1 March, 2007
Matthews could get £670,000 compensation over turkey cull
By SEAN POULTERDaily Mail
Also front-page of the Telegraph.
"Taxpayers may have to pay Bernard Matthews as much as £670,000 in compensation for turkeys culled after bird flu was discovered at one of his company's factory farms.""......It is understood there is a possibility of other payments to cover the firm's clean-up costs and financial support for workers who were laid off.""..........The turkey sheds used by the company had holes in the roofs which were used by the gulls for roosting. As a result, it is possible that infection was washed into the shed by the rain. There was also access for rats and mice. Defra said there will be no decision on a prosecution of the company for about two weeks.""........Even if it is found to be culpable in some way, this would not prevent compensation." ".......A company spokesman said: 'Bernard Matthews can confirm it will receive compensation from Defra for culling healthy turkeys following last month's outbreak.'"
Read the whole article Here
Who is responsible for approving this insulting regulation? DEFRA condones keeping 160,000 chickens in 20 sheds, may find illegal environmental conditions and then even so rewards the offender with hundreds of thousands of the taxpayers money. To add insult to injury, the taxpayer paid for their removal thus saving Matthews the overhead expense. Can nothing be done about this? Any suggestions? The whole thing makes me sick. This is one of the reasons why I do not enter supermarkets except to protest against GMOs in food.
Saturday, 3 March 2007
Corn for fuel
26 February, 2007
Factories Around the World Consider Halting Production of Biofuels as Price Soars
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=770
"Less than a month after George Bush used his State of the Union address to announce that the US would use biofuels to achieve energy independence, companies across the globe are threatening to stop production because of rising prices. "Corn prices reached a 10-year high yesterday for the second successive day when they touched $4.31 a bushel, up five cents. This increase, at the same time when oil prices are at the same level they were a year ago confirms doubts raised by biofuels critics.But the doubling of the price of corn, a main feedstock for US ethanol producers, over the past year at a time when oil prices are at the same level they were 12 months ago has raised questions over the viability of the biofuels industry without heavy government support."".......High grain prices create problems for biofuels companies which produce ethanol from wheat and barley. Other biofuels companies make biodiesel from oil-bearing crops such as soya, peanuts, palm oil and rapeseed. The prices for most of these commodities have also risen sharply, reflecting the competition between demand for these crops as food and demand for them to produce fuel." ".....Brazil is the world's biggest producer of ethanol, and its industry will be unaffected by high grain prices because its producers use sugar cane rather than wheat.Brazilian companies have been repeatedly accused of illegally clearing rainforest to plant crops for biofuel production."
This month's issue of the Ecologist, available in newsagents now, features a 19-page special report on biofuels
What ethanol producers really want is more government subsidy so that the taxpayers will fund their growth. The major middle-people such as Cargill and ADM have been soaking the public through farming subsidies for years. The irony here is huge. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded as to my obligation to help feed the poverty stricken and starving millions. Now we have millions of acres which have been in the past used for food production switched over to meet the ethanol demand. This ethanol demand is fueled by the utterly mindless 3 car garages filled with an SUV for holidays, a junker for shopping and a swish sedan for the wage earner to drive to work. It is also fueled by transportation costs of shipping grain from recently chopped rainforest. (the soil is carbon deficient allowing only a year or two of crops. Then comes the super with its shippng cost, nitrate runoff and nitrous oxide, the most harmful greenhouse gas. So, as a double irony, you have the primary sink for carbon dioxide on the land chopped down to make room for grain to produce ethanol to save on emissions causing excess carbon dioxide. If this is our response to global warming, then we will certainly see the social and economic devastation which will result from excessive greenhouse gases. What comes to mind is the talk of humans as co-creators of the Earth's destiny and also the vision of humans colonising other planets. Oh please, let it not be true. We have sent up cannisters into space with indications of what earth creatures and humans are like. Let there be a warning to all to keep us away.
Factories Around the World Consider Halting Production of Biofuels as Price Soars
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=770
"Less than a month after George Bush used his State of the Union address to announce that the US would use biofuels to achieve energy independence, companies across the globe are threatening to stop production because of rising prices. "Corn prices reached a 10-year high yesterday for the second successive day when they touched $4.31 a bushel, up five cents. This increase, at the same time when oil prices are at the same level they were a year ago confirms doubts raised by biofuels critics.But the doubling of the price of corn, a main feedstock for US ethanol producers, over the past year at a time when oil prices are at the same level they were 12 months ago has raised questions over the viability of the biofuels industry without heavy government support."".......High grain prices create problems for biofuels companies which produce ethanol from wheat and barley. Other biofuels companies make biodiesel from oil-bearing crops such as soya, peanuts, palm oil and rapeseed. The prices for most of these commodities have also risen sharply, reflecting the competition between demand for these crops as food and demand for them to produce fuel." ".....Brazil is the world's biggest producer of ethanol, and its industry will be unaffected by high grain prices because its producers use sugar cane rather than wheat.Brazilian companies have been repeatedly accused of illegally clearing rainforest to plant crops for biofuel production."
This month's issue of the Ecologist, available in newsagents now, features a 19-page special report on biofuels
What ethanol producers really want is more government subsidy so that the taxpayers will fund their growth. The major middle-people such as Cargill and ADM have been soaking the public through farming subsidies for years. The irony here is huge. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded as to my obligation to help feed the poverty stricken and starving millions. Now we have millions of acres which have been in the past used for food production switched over to meet the ethanol demand. This ethanol demand is fueled by the utterly mindless 3 car garages filled with an SUV for holidays, a junker for shopping and a swish sedan for the wage earner to drive to work. It is also fueled by transportation costs of shipping grain from recently chopped rainforest. (the soil is carbon deficient allowing only a year or two of crops. Then comes the super with its shippng cost, nitrate runoff and nitrous oxide, the most harmful greenhouse gas. So, as a double irony, you have the primary sink for carbon dioxide on the land chopped down to make room for grain to produce ethanol to save on emissions causing excess carbon dioxide. If this is our response to global warming, then we will certainly see the social and economic devastation which will result from excessive greenhouse gases. What comes to mind is the talk of humans as co-creators of the Earth's destiny and also the vision of humans colonising other planets. Oh please, let it not be true. We have sent up cannisters into space with indications of what earth creatures and humans are like. Let there be a warning to all to keep us away.
Friday, 2 March 2007
Biofuels- a solution or an even bigger problem
19 February, 2007
Biofuels - facts and fictionThe Ecologist
Claim 1: You get more out than you put in
"For more than 15 years, David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agriculture at Cornell University in New York, and his colleague, Professor Tad Patzek at Berkeley, have published peer-reviewed research showing that biofuels give out less energy when burnt than was used in their manufacture.
By using a ‘cradle-to-grave’ approach – measuring all the energy inputs to the production of ethanol from the production of nitrogen fertiliser, through to the energy required to clean up the waste from bio-refineries – they have shown that while it takes 6,597 kilocalories of nonrenewable energy to produce a litre of ethanol from corn, that same litre contains only 5,130 kilocalories of energy – a 22 per cent loss.(1) (1) (Pimentel, D & Patzek, T, 2005, ‘Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower’, Natural Resources Research, 14:1.)
Claim 2: It makes economic sense
In 2006, the American government handed out between $5.1 and $6.8 billion in ethanol subsidies. These include payments made to farmers, tax breaks given to refiners and payments made under carbon reduction programmes.(12) But instead of these subsidies finding their way into farmers’ pockets, they are instead swelling the accounts of several large biofuel manufacturers.(13) (Pimentel & Patzek, 2005:67.)
One company, Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM, one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies), accounted for nearly 28 per cent of the US ethanol industry in 2006.(14) According to attorney Arnold Reitze, Professor of Environmental Law and Director of the Environmental Life Programme at George Washington University Law School, every dollar of ADM’s profit has cost US taxpayers $30. To ensure the continuation of ethanol subsidies, the Renewable Fuels Association (of which ADM is a member) had reportedly contributed $772,000 to Republican coffers between 1991 and 1992.
Claim 3: It is the solution to our energy problems
Recent figures show that if high-yield bio-energy crops were grown on all the farmland on earth, the resulting fuel would account for only 20 per cent of our current demand.(19)(http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=380) The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published research which shows that more than 70 per cent of Europe’s farmland would be required for biofuel crops to account for even 10 per cent of road transport fuel.
But there are more basic reasons why biofuels cannot be the answer to our energy problems. A normal petrol engine cannot run on more than a 15 per cent ethanol blend, and it is considered too expensive to modify a car after manufacture.(20,21) Given that the average life expectancy of a vehicle is 14 years,(22)9Asia Times Online, Beware the Ethanol Hype, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/HH01Dj01.html) it would take approximately this long to replace the current petrol fleet. By 2021, however, it could already be too late to make a difference to serious global warming.(23)(23) Monbiot, 'Heat')
Claim 4: It's clean and safe
The biofuels ethanol and biodiesel are often referred to as ‘clean-burning’ fuels, and much has been made of their lower emissions of carbon monoxide. However, analyses of exhaust emissions from cars burning ethanol show an increase in nitrogen oxides, acetaldehyde and peroxy-acetyl-nitrate.(30)(Patzek, 2004:63.)
Likewise, cars burning biodiesel have been shown to emit higher levels of nitrogen oxides than those burning mineral diesel. Nitrous oxides are powerful greenhouse gases and can lead to the depletion of atmospheric ozone. At low levels they can react with VOCs and create low-level ozone, which can give rise to urban smog and respiratory problems.
When ethanol is blended with gasoline it makes the entire fuel more volatile. This means that it is more likely to evaporate, especially in the summer, through rubber and plastic parts of the fuel system. A study by the California Air Quality Board in 2004 found that blending ethanol with petrol increased fuel evaporation by 14 to 18 per cent.(31)(Hancock, 2005, cited by Patzek, 2004:63.) This means a higher quantity of hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, as the fuel dissipates from vehicle tanks."
Mark Anslow is a reporter for The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=755
What ethanol producers really want is a government subsidy so that the taxpayers will fund their growth. The major middle-people such as Cargill and ADM have been soaking the public through farming subsidies for years. The irony here is huge. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded as to my obligation to help feed the poverty stricken and starving millions. Now we have millions of acres which have been in the past used for food production switched over to meet the ethanol demand. This ethanol demand is fueled by the utterly mindless 3 car garages filled with an SUV for holidays, a junker for shopping and a swish sedan for the wage earner to drive to work. It is also fueled by transportation costs of shipping grain from recently chopped rainforest. (the soil is carbon deficient allowing only a year or two of crops. Then comes the super with its shippng cost, nitrate runoff and nitrous oxide, the most harmful greenhouse gas. So, as a double irony, you have the primary sink for carbon dioxide on the land chopped down to make room for grain to produce ethanol to save on emissions causing excess carbon dioxide. If this is our response to global warming, then we will certainly see the social and economic devastation which will result from excessive grenhouse gases. What comes to mind is the talk of humans as co-creators of the Earth's destiny and also the vision of humans colonising other planets. Oh please, let it not be true. We have sent up cannisters into space with indications of what earth creatures and humans are like. Let there be a warning to all to keep us away.
Biofuels - facts and fictionThe Ecologist
Claim 1: You get more out than you put in
"For more than 15 years, David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agriculture at Cornell University in New York, and his colleague, Professor Tad Patzek at Berkeley, have published peer-reviewed research showing that biofuels give out less energy when burnt than was used in their manufacture.
By using a ‘cradle-to-grave’ approach – measuring all the energy inputs to the production of ethanol from the production of nitrogen fertiliser, through to the energy required to clean up the waste from bio-refineries – they have shown that while it takes 6,597 kilocalories of nonrenewable energy to produce a litre of ethanol from corn, that same litre contains only 5,130 kilocalories of energy – a 22 per cent loss.(1) (1) (Pimentel, D & Patzek, T, 2005, ‘Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower’, Natural Resources Research, 14:1.)
Claim 2: It makes economic sense
In 2006, the American government handed out between $5.1 and $6.8 billion in ethanol subsidies. These include payments made to farmers, tax breaks given to refiners and payments made under carbon reduction programmes.(12) But instead of these subsidies finding their way into farmers’ pockets, they are instead swelling the accounts of several large biofuel manufacturers.(13) (Pimentel & Patzek, 2005:67.)
One company, Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM, one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies), accounted for nearly 28 per cent of the US ethanol industry in 2006.(14) According to attorney Arnold Reitze, Professor of Environmental Law and Director of the Environmental Life Programme at George Washington University Law School, every dollar of ADM’s profit has cost US taxpayers $30. To ensure the continuation of ethanol subsidies, the Renewable Fuels Association (of which ADM is a member) had reportedly contributed $772,000 to Republican coffers between 1991 and 1992.
Claim 3: It is the solution to our energy problems
Recent figures show that if high-yield bio-energy crops were grown on all the farmland on earth, the resulting fuel would account for only 20 per cent of our current demand.(19)(http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=380) The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published research which shows that more than 70 per cent of Europe’s farmland would be required for biofuel crops to account for even 10 per cent of road transport fuel.
But there are more basic reasons why biofuels cannot be the answer to our energy problems. A normal petrol engine cannot run on more than a 15 per cent ethanol blend, and it is considered too expensive to modify a car after manufacture.(20,21) Given that the average life expectancy of a vehicle is 14 years,(22)9Asia Times Online, Beware the Ethanol Hype, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/HH01Dj01.html) it would take approximately this long to replace the current petrol fleet. By 2021, however, it could already be too late to make a difference to serious global warming.(23)(23) Monbiot, 'Heat')
Claim 4: It's clean and safe
The biofuels ethanol and biodiesel are often referred to as ‘clean-burning’ fuels, and much has been made of their lower emissions of carbon monoxide. However, analyses of exhaust emissions from cars burning ethanol show an increase in nitrogen oxides, acetaldehyde and peroxy-acetyl-nitrate.(30)(Patzek, 2004:63.)
Likewise, cars burning biodiesel have been shown to emit higher levels of nitrogen oxides than those burning mineral diesel. Nitrous oxides are powerful greenhouse gases and can lead to the depletion of atmospheric ozone. At low levels they can react with VOCs and create low-level ozone, which can give rise to urban smog and respiratory problems.
When ethanol is blended with gasoline it makes the entire fuel more volatile. This means that it is more likely to evaporate, especially in the summer, through rubber and plastic parts of the fuel system. A study by the California Air Quality Board in 2004 found that blending ethanol with petrol increased fuel evaporation by 14 to 18 per cent.(31)(Hancock, 2005, cited by Patzek, 2004:63.) This means a higher quantity of hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, as the fuel dissipates from vehicle tanks."
Mark Anslow is a reporter for The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=755
What ethanol producers really want is a government subsidy so that the taxpayers will fund their growth. The major middle-people such as Cargill and ADM have been soaking the public through farming subsidies for years. The irony here is huge. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded as to my obligation to help feed the poverty stricken and starving millions. Now we have millions of acres which have been in the past used for food production switched over to meet the ethanol demand. This ethanol demand is fueled by the utterly mindless 3 car garages filled with an SUV for holidays, a junker for shopping and a swish sedan for the wage earner to drive to work. It is also fueled by transportation costs of shipping grain from recently chopped rainforest. (the soil is carbon deficient allowing only a year or two of crops. Then comes the super with its shippng cost, nitrate runoff and nitrous oxide, the most harmful greenhouse gas. So, as a double irony, you have the primary sink for carbon dioxide on the land chopped down to make room for grain to produce ethanol to save on emissions causing excess carbon dioxide. If this is our response to global warming, then we will certainly see the social and economic devastation which will result from excessive grenhouse gases. What comes to mind is the talk of humans as co-creators of the Earth's destiny and also the vision of humans colonising other planets. Oh please, let it not be true. We have sent up cannisters into space with indications of what earth creatures and humans are like. Let there be a warning to all to keep us away.
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