This is the third post in the "Call Your Rep" series... If you're reading this, and you have a US Senator or House Representative who is not voting the way you want them to vote, it's time to act: Call your representative!
I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he's been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:
World leaders are finally realizing that we're facing a food crisis: they're currently having a meeting in Rome to discuss it, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently stated that we need to grow 50% more food by 2030 to satisfy needs (I believe this is a conservative estimate). This is not much of a surprise to me -- I mentioned the upcoming food crisis in my earlier article on biofuels, and it's also related to the energy situation I discussed before that .
Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts: