On NPR's Science Friday, Ira Flatow had David Blume on in the last segment.

If you didn't catch the show, here is the segment. Start at 13:20 for the part about cattails. http://www.npr.org/... Here's a couple of audio snippets from the show. Blume claims that cattails, that ubiquitous plant that seems to be more of a nuisance than anything else can yield over 7,000 gallons of ethanol per acre [?!?]   http://www.sciencefriday.com/... http://www.sciencefriday.com/...

Cattails have been a food staple [yes, the things that grow in marshes] of American Indians, something I did not know up until today. If someone had told me you could eat these, I would have said "you're nuts".

Getting off oil is a big task, they say, but here are some ways that are affordable and reasonable to do now to break off our foreign dependence on oil.

From the AP-

Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes the $300 billion farm bill and subsidies for ethanol, positions that both supporters and opponents say might cost him votes he needs in the upper Midwest this November.

His Democratic rival, Barack Obama, is making a more traditional regional pitch: He favors the farm bill approved by Congress this year and subsidies for the Midwest-based ethanol industry. McCain instead has promised to open new markets abroad for farmers to export their commodities.

Cross posted on La Vida Locavore

Bigger is always better, isn’t it? Big cars, big houses, big business, big farms. If you were big, you made more money. Clearly, that is the way of the world. When Europeans colonized the Americas, they wanted more land — not some of it, all of it. Napoleon wanted more land. Nothing stopped him until Waterloo.

So, do you think that the human race, has reached it's Waterloo? Have we finally hit the wall with our never-ending desire for "bigness"? I decided years ago that I didn’t want my farming operation to get bigger. I liked milking 45 cows, raising their feed and doing a little direct marketing.

I liked being small.

hate the game.

and in this case I'm not talking politics, I'm talking corn.

that great native food of the America's that has come to dominate the world.

The Democrats always let the Republicans frame the issues.  Once that is done and the press is suckered into the frame then the Democrats are dead meat.  It has happened again with the offshore drilling.  The framing created by the Republicans is that we need to drill for oil to get relief for high oil prices and to improve our independence from oil sheiks.

It is already known by all the intelligent people that, while additional oil supplies might minimally help in the future, this near term argument is nothing less than stupidity on steroids.  The Republicans do not wish to address the intelligent people.  They want to address enough of the stupid people to win an election.  And if the Democrats can't figure out a way to make an argument that will encompass the less intelligent then they will get their butts kicked exactly as they are doing.

I'm the last person on the planet that you'd call mainstream. OK, I have some "mainstream" qualities about me... I have a business degree and a white collar job, and I very occasionally go to Starbucks (sometimes I actually buy coffee instead of just using the bathroom and leaving)... I think that's probably where my similarity to mainstream American culture ends. I have no TV, no X-box, no DVDs. I've never had a Christmas tree. I don't go shopping at the mall if I can avoid it. I speak Chinese. I buy my food directly from farmers I know. I am weird.

But I think my values are pretty normal. So what I'm wondering is: Am I the crazy one, or are they? And by THEY, I mean the Dems in the House and the Senate. Join me over the flip to see what I mean.

...or Bush's for that matter.
Basically our choice is Coke or Pepsi. The cornerstone of both candidates energy plan is about as innovative as Bush's. They both rely on fossil fuels and dangerous energy sources and spend little time on renewable energies. Good times!

A US government task force released its interim report Tueday that confirmed what I wrote last week; that speculators are not driving up oil prices significantly. Hopefully this will pour some cold water on Congressional efforts to pass laws against speculation instead of dealing with the real issues causing the spike in energy prices. A good first start would be eliminating or reducing the import tax on ethanol made from Brazilian cane sugar, as Fed Chairman Bernanke suggested the other day. This import tax is pure protectionism, an attempt to protect both the US sugar and corn ethanol industries, but actually has the effect of making fuel more costly for the American consumer.

The latest controversy over Obama's statements about the Iraq War confuse him. He says that if President, he will simply instruct his Chiefs of Staff to end the Iraq war. He says that he will do what it takes to safely withdraw the troops. He adds that what makes his policy different from GW Bush and McCain is that they are for this open ended commitment that can leave troops indefinitely in Iraq. Obama's politics has the Left mad because he won't announce an immediate withdrawal of troops regardless of conditions on the ground and the right who say he is vacillating somehow on his promises and previous statements.

Corn ethanol and biofuels production has driven global food prices up 75%, triggering a global food crisis according to a secret World Bank report revealed by the London Guardian. The report was apparently kept secret to protect the United States which is most responsible for the diversion of food to fuel. The World Bank, released a report on Wednesday, July 2, on the jump in food prices without specifying the cause (PDF).

Food prices have accelerated sharply in 2008. Grain prices have more than doubled since January 2006, with over 60% of the rise in food prices occurring since January 2008 (Figure 1). Individual grain staple prices have increased even more, with monthly average wheat prices doubling since January 2006. Rice prices more than tripled between January and May 2008.

As a general rule, we know that Democrats and progressives seek to end our addiction to oil, both for our environmental and economic health, and that Republicans want to push the fossil fuel syringe a little deeper. On Tuesday, Barack Obama and John McCain each unveiled their visions for a new energy future, and the two can't be any different.

I found a good breakdown of the differences, and will, in addition to linking my fellow Kossacks to it, wanted to share a part of Obama's inspiring speech:

Obama, McCain Debate Energy Future

Barack Obama has presented himself as the reform candidate out to challenge the special interests and change "politics as usual."  If only that were true, and if only we knew what we now know (and who knows what we’re left to learn) five months ago.

H.R. 6049, the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008, will provide approximately $18 billion of tax incentives for investment in renewable energy, carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects, energy efficiency and conservation. The bill will also extends $27 billion of expiring temporary tax provisions, including the research and development credit, special rules for active financing income, the State and local sales tax deduction, the deduction for out-of-pocket expenses for teachers, and the deduction for qualified tuition expenses. In addition, the bill provides almost $10 billion of additional tax relief for individuals  through an expansion of the refundable child tax credit and a new standard deduction for property taxes. The bill would be primarily offset by closing a tax loophole that allows individuals that work for certain offshore corporations, such as hedge fund managers, to defer tax on their compensation and would delay the effective date of a tax benefit that has not yet taken effect for multinational corporations operating overseas.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/...

Have you heard about the emergency proposal to redirect corn that has been contracted for ethanol so it can be put to other uses this year? I haven't, but I'm hoping this gets on the table quickly given our food predicament.

Given the global grain supply situation, which, going into this northern hemisphere growing season has basically no reserves or tolerance for diminished harvests, the dependence on the global system on our midwestern grain production, and the floods across the midwest that are an unmitigated disaster for farmers, it seems to me that we are in for a huge food supply problem starting right about now.

Amazon deforestation in the past 9 months, the wet season, has already exceeded last year's destruction, despoiling an area larger than Delaware. With cloud cover now clearing more deforestation will be revealed and the fire season will begin. The Brazilian government has proven impotent to stop rainforest destruction in the face of spiraling food prices.

Brazil's DETER real-time monitoring system found that more than 430 square miles of forest, an area a bit smaller than the city of Los Angeles, vanished in the month of April, while about 2,300 square miles, larger than the state of Delaware, were destroyed between last August and April.

Deforestation releases massive amounts of CO2, increasing global warming, drought and climate change.

For the past few weeks news sources have talked about the dangerous influence alternative fuels have on our cost of food.

"The recent rise in corn prices--almost 70 percent in the past six months--caused by the increased demand for ethanol biofuel has come much sooner than many agriculture economists had expected. . . And that increase, says Marshall Martin, an agriculture economist at Purdue University, "is the main driver behind the price increase for corn."

No disrespect to Marshall Martin, but the price of corn isn't quite a simple as blaming it all on biofuels.  

I spoke with Jim Martin (no relation to Marshall) who is on the Federal Technical Advisory Committee for Biomass Research and Development, and he confirmed that blaming it all on ethanol neglects a number of other factors that don't always fit into a 30 second analysis.

BRAZIL – THAT MUCH SMARTER THAN AMERICA?
Since 1975 Brazil A+ - America F.

Why is Brazil so much smarter than America ??  The robustly intelligent who frequent KOS will be instantly curious and want to at least explore this premise.  

Brazil is one of the largest Democracies in the world.  It operates the same way as the United States, as a republic.  Brazil’s 190 million residents now enjoy the very comfortable position of being OPEC-Free, or energy-independent.  (Notice how US politicians mouth that phrase as a distant, unachievable dream ... ?) Brazilians couldn’t care less what the Saudi Sheiks do with their oil production decisions:  increase drilling or decrease?  Brazilians don’t care.  Imported oil previously accounted for more than 70% of the country's oil needs, but Brazil became energy independent in 2006.