Ethanol Issue Analysis - Vol. III

From Rolling Stone, comes the latest in a series of overarching looks at the ethanol issue entitled "The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles". Definitely worth reading all the way through. Apologies for posting this soooo late.

HT: Fark

For posts regarding the first two "holistic" analyses of the Ethanol issue, see here and here.

Follow-up: Grocery Bags

As I posted about earlier, San Francisco has been considering a ban on plastic grocery bags. As of yesterday, city leaders approved the ban. If you take the time to read the article, which is quite short, let me know if I am just overreacting or if the attitude that it would be a shame if grocers didn't use the more expensive corn-based biodegradable plastic bags because environmentalists find them the best option infuriating:

"Craig Noble, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it would be disappointing if grocers rejected the biodegradable plastic bag option, since more trees would have to be cut down if paper bag use increases.

"The new breed of bags 'offers consumers a way out of a false choice, a way out of the paper or plastic dilemma,' Noble said."

"The paper or plastic dilemma"!? Since when did grocery stores not allow consumers to bring their own canvas bags to use if they saw fit? I've seen many people do it at many different stores. If anything, grocery stores encourage it because it is that much less money they have to spend on buying bags. The supposed "false choice" is not caused by a lack of other options - it's caused by people who "care" about the environment enough to complain about things but not enough to get over their laziness or cheapness and obtain an alternative solution. These people seem to be saying either "it's too difficult for a consumer to do this on their own" or "it's too expensive for a consumer to do this on their own, so let's make the grocery stores foot the bill."

Grocery Bags

NPR has an article about how San Francisco may become the first city in the country to ban the use of plastic grocery bags due to concerns about their environmental impact. I find this interesting because, as I was growing up, I distinctly remember the use of paper bags being phased out and the use of plastic bags phased in for the exact same reason. The article cites the fact that paper bags are recyclable - aren't plastic bags? I wonder if it is the case that plastic is less efficient than paper to recycle - that might explain it.

I'm very tempted to think that the shift in thinking has no real rational or scientific basis but is rather fueled by the shift from the fad of caring about trees to that of caring about global warming and, by extension, petroleum products.

Since groceries presumably have to be carried out in something, other than plastic and paper bags (both of which are disposable) another option would seem to me to be durable bags made out of fabric or some other material. My instincts would normally say that this would be a great alternative since it would cut down on waste and energy consumption. I am uncertain, though, because I recently heard a fascinating statistic that I have been heretofore unable to verify: when I was in college, the cafeteria was stocked with styrofoam cups and we would go through many cases per meal. Many people advocated bringing a personal mug to meals so as to cut down on the amount of styrofoam we went through. This seemed, like the durable bags idea, to be a great solution. The aforementioned statistic, however, has thrown that instinctual judgment into doubt for me. Supposedly, it takes just as much energy to produce a mug as it would to produce 18,000 styrofoam cups. Faced with that reality, one wonders if the best thing to do wouldn't be to continue using 3 styrofoam cups per person per day since it is quite likely that a single mug wouldn't last as long (6,000 days) due to breaking, getting lost, etc.

If anyone is able to confirm or refute that statistic, I would love to hear about it. Also, if there are other data concerning similar resource consumption ratios between durable and disposable alternatives for the same product, I would love to hear about them.