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– One of the blogs I read regularly is Jim Kunstler’s ➡.  He’s the author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

– He’s insightful and direct which I like. In this piece, he expresses his doubts about all of the hoopla being raised about Ethanol and how it is going to save us from the coming energy crises. Like me, he thinks people are just looking for easy answers so they don’t have to confront the really hard problems which are approaching.

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One of the farmers who organized the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s annual meeting put it nicely: “The ethanol craze means that we’re going to burn up the Midwest’s last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks.”

The American public is in chill mode in more ways than one. We are finally freezing our asses off in the Northeast after a supernaturally mild December and January, and the heating oil trucks are once again making the rounds of the home furnaces (and running down their inventories). But we’re also chillin’ on the concept that there is an energy problem per se. The public is convinced that we are one IPO away from attaining the sovereign rescue remedy that will permit us to continue running our Happy Motoring utopia.

The public is bombarded daily with feel-good news about new bio-engineered bacteria that can turn sawmill refuse into high-test gasoline, cornucopias of miracle diesel beans, lithium batteries that will take you from Hackensack to Chicago on a single charge, and still (despite all the evidence against feasibility) hydrogen-powered SUVs. The public is convinced that we will enter a nirvana of “energy independence” just-in-time — the same way that WalMart miraculously restocks it’s shelves.

More… ➡

Science Daily — Most Americans believe global warming is real but a moderate and distant risk. While they strongly support policies like investing in renewable energy, higher fuel economy standards and international treaties, they strongly oppose carbon taxes on energy sources that put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

These results were reported by Anthony Leiserowitz, a courtesy professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon, in a talk during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. His conclusions, based on a national survey conducted in 2003 are detailed in a new book, “Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change — Facilitating Social Change,.

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Great Forests Hold Fateful Role in Climate Change

PINE FALLS, Manitoba — Here on the edge of the silent and frozen northern tier of the Earth, the fate of the world’s climate is buried beneath the snow and locked in the still limbs of aspen trees.

Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the sweeping boreal forests, which gird the Earth in the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. Scientists now fear that the steady rise in the temperature of the atmosphere and the increasing human activity in those lands are releasing that carbon, a process that could trigger a vicious cycle of even more warming.

The prospect of the land itself accelerating climate change staggers scientists, as well as woodsmen such as Bob Austman, who stopped recently in a quiet stand of birch on the edge of the boreal forest to examine a jack rabbit’s tracks.

“There are big forces out there,” he said succinctly.

Those forces, which scientists are only starting to understand, could free vast stores of carbon and methane that have been collecting since the last ice age in the frozen tundra and northern forests. Their release would push the world’s climate toward a heat spiral that would raise ocean levels, spawn fierce storms and scorch farmlands, scientists believe.

More… ➡