Articles by Erik Hoffner

Why bother filing an EIS for a biodiversity-destroying project?

Ag giant Cargill was forced to close a soy export terminal in the Brazilian Amazon this weekend, marking a major victory for greens, who have argued for years that the plant was built illegally and became a significant cause of rainforest depletion.

The terminal spurred a major leap in soy production -- millions of acres of rainforest were turned over to soy bean fields -- which is used principally to supply European livestock farms. Ironically, it was closed not because of the destruction, but because they never submitted an EIS. Mmm, soy.

Or a new way forward?

File this under possibly hopeful news: Researchers at Purdue are calling an approach that gasifies biomass to make liquid fuels a "hybrid hydrogen-carbon process," or H2CAR. Read the article for the straight scoop, but it's basically adding hydrogen to biomass from a "carbon-free" energy source (solar? wind? nukes?), via gasification.

The process would be more efficient than current biofuel production because it'd suppress the formation of carbon dioxide and convert all of the carbon atoms to fuel. Is it just hot air? And if this process is powered by nukes, that's a whole new question.

Endangered species and Beijing

China is currently the world's largest consumer of illegal "wildlife products" -- 40 percent of the global market. And that number's only going to grow as its economy strengthens. WildAid has gone to the battlements with its Conservation Awareness program, using the '08 Olympics in Beijing as an opportunity to highlight the need for conservation. They'll be enlisting athletes to educate folks about this issue during the games, and have developed a number of PSAs featuring Chinese and other athletes, on view here.

But aren’t those things mutually exclusive?

A hopeful Friday note: a significant downloadable report (PDF) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It was just brought to my attention, but it's from 2004. Its message bears repeating: energy efficiency/technologies have the potential to dramatically reduce energy use while supporting economic growth.

This European agency estimates that the E.U. could accommodate a 65 percent increase in energy services by 2050, yet simultaneously use two-thirds less energy than today. In the U.S., the estimate is that we could reduce energy demand to one-sixth of our use today through more efficient technologies.