Biofuels

A recent post by Joe Brewer at Celsas is called The Coming Biofuels Disaster.  In it, he points out that a recent push towards biofuels is likely to make matters worse.

There are two reasons to push for biofuels (or three, if you’re a cynic).  One is carbon – since biofuels are made from recent photosynthesis, the carbon released is equal to the carbon fixed.  Thus, they can be seen as a carbon neutral fuel.  The other side is energy independence – since the main feedstock, corn, is produced in the US, any fuel produced by corn is fuel the US doesn’t have to import.  (The third reason could be profit, in the form of subsidies for Cargill and ADM).

Brewer argues that the “carbon neutral” issue is false.  The “costs” associated with corn production (in terms of fossil fuel for fertiliser, cultivation, transport, etc.) are so high that it takes more energy to make corn than we can get out of it.   In addition there are unaccounted-for subsidies in the form of damage to land and soil as a result of industrial agriculture.

Large-scale agricultural practices deplete soils, contaminate water supplies, and are vulnerable to pests and disease when single crops (monocultures) are grown in large fields. The widespread use of pesticides – manufactured using fossil fuels – is also contributing to the cancer epidemic wreaking havoc on our communities. Current agricultural practices also require non-renewable resources and utilize vast distribution networks that are very high in resource demand – including the need for lots of energy.

The demands for fertiliser isn’t going to change – that’s the key behind the yields of corn fields.  The cultivation systems depletes and pollutes both ground and surface water.  The cropping system degrades the soil.  Yep, we know that.  So how does diverting corn to biofuels change anything?  The system is already geared to keep increasing corn production, while farmers go bankrupt growing corn.  What difference does it really make whether it is being fed to cattle or cars?

The tone of the article doesn’t engender confidence – it seems terribly alarmist.  But tone is meaningless – what are the facts?  Dismissing something as “hysterical” is far too often a tool of the anti-science bunch.  I have no intention of judging content based on tone.  That said, it takes some effort not to do so.  It gets worse when it becomes an anti-GMO rant:

We shouldn’t call genetically engineered plants biofuels. They are frankenfuels. By tampering with plant DNA, we run the risk of getting further out of balance, possibly introducing new and unexpected harms like invasive species that take over croplands and natural ecosystems.

Sadly, the article goes downhill from there.  Brewer writes:

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to do a lot more than change from fossil fuels to plant-based fuels. Global warming is a problem because the way we live is out of sync with nature. The solution is to rethink how we relate to our natural environment. This is where livability is paramount. We need to be thinking about family farms, not factory farms. In the family farm frame, people are interacting with the earth to produce food. The factory farm frame has people interacting with the earth to produce money.

Sure, but who is going to challenge the powers that be?  Who is going to change the system?  And if your main challenge is to change the system stop feeding corn to cattle.  CAFOs are far bigger problems than debating biofuels.  CAFOs turn a resource (manure) into toxic waste.  Stop feeding corn to cattle and we suddenly have a surplus of corn.  In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan says that sixty percent of corn is fed to livestock.  Get rid of the CAFO and the price of meat goes up.  The price of meat goes up and people eat less of it.  So you would probably make a dint in the obesity epidemic.  I’m not saying that Enforced vegetarianism is a viable solution, just that it’s probably easier to achieve than a return to the family farm.

There’s a subtext in the article that says that global warming isn’t the problem, it’s living out of balance with nature.  Sure, but so is everything since the Neolithic Revolution.  Climate change is the problem.  And reverting to the family farm seems almost impossible.

There’s one more point in the article that bothers me.  Brewer makes the point that we should not be taking food out of the mouths of the poor to fuel our cars.  But a return to sustainable farming takes the food out of production, and thus, deprives the poor of the food just as effectively.

The “theory of intelligent design”

Wired recently published a very bad article on “junk DNA”. This prompted a lot of crowing from IDists, who made the claim that modern discoveries about non-coding DNA vindicated predictions made by “the theory of intelligent design“:

“It is a confirmation of a natural empirical prediction or expectation of the theory of intelligent design, and it disconfirms the neo-Darwinian hypothesis,” said Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Of course, the idea that non-coding areas of DNA were important pre-dates ID by decades. But the most interesting thing is Meyer’s statement that there is a “theory of intelligent design“. Funny that they haven’t shared it with anyone – is it somewhere under Bush’s desk alongside the WMDs?

I have heard mention of this mythical beast from time to time. But there is no such thing. As Elliott Sober has discussed*, there are several ID hypotheses. The broadest one is what he calls mini-ID, the idea that “that the complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer” (Sober, 2007). This minimalistic idea allows the “big tent” to function, allowing various stripes of creationists to coexist.

Within the “big tent” there is room for literal 6-day YECs and people like Behe, who believe that the world is billions of years old, and organisms share common ancestry. Of course, it wasn’t until Behe published his latest book, The Edge of Evolution, that I realised how strange his ideas were…he asserts that the “edge” of what evolution can do lies somewhere above the level of the species, but not very far. Creationists who believe that current species descend from the “kinds” that were on the ark would be comfortable with Behe’s vision of evolution (except that, in order to produce several hundred species per “kind” since the Flood, evolutionary rates must be much, much higher than what any scientists assert).

Still, Behe’s views of evolution do not seem to be in agreement with those of Jonathan Wells, who doubts common descent at all. Wells’ idea of ID seems to focus on design – pure teleology. He asserts that sub-cellular “machinery” resembles real “machinery” because both were “designed” to do a certain task. Of course, this idea is totally blown out of the water by an examination of the way that morphogenesis actually works. Gene expression shows clear signs of being hacked together by an incompetent designer (or, perhaps, a blind one).

More important than all of this though is the fact that there is no theory of intelligent design. ID consists of an incredibly poorly constructed** core hypothesis (which makes no predictions and is unfalsifiable) and a number of unrelated anciliary hypotheses which are, in general, demonstrably false. Intelligent design predicts nothing. Since it chooses not to speculate about the nature of the designer (another ploy), it cannot predict what he/she/it/they would have done. Goddidit (but his motives are ineffable) is a hypothesis which, by design, can make no predictions.

* E.g. Sober, Elliott. 2007. What Is Wrong with Intelligent Design?. Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (1): 3-8.

**Saying that the mini-ID hypothesis is “poorly constructed” assumes that it was constructed as a scientific hypothesis. It was not. It’s actually quite well constructed, but not for the purpose of furthering science.

H/T mark in the comments to Ed Brayton’s post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Heaven and Hell

Newsweek‘s On Faith blog has four eighteen perspectives on heaven and hell today: N.T. Wright, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Susan Jacoby and Cal Thomas. No idea why they bothered to waste space with Cal Thomas – as usual, he had nothing of substance to add, though perhaps he stands as a good example of uninformed fundamentalist thought on the issue – no scholarly context, no evidence of depth of what the bible says, just a few “proof texts” thrown up there to support prior assumptions, coupled with an attack on ‘secular society’.

Susan Jacoby’s perspective was valuable, but a bit boring. She say:

Oh, for heaven’s sake. This question irritates the…inferno out of me. Of all the pointless, utterly childish notions associated with traditional religion, belief in eternal bliss in heaven or eternal damnation in hell surely tops the list.

True. But hearing the same arguments yet again are also a little bit irritating. I realise that most of the world hasn’t heard them, but I bought into them years ago. Religion is the root of an awful lot of evil. And

I know that indignant readers will claim that none of these crimes have anything to do with the “real” Christianity or the “real” Islam. They don’t have anything to do with modern, moderate forms of Christianity or Islam, but they have everything to do with retrograde expressions of religions that preach, among other things, the doctrine of eternal damnation for unbelievers and infidels. And these retrograde religious forms are on the rise in the world. They are every bit as “real” as religion based on earthly, loving kindness–something that promoters of religion as an unqualified good never want to admit.

There’s middle ground between “religion is the root of all evil” and “real religion preches love”. Despite the obviousness of what she had to say, it’s nice to see it said for a change: common sense, as they say, isn’t all that common.

I know almost nothing about Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. Being president of a UCC seminary is a mark in her favour, of course. In my book, they are “the good guys” in the world of religion. Her piece is uplifting, but not terribly informative. Again, the idea that heaven and hell are here on earth is an old one. Granted, when I first heard that notion I dismissed it as nonsense – I was a committed atheist at the time, but I wanted the religion I didn’t believe in to be less theologically fluffy. Since then I have come to understand the perspective. And while quoting Toni Morrison gets your points in my book, I still come away with “if I am going to read your words I should come away with some additional knowledge.

Then I got to N.T. Wright. While I doubt I agree with him theologically, his piece was written with the heart of a scholar. While he wasn’t saying anything new, there was enough there that was new to me.

Heaven and hell are not the ends in the biblical narrative. Mainstream conceptions of them, like the one Thomas extolled, were picked up along the way.

The way the phrase ‘heaven and hell’ are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal…. When Paul says ‘my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better’, and when Jesus says ‘today you will be with me in Paradise’, the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the ‘second coming’ is NOT Jesus ‘coming back to take us home’, but Jesus coming…to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.

Even though I don’t buy the whole idea of an afterlife, what Wright has to say is in keeping with what the bible actually says. It annoys me when the literalists/fundamentalists spout ideas that are unrelated to the bible. But I find his final paragraph most interesting

The great breakthrough in Paul’s thinking is that no, the one God of Abraham wants to reach out and welcome ALL people on the basis of faith alone. Similarly today many Christians think God is only interested in rescuing them, as saved humans, FROM the world, whereas the Bible is full of hints that those who know God and receive his salvation here and now are to be his agents in bringing that salvation to the wider world. Note how, even when Revelation 21 and 22 speaks of those who are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and those who are excluded from it, it also speaks of the river of the water of life flowing out to the world around, and of the tree of life growing on the banks of the river, with ‘the leaves of the tree being for the healing of the nations’. What does that mean?

Update: I missed the other fourteen perspectives: only these four had popped up on my RSS reader when I started writing this.