So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone. I learned a new word today, agflation. Agflation is when the cost of food goes up. It's derived from two words, agriculture and inflation.
Definition: an increase in the price of food that occurs as a result of increased demand from human consumption. While the competitive nature of retail supermarkets allows some of the effects of agflation to be absorbed, the price increases that agflation causes are largely passed on to the end consumer.
As in "We are in a state of agflation because so much of Iowa's corn is going to make bio-fuel as opposed to having it feed people." When I read this I thought it was really amusing. For years I dated a vegetarian, I am anything but. She was cool but in her circles I ran across a few people who I would characterize as "Vegan Nazis". These are the kind of people who see you eating a hamburger and feel obligated to remind you that it takes 12 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10252015
Today I read that article above and it let me know that you could feed a person for a year on the amount of corn that it takes to make one tank of bio-fuel. Because of the government subsidies on corn being grown for alternative fuel we have a food shortage. The irony is this year Iowa farmers reported a record yield. Thats corn that is not feeding people, or cattle in a world where there are still people starving.
Corn ethanol is a red herring just like hydrogen as far as alternative fuels go. Hydrogen technologies are still a long ways off from being affordable and on the road. Even worse than that is the fact that we have no infrastructure in place to support hydrogen fueling stations. It's those filling stations that are the reason that the government is backing hydrogen technologies. They don't want to be responsible for loosing tens of thousands American job in gas stations across the country. They want to make sure that there is something we have to stop and put into our cars. In a documentary I saw once called "Who Killed the Electric Car" I saw Phillis Diller reminiscing about driving in an electric car back in the 1920's. The biggest problem with electric cars is where is all the energy going to come from if everyone has to plug in their car at home each night. Well, we might get there with solar some day but at this point we would need a solar panel the size of a medium sized state.
Some people won't like this but nuclear is at this point the best way to go. We have had nuclear since 1942. In all that time there have only been two accidental disasters. One was Chernobyl which was a joke among nuclear plants in terms of safety procedures and maintenance, and Three Mile Island which got scary but in the end nothing happened. If we build new nuclear plants that are up to modern standards the chances of a meltdown are in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 20,000 per reactor, per year according to the extensive research I did a minute ago.
As for the issue of nuclear waste Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been under construction for years. Nevada is an ideal location due to the fact that there is almost no chance of contaminating ground water. It's open has been long delayed do to the "not in my backyard sentiment; but there is room there for storing over a hundred years of nuclear waste. In a hundred years I can almost guarantee that we will not only have a method for disposing of waste but I would bet that we will not be still using nuclear power. In the next 50 years solar may very well increase it's energy efficiency and will be in a position to take over but we still need something to see us through the better part of a century without the rolling blackouts the we in California remember so well. Nuclear dose not effect local air quality, and it's abundant and powerful enough to solve: the gas crisis, our dependence on foreign oil, and lower our green house gas emissions.
