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When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
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If one assumes that a person is making their money, including enough money to have no incentive to "work", by…
Ob sie wirklich Deutsch spricht. Normalweise, kommt die US Soldaten nicht ins Stadt und spricht nicht so oft mit denn…
As for being a Nazi, ich spreche fliessend deutsch und wohnte in Deutschland fuer drei Jahre mit der americanishe Luftwaffe…
And of course this "incentive" only applies to poor people: Rich people who already have enough to live off of…
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I don’t comment on the drawing much. It’s just something I never really notice. But…
I love the faces in the first panel and I love the Calvinism of Big Corn in the inset in the last panel.
I love this one! The creepy look of big corn is great! Another fun fact is that corn based ethanol may not be energy positive. (i.e. scientists can’t agree that you get more energy out of corn based ethanol than you put it.)
Panel five is weak. Screw the bunnies and the fish, what about the people? Have him say “Not to mention helping to starve out the inferior poor by driving food prices through the roof!”
I find it hard to type these words, but Robert is right. (Mark your calendars, people.)
Whether people eat corn, or something that eats corn, they’re paying more because corn is being turned into ethanol.
Besides Robert’s comment, I think this is definitely a step up from the last comic’s art. The only gripe I have is the mini-panel at the end, because it’s a great quip and the characters themselves are too big for it.
Wow, this is so appropriate for my class at the university…
Damn. I forgot to use the compliment sandwich to increase the odds of my suggestion being implemented. Revision:
Ha, this is a funny one, Amp. I like it! My only suggestion would be to revise panel five with something more compelling, like how ethanol raises food prices for poor people. Also, I gotta tell you, the look of malicious glee in panel four is priceless.
I can’t believe no one else commented on this, but I love the Earth’s Charlie Brown shirt.
What about celulose ethanol? Isn’t that more efficient?
Nice strip – the gleeful lust for violence in panel 5 is blood curdlingly good.
I also like your zingers in the bottom of panel 6 – in this strip and the transphobia strip earlier this week.
Just curious – are you publishing your political strips anywhere in hard-copy?
Yeah, burning food for fuel doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. Not to mention the point that, in actual fact, if you take away the goverment subsidies ethanol is NOT a cheaper fuel than petroleum-based ones (and consider the amount of petroleum-based fuels needed to grow corn). A dumb-ass idea all around.
Oh man, I know other comments have been a bit critical, but for me this strip swas p.e.r.f.e.c.t.
If GM is promoting it, you just KNOW that it’s more about big business than it is about protecting the planet. The “think yellow” ads have made me sick form the start. Gotta go, cats starting global warfare with each other.
The protein and fat in the corn remain intact and are used as foodstuff for cattle. While the sugar content of corn has some value, it is the protein that is the most valuable component as food.
While ethanol production increases the value of corn significantly, I’m not convinced that it increases the price of corn to consumers significantly (particularly not in the US, where the overwhelming majority of corn is going to be purchased by consumers, even poor consumers, several steps down the line from being raw grain). Furthermore, under priced US grain is more of a problem for most of the world’s poor people than over priced US grain. Under priced US grain destroys the markets for locally produced grain, driving people out of farming and into the megacities.
Certainly, corn is not the best source for ethanol in the US. The best source would be tall grass prairie. Tall grass prairie grows well without any added water or fertilizer across much of the US corn growing region, is hugely productive in carbon per acre (equal to switch grass in field tests), and would involve massive habitat restoration. Admittedly, you can’t eat the waste product of tall grass prairie (although you could run buffalo on the tall grass prairie and eat them), but you can burn it for fuel.
Plants are an excellent way of converting solar energy into fuel. Fermentation is an excellent way of converting plant fuel into transportable fuel.
“While ethanol production increases the value of corn significantly, I’m not convinced that it increases the price of corn to consumers significantly”
Where is the rest of the world in this equation? Is the US so egalitarian in their 70% consumption of the worlds resources that they cannot look past their own borders? Mexico: people down there cannot afford even raw corn to make tacos because farmers producing for the ethanol market only want the dollar, and don’t care about feeding people. Mexico is trying to fix that problem.
China: mandates a dramatic cutback in ethanol production using food grains (read corn) so that the people can be fed.
Seems that once again the US is leading the world using ignorant science, no thought for the people. But then again, didn’t they just have a conference of “scientists” down there in Texas that advocated a population reduction of 90%?
Cellulosic process ethanol conversion is much better at producing ethanol and it uses waste materials from food grain production, or any cellulose producing plant. There are so many more that are more efficient than corn it makes one wonder why the US is once again trying to control the world food production.
I love this one. Love it. Could you drop me a line and let me know if it would be all right to repost the image elsewhere, with link and attribution, of course?
Charles – Not so much.
Overpriced US grain would be great for farmers in developing nations, if our underpriced grain hadn’t already thrown so many of them off the land. As it is, the price of tortillas in Mexico has gone through the roof, with many poor families going hungrier as a result.
Elsewhere in the world, Europe’s quest for biodiesel is appropriating crop and forest land, squeezing out valuable ecosystems and farming for food. When industrialized consumers are willing to pay fuel prices for your developing nation food, you’re SOL.
Cellulosic has a terrible energy balance if used as liquid fuel, though it’d be nice if we could have more prairie. The sugars need to be treated twice to turn them into usable liquid, a process already enormously consumptive of water in corn ethanol production. Indications are that gasifying these biomass feedstocks would be a good way to go, but this is a solution that only works when you don’t have to transport the material more than 50 miles to process it.
Actually, when you get right down to it, gasoline is a pretty good source of energy. Low toxicity, huge potential energy, stable, doesn’t burn in liquid form. It’s only when it’s used in LARGE amounts that you get into the problems we have now.
So are there any good ways to make energy that won’t destroy the earth? Or is drastically conserving and cutting back (ain’t gonna happen in America) our only hope?
So are there any good ways to make energy that won’t destroy the earth?
Tons. We face questions of convenience and cost, not of existence vs. nonexistence. We could provide all our electricity needs with solar and wind, even with everyone running 1000-watt computers and 2000-watt airconditioners 24/7. It would just take a boatload of money to build that many PV installations and wind towers, and our skylines would look weird with all those windmills spinning.
Storing energy is actually the more difficult problem. (Great, your home PV system generated a gazillion watts…at noon, while everyone was at work.) A nontoxic, durable, low-cost battery solution is still not in sight.
Renewable isn’t the same thing as green. Wind for instance takes up a lot of pretty space (this is why Ted Kennedy killed in it the east) and also kills a lot of birds.