EH - 75 : Agriculture

Breadbasket - where does our food come from? What is the sense of turning viable foodstuffs into fuel, when fuel is a lower value than food? Building resources out of wastes will be the method of increasing value, but until the squeeze is stopped, people have problems. Ms Morrison is correct though in the importance of barges and the shortsightedness of not getting the means of shipment of grain out of the midwest except by truck defeats the purpose of having a grain crop - and turning the stagnant grain into fuel at a loss for everyone but the biofuel producers? Wrong area to be throwing money at.

Biofuels is not the ultimate solution, unless we are talking stalks and weeds and cellulosic inedible materials. These materials will still put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - but CO2 is not the real problem. Heat generated via inefficiency of use of current energy is the problem.

In the old days work came from harnessed metabolic energy - today it comes from machines. Perhaps next gen, it will come from harnessed metabolic energy, or chemical exchange energy, or solar or wind or even oil (if the peak oil argument is a pique, and the earth manufactures a steady state of oil internally).

Again - why are we not seriously questioning the entire knowledge base and rooting out the outrageous misconceptions that became embedded because it sounded good and nobody bothered to check it through, beyond the theory and initial practice. What are the long term questions and experiments preset by the Galileos and Newtons that require 100-500 years of data collection to answer? What are we doing now to set the stage so that our future can have organized data to base knowledge upon? Hopefully lots of people are keeping track of lots of things - the common knowledge is hardly common and i question whether in fact it is knowledge. Let's check what we know. How do you know what you know?