grim meatoil future

[hep]

Michael Pollan's excellent Omnivore's Dilemma, ISBN-13 978-1594200823, features an anecdote about the Mayans early on in the first chapter. The Maya word that referred to themselves and their civilization was "corn walker," and often you hear Chicanos and other Mexican indigenous peoples using that term on themselves even today. But Pollan points

Comments

[uke]

http://thymecube.com/

[jwm]

…nitrogen is not as easy to fix and is more scare than carbon in the atmosphere.

Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78% nitrogen versus 0.04% carbon dioxide. Not that I completely write off the rest of the text, but I am concerned about such a rookie error creeping in there.

[jtzapp]

I was going to comment on this. I'm sure there are relative levels involved, such as the ease in fixing the gases (I mean, plants were basically built to fix carbon) but come on....

[und1sk0]

sorry, harder to fix therefore more scarce in terms of availability to plants.. will fix wording.

[jtzapp]

More importantly, I don't understand the worry of the energy crisis. Yippy skippy, I have my treehugger moments, but if/when oil runs out, we'll find something else. Coal is certainly not ideal, but the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. Furthermore, there are an abundance of other energy creation methods we could use, we just don't because it's so damned easy to use fossil fuels - dig it up, burn it (yes, I realize that this is something of an oversimplification). We have nuclear, thorium-variant nuclear, which is crazy safe and abundant, solar panels become more efficient year by year, wind farms are starting to take off (ha, ha), research is being done into using oceanic thermal gradients, fission in the long-term (well, so is thorium, but not nearly as), et cetera

[und1sk0]

nature abhors homogeny.. if all you eat is corn and corn by products, nature will punish you (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc).

not to mention that corn subsidies are bad for farmers, bad for the environment (cattle waste from a grain diet is too toxic for fertilizers), and is really just passing taxpayer money, almost wholesale, into the hands of agribusiness giants like conagra foods, general mills and adm.

these companies, at least, do not need a taxpayer subsidy that is north of $20billion a year, just like how we don't need to subsidize oil companies that are making record profits.

[jtzapp]

Which is fine and good, but it has nothing to do with what I said. I'm not saying it's healthy, and I didn't say it was fiscally smart for the nation as a whole; I'm just saying that there's not any kind of energy crisis.

[testing4l]

nature abhors homogeny.. if all you eat is corn and corn by products, nature will punish you (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc).

You might want to look around at nature then. Most creatures have a relatively limited range of things they eat.

Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, and virtually any other malady you name by and large effect those of us who are older. Plain and simple, we humans live longer than our ability to care for ourselves lasts.

It sure as heck beats the alternatives though.

[und1sk0]

made some spelling corrections here:

http://und1sk0.livejournal.com/568469.html?thread=1306261

ETA

[und1sk0]

you might find this of interest:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/04/08/pollan/index.html

Re: ETA

[austinrobinson]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Come out and say it, if it indeed exists; and if you're not parrorting some stupid liberal bullshit science that means nothing

Re: ETA

[und1sk0]

LOL!