River Of Waste - Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms

Luddly Neddite

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Sep 14, 2011
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Hulu - A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms - Watch the full movie now.

I watched this documentary on Free Speech TV yesterday. I thought I was knowledgeable about the issues involved but its much worse than I knew. Many people dying but not just from heart disease, cancer, etc from eating meat. In many areas of our so-called "beloved heartland", entire communities of children have died because they lived near a meat producer.

Sadly, that doesn't matter to the big businesses who produce the poisons on our plate and in our environment. And, incredibly, the Rs want to do away with the few safety regulations that are currently in place and largely ignored because its cheaper to pay a piddly fine than to actually change the way they do business.

“Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”
So goes a well-known Cree prophecy, to which we should now be paying heed.
 
Do they mention the Gulf of Mexico dead zone caused by agricultural runoff, much of which stems from the left's insistence that corn be grown to make ethanol, the production of which consumes more energy than the ethanol provides, in pursuit of their ecological agenda?
 
Granny says it's gettin to a point we gonna have to decide whether to eat or drive...
:eek:
EPA is pressured to drop ethanol mandate while drought drives corn prices up
August 16, 2012 - With record drought destroying crops across the country, corn prices are skyrocketing, and that is causing a world-wide ripple effect, including on the cost of the corn-derived gasoline additive ethanol.
Corn prices are up 60 percent this summer, Christopher Hurt, a Purdue University economic professor, estimates. And now Democratic governors from Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina and Arkansas have joined ranchers, poultry farmers and the United Nations director-general for food and agriculture in asking the Environmental Protection Agency to waive the federal requirement that gasoline contain 10 percent ethanol. "It's universally acknowledged that ethanol is raising the price of food," Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute said. "It's not lowering the price of gas. In fact, it may be raising the price of gas, and it's having a devastating environmental effect in terms of coastal pollution."

Green says coastal "dead zones" may be increasing because of the run-off from fertilizer-intensive corn crops. But the human economic costs are potentially more severe. The Department of Agriculture estimates that food inflation will hit 3 percent to 3.5 percent this year, then 3 percent to 4 percent next year. The U.S. is the world's largest food exporter. For the poorest countries dependent on U.S. exports of corn, the impact may cost lives. The Obama administration, however, hasn't acted to waive the ethanol mandate. "What I can tell you is that the EPA has made it clear that they are working closely with the Department of Agriculture to keep an eye on yields," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Friday. "They will evaluate all the relevant information when assessing that situation." More recently, when asked about the president's commitment to ethanol, Deputy White House Communications Director Jen Psaki said, "He absolutely believes in it. He thinks it's a driver of the economy here and a key component of renewable energy."

Indeed, ethanol mandates have won favor in the corn belt -- where corn prices and profits have set records in recent years. As evidence of that, more corn now goes to the production of ethanol than to the production of food and cattle and poultry feed. Many of those same corn belt states, including Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan, happen to be key swing states in the upcoming presidential election. Even if there were political will to challenge the mandates, the ethanol industry has now become an entrenched player in Washington. "Once it's entrenched, you have a locked-in lobby that won't let you pry it out," Green said. "No matter that your environmental groups have walked away from it, international groups have walked away from it. Everybody has acknowledged it's bad public policy, but it's dug in like a tick."

Source
 
Study: Ethanol Production Consumes Six Units Of Energy To Produce Just One
Patzek's ethanol critique began during a freshman seminar he taught in which he and his students calculated the energy balance of the biofuel. Taking into account the energy required to grow the corn and convert it into ethanol, they determined that burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65 percent. Later, Patzek says he realized the loss is much more than that even.

"Limiting yourself to the energy balance, and within that balance, just the fossil fuel used, is just scraping the surface of the problem," he says. "Corn is not 'free energy.'"

Recently, Patzek published a fifty-page study on the subject in the journal Critical Reviews in Plant Science. This time, he factored in the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs. All told, he believes that the cumulative energy consumed in corn farming and ethanol production is six times greater than what the end product provides your car engine in terms of power.​
 

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