On 03/set/06, at 03:18, Michael Perelman wrote:
The idea of corn-based energy system strikes me as wildly irrational.
I fully agree, they would require too much land, pesticides, water, energy. since we have to shift from oil based energy we better change something at a deeper level rather than thinking this type of substitutions. Oil is a concentrated that incorporates many thousand acres of organic products coming from the past, thinking to use in a large scale not-concentrated products coming from agriculture today seems to me quite crazy
consuming local food supplies is probably a simpler method of conserving fuel.
I think that this is the solution, but there is a power infrastructure in place with interests that work exactly in the opposite way. It seems unbelievable but, in Italy, we are doing NOW what you have done in the US long ago. They are moving all shops and movie theatres from downtown, where people live, to cheaper areas, building big complexes, where everybody needs to go by car. This means exactly the opposite of a rational organization that acknowledges the need of a shift in the energy consumption approach. A couple of days ago I was talking to my friend of the possibility of exchanging our products (we both have some small farming) and this could work well also in a larger scale, may be using the internet to show what one has to sell, to avoid unnecessary travels. (This raises another problem. Traveling less is a good thing, but people should meet often to be able to exchange ideas and be a group and not individuals put together) Massimo Portolani [Natural justice is a utility pact, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another (Epicurus)]
