Willamette Week notes that an enviro magazine based out of Seattle has voted Portland as the second greenest city in the world. While it'd be nice to see what the criteria were and who, exactly, did the "voting", it seems clear that folks who love choo-choo trains and biofools just naturally gravitate to Portland these days.
But speaking of biofools, Rolling Stone is out with an article that takes a surprisingly in-depth look at Fireman Randy's latest crusade, and concludes that it's a scam. Although focusing on ethanol, the same applies to biodiesel; in both cases, valuable cropland is converted to produce fuels that not only do not burn cleaner than gasoline - they aren't any less expensive. In fact, taking all of the costs into account, biofools are more expensive and cause greater environmental damage than do conventional fuels. Of course, folks don't want to hear that, so it's all the more impressive wher the venerable Rolling Stone comes right out and says it like it is:
This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel -- not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. What's more, when corn ethanol is burned in vehicles, it is as dirty as conventional gasoline and does little to solve global warming: E85 reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a modest fifteen percent at best, while fueling the destruction of tropical forests.
Of course, that was touched upon here, but the Stone goes into greater detail. It's well worth the time it takes to read the three-page piece.
Going back to another part of the puzzle that nets Portland "the second greenest city in the world", you might want to check out the actual effects of light rail "planning". For another look, and for commentary pro- and con-, you might spend a few seconds at the Catalyst. Finally, to counter the onslaught of PR emanating from Metro and other sources (there are a minimum of 500 "planners" employed by Metro, the PDC, and the City of Portland), you can get a glimpse of the actual impacts of fixed rail here.
The bottom line: most of what you think you know about the world's second greenest city is dead wrong.
