Meanwhile, the Oregon Environmental Council continues to shill for ethanol subsidies because there might someday be a magic pony of ethanol created in an entirely different way, using entirely different plants and processes, and if we don’t support agribusiness with subsidies and mandates now, why, why, they won’t try to find this magic pony any more!

But most didn’t directly defend heavily subsidized corn-based ethanol, the feedstock for Oregon’s two industrial-sized plants. Instead, they said maintaining Oregon’s guaranteed demand for ethanol would boost development of more environmentally friendly forms.

Biofuel development is “key to the transition away from oil,” said Andrea Salinas of the Oregon Environmental Council.

It’s truly pitiful — pathetic even — when the so-called environmentalists are more concerned with keeping the subsidies flowing to agribusiness than anyone else.

Whenever you hear the word miracle, you know there’s trouble just around the corner. But however many times they lead to disappointment or disaster, the newspapers never tire of promoting miracle cures, miracle crops, miracle fuels and miracle financial instruments. We have a bottomless ability to disregard the laws of economics, biology and thermodynamics when we encounter a simple solution to complex problems. So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the new miracle. It’s a low-carbon regime for the planet which makes the Atkins Diet look healthy: woodchips with everything.

[Algal biodiesel] will be subject to the Law of Receding Horizons, which simply means that energy sources that require high energy inputs will always see their point of economic viability pushed farther out as energy prices rise. Remember when oil was $20 a barrel, and oil shale was going to be viable at $40 oil? By the time oil got to $100, I was hearing that it would be viable at $120 oil.

This won’t stop people from throwing money at algal biodiesel. As John Benemann once said to me “This is a good research project, but nowhere close to commercialization.” Somehow, I don’t think this is the reason investors are throwing their money in that direction. They are falling victim to the hype of ‘the next big thing.’

There’s nothing wrong with high speed rail except that when your country is really hurting, when your rail system largely falls behind other countries’ because of lack of tracks rather than lack of velocity, and when high speed rail appeals more to bankers than to folks scared of foreclosing homes, it’s a strange transit program to feature in something called a stimulus bill.

One might even call it an $8 billion earmark.

Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D, an environmentalist and brilliant poet, writes about the medical-industrial complex and its instant assumption that the genesis of cancer is in the genes in her outstanding book Living Downstream. Sadly, her message seems to have been shrugged off by industry and the agencies charged with protecting public health. The media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has a nice new piece in the February 2009 issue (alas, not yet available online) on the media’s code of silence with respect to the environmental causes of cancer.

It’s worth a trip to the library or magazine stand to check it out.

Meanwhile, there’s a good discussion of the topic that starts at about 18:40 in this week’s “CounterSpin,” the FAIR radio program.

The bottom line: environmental insults are at least as significant as the usual factors discussed around incidence of breast cancer in the US — but are studied far less, and are almost entirely absent from the wave of feel-good pink bushwa that floods the media every year during “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”

The sterling SF Bay-area group Breast Cancer Action has been a real leader in refusing to allow industry to bury the connection between their emissions and women’s breast cancers. For a good example of their work, check out this factsheet on breast cancer and the environment.

Freaking hippies. If God had meant people to use land for growing food instead of fuel for cars, he wouldn’t have created lobbyists.