water, fossil or otherwise...

"corn typically needs about 24 inches of water, either precipitation or applied, during the growing season; if that yields 220 bushels/acre of corn, the 'depth' of the EtOh (ethanol) produced is 0.022". if we assume just 12" of water was applied to supplement rain the ratio of water/EtOh is 5553:1. when you see a railroad car filled with ethanol go by. think of the five trains of water, each with 110cars, hauling the water necessary to produce one tank car of ethanol." charles a. washburn ........................ so...are biofuels going to save your corvette's fuel injected ass? no...so many problem with the national corn growers' association view of the world that it is difficult to know where to begin...from the overdraft of the ogallala aquifer to grow all that "corn husker" corn in nebraska to the eroei on biofuels the complications are staggering...like that mickey d's burger, fries and coke you bolted down at lunch, biofuel takes an enormous amount of water to produce, this doesn't even touch on the petro-chemical inputs in the form of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for machinery that biofuel production consumes...setting aside the bug and weed killers and plant food ( in the form of haber-bosch process anhydrous ammonia which uses natural gas as feedstock...remind me to tell you the fritz haber story sometime...ironic doesn't quite cover it...but it's the best i can do at the moment) there's the fuel farm machinery consumes...as i write this oil is trading at $109.62 a barrel...not a world's record ( yet ) but With all the noise about iran and the closing the straits of hormuz and placing sanctions on the purchase of iranian oil ( which just leaves more for china and india ) it will go as high as the speculators can drive it...anyway...you get the idea...oil as a resource is facing a limited and increasingly expensive future ( no arguments about hubbert's peak and when it is..or was...in this post anyway ) so what's going to replace it as fuel in farm machinery? biofuels?...if you start to use a fuels a s water prohibitive as ethanol to produce ethanol you could have a problem...not to mention the fact that ethanol is only one quarter as efficient as petroleum based fuels so you may end up expending more energy to make ethanol than it returns (eroei returns to bite techno optimists on the ass again)...there's always a catch...water...fuel...fertilizer...malthus hasn't cashed his check yet...time to dust off wes jackson's "new roots for agriculture" and steve brush's "farmer's bounty"...buffalobird woman could give you some useful ideas about feeding yourself too.

fossil water

http://www.great-lakes.net/humanhealth/drink/index.html

i live at the southern end of a fresh water inland sea that impacts many things from the climate to the water i put on my gardens when it doesn't rain in july...if you go for a stroll along the shore it seems like an infinite supply...and there is a lot of water there...lake erie has 118 cubic miles of water...lake huron 850...lake 1,180...lake onatrio 393...and lake superior has 3,00cubic miles of water...that's 5,533 cubic miles of water in the basin...lots of coffee, tea, or icewater...but it's not limitless...most of it is fossil water left over from the last ice age and the system recharges at only about one percent ( 53 cubic miles )...a cubic mile holds about 110 trillion gallons which makes the total amount seem even more astronomical...but then consider that chicago alone uses a billion gallons a day, and because the chicago river's flow was reversed it drains another 2.1 billion gallons out of the system every day and things focus in a bit better...the 26 million people that rely on the great lakes for drinking water withdraw around 328.5 billion gallons a year...this doesn't include industrial and agricultural use but even with those figures added in i assume the usage is well within the 53 cubic mile recharge rate...as climate change exacerbates water crises like the one in the texas town that the water truck is making a delivery to i have to wonder how long the usage will stay within those parameters...will the entrepreneurial spirit of the market treat a finite resource as an expendable asset the way economists have taught them to do so far with all the other finite resources? my bet is greed will trump wisdom every time and the resource managers will create a large-scale ecological mess in one area ( have a look at the water transfer schemes in china...there's a study in desperation...how many yuan per cubic mile of great lakes water? ) in a effort to offset one in other places ( generating a tidy profit for the risk takers who engineer the whole deal...rightful profits and all that...i wonder who will become the edward trevelyan of the water famine? the pompous and rank conciliator of greed to want ) scoff if you like....malthus hasn't been proven wrong yet...there's still data to collect.

one big union

there are those who argue, and i am inclined to agree, that organized labor's real troubles began when they were officially recognized in 1935 when fdr signed the wagner act and the venue for expression for worker discontent was removed from the street, sit down strike, and picket line and dropped into the realm of legislation, courts, and injunctions where it has been pummeled by the agents of a reactionary elite determined to retain its economic and political advantage ever since...the issues widened in the post world war two era when unions bought into the social contract that gave workers a continuously rising standard of living in return for staying out of politics AS WORKERS, and instead relying on mostly the democrats for their "seat at the table'...as the post-war economic dominance of the united states faded the elites began to roll back the economic perks of the contract and, unfortunately for labor, they discovered too late that the democrats were actually the liberal wing of the ruling elite and that their liberalism ended when the pipeline of wealth was threatened...labor bet on a false ally...as labor's political influence eroded the leadership continued to focus on parochial issues of economic, as opposed to political, gain for its membership...mostly because the unions had become businesses...contratcs-r-us...dispensing industrial peace in contract sized bites...this this focus on money created a unionized economic elite disconnected from the problems of the balance of workers...the "official" labor movement had become a small scale ( compared with corporate interests ) special interest group lobbying legislatures for its membership and not the "workers" it claimed to represent...isolated by its small size and its distance form public good will it has been subjected to increasing attack and constriction of the rules governing how it can operate...today the whores and slumlords in indianapolis passed a "right to work" law in an effort to put the final nail in organized labor's coffin..okay...it wasn't doing much good anyway...perhaps now workers will begin to realize the need to participate in politics as WORKERS rather than relying on an inadequate and unreliable proxy...tear it down and we can rebuild a mass movement and reclaim some turf from the grassroots up.