the movie actor Keanu Reeves. 

Later, the authorities come in and ask the alien what he wants. “Why did you come to our planet?” they inquire, with a false sense of innocence dripping from their collective lips.

“Your planet?” replies the alien.  Uh oh.  It’s worse than we thought.  The aliens are mad at us.  And it doesn’t help that we shot the guy.  So it’s time to call Houston and tell them that we have a problem.

Death Ray Gap

Of course, the authorities fear the alien because they know that his death rays are better than our death rays. In true Cold War fashion, we have a “death ray gap” that leads to a chasm of misunderstanding.  That, and the unnerving sense of territoriality that the alien seems to exhibit towards our blue orb.

The bottom line is that the alien is visiting Earth to tell mankind to clean up its act, literally and figuratively. In the 1951 movie, the alien wanted to tell mankind not to kill itself off with nuclear warfare. It was an early sop to the anti-nuke movement. In the new release, it’s an environmentalist sequel to Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. That is, the alien declares, “I’m here to save the planet.” 

No kidding. Justice is coming from outer space.  The aliens are going to save the planet, and save it good and hard. This particular alien and his kind are ready to out-do even the Earth First! crowd.  Tree-spiking?  That’s for sissies.  Burning down a Hummer dealership?  They’ll see that, and raise us by a few orders of magnitude.

“If the earth dies, you die,” says the alien.  “If you die, the earth survives.”  Whoops.  This cannot be good.

On cue, the giant robot — GORT, for genetically organized robotic technology — decomposes into a locust-like blizzard of nanoparticles. These tiny particles take flight like a dark cloud and start devouring all man-made substances (including people) in their path, breaking them down into the constituent elements.

There are some serious special effects involved. How serious?  Let’s just say that the New York Giants will need a new stadium in which to play.  And Donald Trump will have some new development opportunities in lower Manhattan — if there is anyone still around who wants to live there.  Yep, these aliens are going to save the planet by killing off mankind and leaving behind wide swaths of mineral sands. It’s urban renewal on nanotechnology steroids.

Girl Meets Alien

But there’s this good-looking female astrobiologist from Princeton. It’s the ageless and eye-popping pretty Jennifer Connelly who won an academy Award for her 2001 efforts as a Princetonian in A Beautiful Mind.  She also appeared in the 2003 movie version of The Incredible Hulk.  So I guess she’s into both smart and genetically altered guys.

It seems that astrobiology-girl took a bunch of government grant money for her research. Apparently, she never read the fine print. There’s a clause in the government contract that says, “If aliens show up, we draft you into the service of the nation.”

So our Princeton Tiger gets shanghaied off to help the government people deal with the alien. She shares a tender moment with the alien when he is in the hospital. And guess what? The alien guy kind of likes her, which is not hard to do when someone as hot as Ms. Connelly is holding your hand.

So to make a long story short, there’s this series of exciting chase scenes. Cars careen and crash. Helicopters hover and hit in fiery collisions. Kindred souls bond. Eventually, the Princeton lady uses her feminine charms to convince the alien to call off the nanobugs.

You go, girl.  Another Academy Award for Ms. Connelly?  She’s good but I don’t think she needs to overspend her budget for the gown she’ll wear to the Kodak Theater.  Even though, to Ms. Connelly’s great credit, the Earth is saved while mankind has to promise the aliens that we’ll stop wrecking the environment.

Stop wrecking the environment? What does that mean? Will the aliens be satisfied now that Carol Browner is going to make energy and environmental policy at the Obama White House?  Or do the aliens want something more than that?  Is there something more than that?  Really, even science fiction has its limits and Carol Browner may well be the one to take it to the edge of physics.

Well, for our purposes it means that the movie is over. That’s all you get for the $9.50 ticket.

After all the action and flying nanobugs, The Day the Earth Stood Still (v. 2.0) does not get to the part about how 6.5 billion people can continue to exist on this planet without using an industrial level of energy supply and industrial levels of agriculture, minerals, water supply, public health and much more. I guess that’s in the next remake, in another 57 years if we’re lucky.

Until we meet again,
Byron W. King

December 23, 2008

An Alien Tree-Hugger Scoffs At Earth’s Governments was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was one of the world’s largest oil producers. Many experts predicted that with Hussein out of power, Iraqi oil production would only rise. This has not been the case. If anything, the war with Iraq has significantly harmed the production of oil and raised the price to record levels. Tensions in the area continue to grow, and recently the threat of an invasion by Turkey sent the price to its highest mark.

So that’s the bad news. Despite what many people think, there actually is good news coming from Iraq. This is news that should delight the very people who have been opposed to the war from the beginning. According to Gallup, the majority of Americans who oppose the Iraq war are Democrats. The same can be said for the majority of Americans who believe global warming to be a major problem. Based on those facts, it may be safe to assume that the same people who oppose the war are the ones asking for changes when it comes to global warming. Many of these people want the government to do something significant about this problem, but the free market should be figuring it out for them.

As more and more people talk about global warming, millions are looking for alternative forms of energy that are cleaner and more environmentally friendly than oil. The technology for alternative fuels is there. The solutions are just way too expensive.

Take hybrid cars, for example. Right now, the Honda Civic sedan starts at $15,010. The popular family vehicle gets 36 miles per gallon. The hybrid version of the Civic starts at $22,600. The hybrid operates at 45 miles per gallon. Clearly, owning a hybrid will have you fueling up fewer times a year and is better for the environment. But are the savings in gas consumption and environmental effects worth it for the average customer to pay over $7,000 more for the “green” vehicle? Based on an average of 12,000 miles driven per year and paying $3.09 for every gallon of gasoline, the savings you get by choosing the hybrid car are only $207 per year. It would take over 33 years to make up for that extra cost. That hardly sounds worth it to me.

One of the only ways these hybrid cars will become more affordable and then be used by more people will be if oil prices begin to rise. The higher oil gets, the more affordable by comparison environmentally friendly alternatives will become. Not only will rising prices balance the differences between oil and alternative energies, but the more expensive oil gets, and the greater a national emergency it becomes, the more incentives to improve energy technology rise.

The incentives will also rise when further political pressure is put on the government. When that happens, subsidies for alternative energy programs will increase. If political unrest continues in the Middle East and the countries that control OPEC refuse to step up production, Americans will have no choice but to curb their use of oil and will then be forced by the market to become part of the ecological solution.

You can already tell that the issue of government subsidies for alternative fuel is one that companies in the energy business are pushing for. According to the National Venture Capital Association, startup companies that focus on clean technologies attracted more than $800 million in venture capital last quarter alone. That shows that there are plenty of investors willing to put up their money hoping the winds are changing toward clean products.

In fact, just last week, the world’s most famous environmentalist, Al Gore, became a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a successful venture capital firm that backs many eco-friendly startup companies. Kleiner Perkins claims that Gore will be an integral part of the running of the firm, but many believe that he will be used for his vast connections in Washington. If Gore can help get more subsidies from the government, the money that a firm like KPCB stands to make could be huge. And of course, the politicians that will provide those subsidies will also be answering to the concerns of their constituents. If the price of oil becomes the biggest problem facing Americans, you can be sure that Congress will attempt to do something to appease the voting public.

What stands in the way of these companies is the threat that oil could somehow become cheap again. What if the U.S. leaves Iraq and tensions in the world begin to ease? What if that led to Iraqi oil production on the levels we saw before 2003? If such a thing would happen, then the American people would continue to drive their gas-guzzling cars and polluting the environment. That is the exact opposite of what many global warming activists want.

Of course, this rationale sounds absurd when compared with the money that could have been saved had we not gone to war. That money could have been used by the government to directly subsidize alternative energies sooner. But would they have used it that way? Probably not. Governments usually tend to respond to problems only when they become a crisis.

This goes to show you that by creating an oil crisis, the government may finally be able to solve it. It may be hard to swallow, but believe it or not, people interested in America cutting down on its use of oil and stepping up cleaner initiatives may have George W. Bush and the Iraq war to thank.

Until next time,
Jamie Ellis

November 23, 2007

Iraq Goes Green was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

First, I give a heartfelt thanks to those who wrote in with kudos and "attaboys." It’s always nice to hear from those who’ve been persuaded, or whose points of view, so long unechoed in the mainstream, have been affirmed. Special thanks to the fellow who invited me to join him for a pheasant hunt on his Michigan farmland.

I also want to thank the entire Whiskey & Gunpowder readership for NOT writing in to bust my chops about the cheesy pun I used for the title of my last piece. I simply could not resist the wordplay, even though it no doubt made some of you groan. A thousand thanks for your restraint (not one person wrote in about it) — and a thousand apologies for my self-indulgence.

And finally, just to prove to you that we don’t shrink from criticism here, I offer the following responses to my detractors…

To those readers who wrote in to claim, in so many words, that I’m an enemy of the Earth, I say this: As a lifelong outdoorsman and conservationist, pristine, untrammeled nature is as precious to me as it could ever be to you, likely more so. And I’d wager you a year’s salary that I spend more time out in it — and more dollars on its preservation, defense, and maintenance — than you ever will.

To those readers who complained that I tend to steer my essays on the environment toward issues involving shooting and the blood sports, I say this: I write about freedoms. And when it comes to the environment, those freedoms most in the cross hairs of the quasi-religious fashion show the environmental movement has become in this country are those involving hunting, shooting, fishing, and the responsible treading upon the lands our tax dollars pay for with the gear involved in pursuing these freedoms.

To those who wrote in to take offense at characterizations like "tree-hugger" and "enviro-Nazi," I say this: These labels are meant to call into glaring relief zealous factions of the new religion of environmentalism that would sacrifice all American freedoms — not to mention prosperity — on the altar of flawed assumptions about the natural world, and about how best to save and preserve it. Most Americans who would call themselves environmentalists fall nowhere near these classifications in my eyes. Apologies if I didn’t make this clear in my prior essay. The last thing I wish to do is alienate the open-minded and receptive with my characterization of the narrow-minded and destructive.

And last but not least, to the guy who wrote to excoriate me as clueless and factually inaccurate because HE didn’t distinguish between my comments on carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, I say this: Get a clue yourself — and learn to read!

Now, onto other matters, like offending another group of misguided, misanthropic misusers of the environmental agenda: animal rights activists.

An Inconvenient "Toot"

As you know, I’m normally either poking fun at the animal rights crowd or exposing their agenda as disingenuous, fraudulent, and logically flawed.

But today, I’m their best freakin’ friend. Seriously, I am so glad these fools exist right now — because they’ve poked a far larger and more-visible-to-the-mainstream hole in the human-caused global warming argument than I could with a thousand essays in this forum…

As you may have noticed, a new element has entered the global warming debate lately. Well, it’s not really new at all, but it is newly anointed as credible by the mainstream media — owing largely to the slick, refined PR machine that PETA and friends have spent all their donation and membership monies building (they certainly haven’t used it to buy any land for wildlife to flourish on). The element I’m talking about:

Greenhouse gases from livestock, uhh… emissions.

Yep, cow farts and other livestock-related processes. As it turns out, PETA’s rabid hatred of all things carnivorous has driven them to mass-publicize a fact that pulls the rug out from under a major pillar of Al Gore and company’s politically motivated hatred of all things carboniferous: that the cumulative effects of raising animals for food creates more greenhouse gases than all the world’s cars and trucks combined.

Only around 9% of the world’s atmospheric CO2 comes from livestock sources. However, as measured by CO2 equivalent, around 18% of the Earth’s greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide are the biggies) result from animal emissions, the livestock-rearing process, and the carbon-negative impact of clearing grazing acreage of forest and other plants, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report released last November.

Here’s how this is possible, in case you’re wondering…

While it’s true that the carbon dioxide that cars, trucks, fossil fuel power plants, and the like spew out represents around 75% of the greenhouse gases released by all mankind-related sources, other gases — like the methane and nitrous oxide that livestock rearing generates in copious quantities — have a "greenhouse" effect many times more powerful than CO2. In fact, methane’s actions in the atmosphere account for 23 times more GWP (global warming potential) than CO2, and nitrous oxide nearly 300 times as much!

What this means is that if Earth’s current warming trend is indeed caused by mankind (despite what Gore and friends say, there isn’t a scientific consensus), and if the U.N. report is accurate, then cows, pigs, and chickens are more to blame for it than cars…

This is what PETA has latched onto and successfully penetrated the mainstream media with. On the strength of this U.N. report and the high profile of Al Gore’s movie, PETA is calling for eco-minded Americans — and, specifically, Gore himself — to go vegetarian in the name of Mother Earth. And indeed, it has a point.

According to researchers from the University of Chicago, if someone really believed that reducing their personal "carbon footprint" (more accurately called a "greenhouse footprint") would make a difference in the global temperature, eschewing meat would make far more of an impact than buying a Prius. Around 50% greater, the U of C scientists estimate.

Unwittingly Exposed: The Green Crowd’s 1% Solution

I’m a hunter and carnivore — so why do I love the PETA crowd for exposing this, you’re asking?

Because it underscores exactly how insignificant vehicular CO2 emissions are, from a global warming standpoint — again, that’s IF you buy into their correlation. Think about it: Everyone’s making such a squawk about tailpipe CO2, yet if the U.N. folks are right about livestock making more of an impact than cars, that means vehicle exhausts are the source of less than 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases (some credible estimates peg this number far lower). For simpler math moving forward, let’s say that 16% of global GHG comes from vehicular exhausts. That’s probably generous, but what the hell…

This means that the mass adaptation of more efficient hybrid cars — which offer at most a 25% real-world fuel mileage benefit over comparably sized gas-powered cars (Prius real-world MPG hovers at around the high 40s, not much higher than what a Honda Civic or VW TDI will get you) — would result in a net GHG benefit of around 4% AT MOST. But remember, that’s if everyone in the world were to adopt these lean, green machines.

Of course, this wouldn’t be possible, since trucks, buses, tractors, military conveyances, and other low-mileage vehicles would still be gas- or diesel-powered. Also, not all nations give a rat’s ass about GHG, or are in a position to adapt to hybrid vehicles on a massive scale.

So let’s come at this another way — one that isolates the U.S. impact alone:

Estimates peg the current number of cars and trucks at around 600 million worldwide. Around one-third of these are here in the States. Assuming that the average vehicle in the U.S. is likely to be far newer, in much better condition, and of a more efficient design to begin with than most other places on Earth, I’m guessing that NO MORE than a fourth of Earth’s tailpipe CO2 comes from America’s cars and trucks (it’s probably far less). So given a 16% estimate of global GHG from tailpipe emissions, this means around 4% of the total annual atmospheric GHG burden comes from AMERICAN tailpipes. Now, stay with me here…

Let’s say that every American citizen were all of a sudden forced by law to trade in their current personal automobiles for hybrid "roller-skate" models. Since these cars represent only around a 25% efficiency benefit over normal cars — and since millions of delivery trucks, big rigs, buses, tractors, and military and emergency vehicles would still be guzzling gas and spewing lots of GHG — the overall impact of such a switch on Planet Earth’s annual GHG output would likely be no more than 1%.

Pretty pathetic, huh?

Now I ask you, as environmentally conscious Americans: Is a 1% reduction in world GHG really worth giving up the luxury, utility, convenience — and yes, even the extra safety — of larger and more capable vehicles?

I say no. Why should Americans give up any variety of our beloved cars and trucks — not to mention our economic advantage — while Kyoto-exempt "developing" Asian and African nations can belch as much GHG into the atmosphere as they want? It isn’t fair by any method of measure…

And now, poetically, PETA’s agenda is exposing this lack of international energy parity.

Carnivores vs. Carbon Whores

Of course, none of this addresses the "problem" of livestock/agricultural GHG sources. In other words: What should we do about the cow farts — now that we know they’re a prime source of atmospheric GHG?

Well, if PETA and friends had their way, we’d all be forced into vegetarianism for the sake of the environment. Mind you, the animal rights crowd doesn’t care WHY we’re vegetarian — only that we don’t harm their precious beasts. They’re single-issue folks, and they’re leveraging the "carbon footprint" concept to further their agenda. That’s why they feel no compunction whatsoever about throwing their own comrades on the political left under the bus with their public calls to Al Gore to become vegetarian or admit being a hypocrite…

What they don’t realize is that when forced to make the choice, Americans will stand up as carnivores instead of lining up with PETA’s carbon whores. There’s no way in this world that we’ll give up our bull roasts and pig feasts, burgers and steaks, baby back ribs and carnitas, ball park dogs and sausage links, fried chicken and Thanksgiving turkeys — even if we do suspect that it’s all contributing to global warming.

And what’s kind of funny-ironic is that if people really stop to consider the ramifications of what PETA has successfully brought to the mainstream consciousness, they may realize things that aren’t in the best interests of either the animal rights OR militant environmental movements. Things like…

What if all the fuss about animal "emissions" makes people realize that global warming from greenhouse gases is a perfectly natural process — one that has waxed and waned many times over many eons in response to many factors (like animal life and its byproducts)?

What if Americans and others around the world decide that while they can’t give up their meat — but they can do without all those GHG-farting deer, moose, elk, bison, horses, cape buffalo, yaks, gnus, caribou, water buffalo, kudus, impala, wart hogs, kangaroos, lions, tigers, and bears? (The PETA crowd would love this, huh?)

What if people start thinking about how their OWN flatulence is killing the planet? Would we start regulating our diets to reduce our own "tailpipe" emissions (I’m telling you right now, a vegetarian beans-and-cabbage diet wouldn’t be optimal)? Would we start restricting human births for fear of the environmental impact of their ass-gas?

See how absurd this could all get — how absurd it already is?

Now, imagine how absurd and restrictive all this environmental hysteria could become if the government figures out ways to leverage all these fears for more control over your dollars and freedoms? Make no mistake — that’s the goal here, as it always is with politicians.

And anyone with half a brain who’s able to detach from fear and prejudice long enough to think about it can figure this out. This leaves out most militant environmentalists (see als tree-huggers and eco-Nazis), all animal rights activists, and anyone who accepts as the scientific gospel anything in Al Gore’s one-sided, campaign-in-a-film can HOLLYWOOD MOVIE An Inconvenient Truth.

Bottom line: I don’t want to lose any more of my freedoms, choices, or money because a bunch of weasel politicians have found a way to parlay a "crisis du jour" that’s far from solidly rooted in science into even more cash and power — and a bigger, more far-reaching government. And it’s all because we’re putting our faith not in facts, or even reasoned debate, but into half-truths that we’re being scared and shamed into accepting by people who are hopelessly agenda driven…

Can’t we just stop and think about this a little — preferably over a burger — before our naivete and capitalist guilt cause us to plunge like so many lemmings headlong over a cliff of needless regulation?

Stomping hysteria in my carbon footprint,

Jim Amrhein
Contributing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

March 22, 2007

Meat and Crusaders was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

However, one doesn’t have to be an expert to see a lot of very obvious flaws in the “ethanol intoxication” that so many Americans (including our president) seem to be so blindly buzzing on these days. Ethanol’s critics claim that current methods of producing the alcohol for use as a motor fuel represent little, if any, actual energy benefit on the balance…

Even the most optimistic numbers paint a picture of marginal benefits: about 1.25 units of bioethanol energy yielded per unit of fossil fuels consumed to produce it.

The most zealous (or ignorant, depending on how you look at it) ethanol advocates are convinced that even this meager benefit is worth revamping America’s vehicle industry and vehicular fuel infrastructure. Tomorrow’s technologies will be more efficient in the transformation of fossil energy to bioethanol energy, they insist. And the fringe benefits, they like to trumpet, include a reduced dependence on foreign oil and a cleaner environment…

This last bit may be technically true — since ethanol does indeed burn cleaner than gasoline. However, most folks who don’t know any better equate ethanol’s “cleaner” emissions with “less global warming” emissions. This is a myth that the pro-ethanol (anti-oil) crowd does nothing to dispel among the throngs of their Prius-driving, Gore-worshipping supporters.

The reality, however, is that ethanol still produces copious amounts of carbon dioxide when burned, much like gasoline. And since it yields LESS mileage and horsepower than gasoline in typical internal combustion engines (which means more of it must be used to go the same distance under the same power), it’s arguable that ethanol consumption is worse for the environment than gasoline — from a “greenhouse gas” standpoint. Ethanol is really only cleaner in the sense that it produces far less carbon monoxide than gasoline consumption…

Don’t get me wrong: Less carbon monoxide is a good thing for the environment, in that it makes the air less toxic to breathe, especially in smog-choked urban areas. But to say, as so many do these days, that burning ethanol in place of gasoline would help to curb global warming — assuming the truth of the far-from-proven notion that it’s caused by man-made CO2 emissions — is just plain wrong. The grand (or tragic) irony that no one in the pro-ethanol camp wants their army of tree-hugger cheerleaders to know is this:

Even if ethanol did represent concrete and significant economic or atmospheric benefits from reducing U.S. oil consumption, an aggressive domestic movement toward the large-scale adaptation of bioethanol vehicular fuels almost certainly represents a net environmental — and quite likely fiscal — NEGATIVE.

And it’s already starting…

Feathers Fly as Croplands Creep

The current tide in ethanol theory is toward the mass adaptation of “bioethanol” alcohol that’s made from crops like corn (even though as source material goes, corn is relatively poor for ethanol production). What most people don’t realize is that even if domestic demand for vehicle fuel were to remain static in the future though a series of magical quantum leaps in vehicle fuel efficiency, it would take far more acreage worth of arable farmland than is currently allocated to corn growth in the U.S. to generate enough corn to make bioethanol even debatably worthwhile…

This means that in order to make the switch to ethanol, MORE land across the “fruited plain” would have to be cleared, cultivated, fertilized, sprayed with pesticides, and converted into cropland. The net result is a lot of extra pollution of waterways, greater soil erosion, increased silting and warming of stream and river fisheries, very likely a certain amount of deforestation (quite a quandary for tree-huggers) – and, last but not least, large-scale destruction of America’s wildlife habitat.

In other words, an environmental nightmare.

These downsides are already being felt, even though the mass adaptation of bioethanol is still in its infancy. Case in point: South Dakota’s pheasant population.

Numbers of ring-necked pheasants, that perennial favorite of American game birds (ironically imported from Asia in the late 1800s), have boomed in South Dakota over the last 20 years — due in no small part to the establishment of the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program. For those who don’t know, the CRP is a comparatively modest subsidy program that grants financial and technical assistance to farmers and landowners who are willing to restore easily eroded and polluted agricultural acreage to a natural state of forests, wetlands, grasslands, and riparian “buffer zones.”

These lands are invaluable habitat for all manner of wildlife — but especially upland game bird species like quail, pheasants, turkeys, and other species. According to USDA data, pheasant populations alone have jumped 22% for every 4% increase in CRP lands within known pheasant habitat zones…

Now, you may not think that, on the balance, increasing the pheasant population in Midwestern and Plains states is anywhere near as economically important as planting more corn for ethanol. But in South Dakota — the nation’s pheasant hunting capital — the numbers make a pretty powerful case. Every year:

• Pheasant hunting pours $135-153 million into the Mount Rushmore state’s economy
• Nonresident hunters — the vast majority of which come to South Dakota to hunt pheasants — spend $143 million on retail-priced gear and supplies
• Upland bird hunting in South Dakota (again, the bulk of which is for pheasants) supports over $51 million in wages paid, over $6 million in fuel and sales taxes, and over $4 million in federal income taxes.

Bottom line: Pheasant hunting and related tourism is just one example of a major economic boon to not just South Dakota, but many other U.S. states. And a huge percentage of this money — not to mention a huge percentage of the wildlife — is facilitated by privately owned lands that are part of the CRP land restoration program…

But now, because of booming demand for a fuel product that’s driven by misguided notions about its environmental benefits, a lot of this land may soon be in jeopardy. According to an Associated Press article from Feb. 7, President Bush’s latest budget proposal would back burner CRP, freezing new enrollments in the program through 2008.

The USDA expects this move to result in an 8% decline in CRP acreage nationwide over just the next 21 months as farmers eager to capitalize on the ethanol-charged price of corn revert this acreage back to croplands. The agency predicts corn will top $3.60/bushel this year, an 80% increase over 2005’s $2/bushel price.

And since Congress’ 2005 energy bill stipulates that the U.S. nearly double its production of ethanol by 2012, this price will only keep going up. So will the number of acres that are pulled out of CRP’s protection and converted back into waterway-polluting, erosive, wildlife-barren, pesticide-laced cornfields.

Amber Waves of Greed

It’s easy for politicians to get behind ethanol. For them, it’s a solution to several problems. Ratcheting up rhetoric about reducing American dependence on foreign oil opens the door for BOTH increased domestic petroleum production and the pursuit of new energy sources. One of these (bioethanol) also boosts the government’s bottom line in at least three ways: less money spent on CRP; less money spent in farm subsidies spurred by historic overabundances of corn; and greater revenue from now-booming farms’ income taxes, refinery taxes, and, yes, even fuel taxes (ethanol can’t be pipelined — it must be trucked to wherever it’s being blended or used)…

And because of the widespread misapprehension that ethanol adaptation is a net positive for the environment, politicians also get to appear “green” — while pocketing lots more of the only kind of green that really matters to them.

So no wonder Bush and friends are all about ethanol. Big Oil isn’t necessarily hurt by the movement (it may even be helped domestically), Big Agro gets a major boost from it, and the tree-huggers are appeased even as they LOSE a major battle in their fight to protect the environment. And as usual, the feds laugh all the way to the bank!

This brings me to my final point. One of the great ironies about today’s typically uninformed environmental zealotry comes when conflicting conservation goals meet in the political arena. In America today, we’re poised ringside at the opening bell of such a brawl, where one very real species of bona-fide conservation is pitted against another of a largely theoretical stripe…

In the red-white-and-blue corner, we have a champion fighting for most Americans’ desire for cleaner waterways; the restoration of wetlands, forests, grasslands, and buffer zones; wildlife conservation and expansion; and the large-scale preservation of myriad recreational opportunities (especially hunting and fishing, but not limited to them) — along with their enormous and wide-reaching economic benefits.

And in the supposedly “green” corner, we have a champion who claims to be fighting to break the back of foreign oil for everyone’s benefit — but only truly representing the economic interests of a few in the process: Big Agro, Big Oil (especially if it results in more domestic drilling), and Big Guv.

I hope that at the final bell, our grand countryside is still dotted with woodlots, wetlands, rolling grassy plains, hedgerows, briar patches, thickets, and dense river drainages where wildlife abounds — and where clear, cool, unpolluted-by-fertilizer streams and rivers are still teeming with fish…

But I fear it’ll be one great lifeless sea of corn, where no man treads with dog or gun and where no beast larger than a groundhog flourishes — interrupted only by highways teeming with streamlined, generic micro-cars running on $3-a-gallon ethanol fuels.

Does that sound like “America the Beautiful” to you?

Wringing necks for ring-necks,

Jim Amrhein
Contributing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

March 15, 2007

A Clear and Pheasant Danger was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder