Global warming and hot breakfasts

Good morning everyone! Have we all had our breakfast? Coffee tea or coke? Eggs and bacon? Ham? Grits or gravy? Toast with jam? Ready to jump into the personal transportation equipment and waddle off to work?

Have a big celebration on Earth day??? Drive to a lecture explaining Gaia? Well, I didn't. Put me down as a "no graven idols before you" kinda guy. But, if you must have a label, call me a believer in "Unintended Consequences."

And speaking of same.

Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects.

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

Put another way, that 30 mile trip to the Gaia lecture driving your 30 mpg car using gasoline with 10% ethanol sent someone to bed hungry....There now. Feel better about your love for the environment?

Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.”

Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article.

Want to make a bet that Pope Algore never returns that call?

And it isn't like this wasn't known to be a problem.

A Harvard professor of environmental studies who has advised Mr. Gore, Michael McElroy, warned in a November-December 2006 article in Harvard Magazine that “the production of ethanol from either corn or sugar cane presents a new dilemma: whether the feedstock should be devoted to food or fuel. With increasing use of corn and sugar cane for fuel, a rise in related food prices would seem inevitable.” The article, “The Ethanol Illusion” went so far as to praise Senator McCain for summing up the corn-ethanol energy initiative launched in the United States in 2003 as “highway robbery perpetrated on the American public by Congress.”

Later chums.