Ethanol Absurdities: the cause of excess cost and carbon

 

The energy it takes to produce ethanol outweighs the energy it provides, and now it's costing Americans (Photo: elizabethrozycki/flickr)

By Michelle Hardy

 

The media is abuzz with forecasts of skyrocketing food prices and subsequently rising global poverty. International food costs are increasing because of commodity shortages – mainly cereal grains like wheat and corn. There’s a major lesson hidden in this crisis, so it’s important to know exactly how the US is helping these prices go up.

 

Tumultuous weather patterns and oil prices account for some of these commodity shortages, but a major determinant of current corn supply is ethanol production. Fuel corn is more lucrative than edible corn; farmers are increasingly choosing to plant for cars rather than humans, despite the ridiculous energy deficit this fuel crop creates.

 

In result, human fuel will be harder to come by. The USDA predicts consumer food prices will rise up to 4 percent over the course of 2011 and remain high in 2012, largely because of corn.

 

Although corn-infused processed food and corn-fed meat aren’t industries to champion, the pervasiveness of corn in food isn’t something society can erase overnight; at the end of the day, people must be able to afford food during the next few years. As of now, 44 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty due to higher global food prices.

 

It seems farmers should just reduce ethanol production and plant more edible corn to account for this crisis, but things aren’t that simple. USDA chief economist Joe Glauber told Reuters stubbornly that “the industry has pretty much been built. This isn’t a question of just saying ‘cut it off.’ It’s much more complicated than that.” He explained further that there was little to be done in the short term to force firms to stop making ethanol.

 

If anyone isn’t frightened by the snowballing ethanol industry, consider how absurd the use of ethanol is in the first place. For one, ethanol has a negative energy balance; it can require up to 57% more energy to grow than it releases in fuel form. The sheer amount of energy inputs from petroleum or coal required to grow ethanol cancels out the benefits of slightly reduced emissions from ethanol.

 

Also consider the amount of land disrupted to produce this supposedly green fuel. Corn farming pummels the soil with fertilizer, uses petroleum-based inputs, and uses precious water in dry areas of the US. America is the world’s largest corn grower and exporter; a tremendous amount of land was already sacrificed for corn, but that amount will grow rapidly from now on.

 

The USDA says corn and grain farmers will increase land use as a reaction to high prices by sowing a whopping 9.8 million additional acres in 2011. US corn production will soar to a record-breaking 13.73 billion bushels this year, likely with limited gains in stockpiles due to rising demand. So as ethanol producers snatch up more and more land, edible corn producers will hastily squander more acres as well just to keep up with global demand and high prices.

 

And the most ironic part of all this? The more viable source of biodiesel would actually be waste. Converting existing byproducts from various industries to fuel would solve many ecological problems at once. In fact, New York is already considering a major energy initiative based on converting wastewater and sewage into fuel. City officials hope to have a contract by 2013.

 

During a recent lecture at Fordham, New York Times environmental reporter Matt Wald explained, “The idea of using ethanol from plants like corn or palm oil doesn’t make much sense. But waste on the other hand – that’s where the future is.”

 

Yes, biodiesel from waste is certainly a viable energy option for many parts of the country – especially in New York, a city that produces 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater daily. But then there’s all that money in producing ethanol…

 

So the next time you cringe at the grocery store register, or while watching new land being cleared for corn fields, think about your connection to ethanol. Biodiesel may have seemed distant or uninteresting to you just last year, but now, it’s something you’ll have to worry about three times a day.

Social Business Panel This Wednesday

Meet successful social entrepreneurs and activists at the Social Business Panel this Wednesday the 9th at 4:00 in O’Keefe Commons, sponsored by Fordham’s Students for Fair Trade. You’ll hear from groups like Mayan Hands, SCHEFO, Raise India, Palestinian Fair Trade Alliance, Of Rags NY, and more. They’ll be discussing the current challenges and opportunities for social businesses, as well as which trends to look out for in terms of technology and micro lending. The panel discussion will be followed by a networking session in which students can meet the entrepreneurs and purchase some of their unique products. Come join the discussion and learn how to follow in the footsteps of some of New York’s most successful social entrepreneurs!

From Political to Personal: Making Social Justice Close to Home

By Christy Moehrle

I recently attended a lecture by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who presented the novel he co-authored with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, entitled, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Kristof spoke of the hugeness that is female discrimination in our world today. He argued that the big social problem of the nineteenth century was slavery, of the twentieth century totalitarianism, and now in the twenty-first century we are faced with a social problem equally magnanimous: violence and discrimination against women worldwide.

 

He spoke of a young thirteen-year-old girl in Cambodia who was kidnapped and taken to a brothel. At the brothel, she was deemed “uncooperative,” and so to reign in her behavior, the brothel owner gouged out her eye. Another girl in Niger was married off at age twelve against her will to a man in his late fifties, became pregnant and was left alone to give birth in a bush at age thirteen, contracted fistula from the failed birthing, was shunned by her community due to her physical condition, and was quarantined in an exposed hut, where each night she fought off hyenas to survive.

 

As I listened to each of his heart and gut-wrenching tales, I underwent two main sensations: firstly, a desire to learn and engage myself more deeply in this injustice, and secondly, to buy his book (what can I say, it was effective advertising). He closed his presentation by sharing a question he receives most often as a reaction to his stories: “Why should I care?”

 

So, why should we care? How can we connect a world so far beyond our own daily lives to our personal and intimate concerns? This, to me, is the meaning of social justice—it is a basic human connection that invokes a desire and a motivation to fight for the dignity of all persons around the world, regardless of race, religion, geography, or cultural practices.

 

We should care because not all issues of social justice take place continents away.  Whether we’re conscious of them or not, we are a part of them.  The way we interact with our community in the Bronx, the global effects of our daily decisions about food and clothing, and the initiative we take to educate ourselves about what’s going on in the world are all acts of (in)justice.

 

However inspiring Kristof’s work on femicide is, he only represents one side of the media. Perhaps some of you remember the controversial reports that Glenn Beck issued last spring about social justice.  He called attention to the progressive term and criticized its ample usage in political discourse.  True, the term has become more ubiquitous ever since a man of color took office in 2008.  For the first time in history, the Oval Office does not exude white privilege.  Unfortunately, according to Beck, social justice has nothing to do with the acknowledgement of privilege and the recognition of those who do not possess it.  For him, social justice is the “forced redistribution of wealth with a hostility toward individual property rights, under the guise of charity and/or justice” (FoxNews.com).

 

Neither in this definition, nor in his entire rant does Beck make any reference to humanity.  And we are, after all, discussing human beings with a right to dignity, not machines within an economic system.  For him, social justice—or the threat of its reality—is purely economic.  If only more journalists and faces of the media viewed social justice as Kristof does—as human life—there would be a much less hostile public sphere in which to make change.

 

In GO, we encourage participants to struggle with the concept of social justice and define it both within a global as well as a personal context.  Matt Cuff, FCRH ’12, defines it as, “A state in which an individual possesses all of the material, social, political, and cultural resources necessary to live a life free of inequality based on religion, gender, sexuality, and race and socioeconomic status.”  Another student ponders that, “social justice is an ideology that suggests that individuals should conduct charitable acts to benefit members of society who live on the margins.”

 

Regardless of wording, social justice indicates a personal commitment to serve as a conscientious member of your local and global community.  How do YOU define it??

Equality in Uganda: Money isn’t Everything.

By: Eric Horvath

David Kato, a gay rights activist in Uganda, was beaten to death yesterday because he sued a local newspaper for publicly outing him as a homosexual (homosexuality is currently punishable by up to 14 years in prison under Ugandan law). Uganda is an English-speaking, Christian nation on the rise, yet it will never elevate itself out of misery if human rights do not accompany its economic progress.

The death of David Kato is only a small manifestation of things like the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (which would elevate the 14 year sentence to the death penalty) proposed in the Ugandan parliament and newspaper headlines like this one:

Rolling Stone, a Ugandan periodical founded in August 2010, has vowed to continue printing controversial content, despite international outrage.

I wrote an article for The Ram last semester, briefly detailing the overt persecution that gays in Uganda experience that focuses on the controversy with Rolling Stone.

Book Review: The Shock Doctrine.

The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, pgs. 464

Review by Eric Horvath

Over the last few decades the United States, along with international economic institutions, most notably the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), has devastated developing nations in the name of capitalism. From Argentina in the 1970s, to Poland and Russia in the early 1990s, to Iraq and New Orleans in the new millennium, The Shock Doctrine reveals what Naomi Klein calls the “disaster capitalism complex,” a theory that disasters—either natural or financial—create an environment conducive to private business profiteering and the abdication of social welfare (such blatant exploitation is made possible by the widespread desperation and vulnerability that disaster victims endure). Klein’s book incisively criticizes the ideology behind the disaster capitalism complex pioneered by the late Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” —neoliberalism—that has been fueled and promulgated more for its pro-business, anti-Communist tenants than on any actual trickling down of wealth.

 

Friedman’s ideology relies on the principle of free market economics, which entails the privatization of nationally owned entities, government deregulation , and  the liberalization of trade and capital markets. Wealth is often analogized to a pie, and in theory, the bigger the pie the more there is to go around. Friedmanite’s claimed that by taking away things like high taxes and government bureaucracy (that lead to inefficiencies in the market and disallow large corporations from generating the most possible revenue) a bigger pie could be shared by all; neoliberalism has certainly created a bigger pie, unfortunately, it has fattened the rich and emaciated the poor.

 

Provided that you read Klein’s first section on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), The Shock Doctrine’s six other sections can mostly be read individually and in any particular order. Klein explores the advent of ECT on psych patients at McGill University in the 1950s, CIA-funded treatments that involved heavy dosages of drugs, electrical shocks, and sensory deprivation. It was the belief of the administrators that drugs, electricity and white-washed, brightly-lit rooms would “wipe the slate clean” and allow them to rebuild the psychologically troubled from the ground up. The belief that erasing a patient’s memory left them more malleable and susceptible to cooperation translated to the evolving field of “interrogation,” or more aptly, torture. The United States, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, along with countries that it’s influenced (eg. Pinochet’s Argentina) have used this form of brutal interrogation in exchange for cooperation and at the expense of human decency. It is this method, an idealized renaissance from the ashes of a depleted mind, that Klein believes our foreign policy has projected onto foreign governments and our own: our form of the “disaster capitalism complex.”…

Read the rest of the review here: http://seoultrywords.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/book-the-shock-doctrine/

Finding Spirituality in Service

The idea of spirituality can seem distant or exclusionary to many students new to the Global Outreach program. Our goal, however, is to incorporate an inclusive, open-minded, and highly personal notion of spirituality into the work we do, using this mindset to connect with communities on a deeper level. In this video, GO participants vocalize some of their most profound ideas and experiences regarding the role of spirituality in service projects.

Social Justice Through a Personal Lens

The role of social justice in Global Outreach can often be misunderstood or difficult to define. With so many politically-charged definitions of the word, it can be hard for new participants to perceive social justice through a strictly personal lens as each project does. In this video, your fellow GO members try to make sense of their experiences and how the program has shaped their conception of social justice over the years.

Tools in Place to Eradicate Malaria in Africa

(Photo: Vestergaard Frandsen/flickr)

By Michelle Hardy

Malaria – that far away, developing country disease that will inevitably plague Sub-Saharan Africa and kill 800,000 people yearly – once ravaged American territory. Until 1951, the U.S. battled malaria without vaccines, global aid, or twenty-first-century technologies. So for anyone under the impression that it will take a miracle to rid Africa of history’s worst epidemic, think again.

We’ve had the tools to eradicate malaria for well over a century, and more keep emerging. The recent development of Mosquirix, the first malaria vaccine, has excited activists fighting to end this disease in concert with the rest of 2015′s Millennium Development Goals. Their main focus is Sub-Saharan Africa, where most cases occur. But the efficacy rate of the new vaccine is only at 50%. To be successful at large, scientists and doctors would need at least an 80% success rate before widespread dissemination for fear users would develop a false sense of security and neglect full-proof methods.

So what is a full-proof method? Mainly, Africa needs more nets. Since 2008, 23 more countries in Africa have adopted the World Health Organization goal to provide mosquito nets to everyone at risk of malaria. By the end of 2010, 289 million nets will have been delivered to Sub-Saharan Africa since 2008 – enough to protect 76% of the people in affected areas. This rapid improvement signifies just how serious this generation is about eradicating malaria from Africa – and how close they are to succeeding.

And luckily, history shows we don’t need to wait for a perfected vaccine to do so. If other countries eradicated malaria 100 years ago, the technologies and heightened global awareness of today are enough to squash the bug in Africa for good.

 

Malaria v. Uncle Sam

This disease was once on our shores. America’s fear of malaria outbreaks spiked in the early 1900′s, when malaria was a major cause of death for workers building the Panama canal during U.S. military occupation in Cuba. 21,000 out of the canal’s 26,000 workers were hospitalized in 1906. The U.S. implemented a vigorous insect control program, and by 1912, only 5,600 out of 50,000 workers were infected.

By 1933, the U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) established a large malaria control program in a region where 30% of the population was affected by malaria. After extensive research, aggressive attacks on mosquito breeding sites, and careful control of water levels, the disease was eliminated in the area by 1947. Also in 1947, a cooperation between the CDC and southeastern state health agencies established the National Malaria Eradication Program. After 15,000 malaria cases were reported that year, the number of cases began decreasing exponentially. By 1951, malaria was altogether eliminated from the country.

Without the use of vaccines, twenty-first-century technologies, or a global coalition of volunteers, the U.S. eliminated malaria. The country’s aggressive insect control operations were achieved through cooperation between government and health organizations, as well as a brief influx in federal funds. With dozens of UN member nations, NGOs, nonprofits, and governments focused on the elimination of malaria, no piece of history or science indicates this disease cannot be eradicated in Africa as well.

 

The economic parasite

Africa’s current malaria battle is not just about reclaiming integrity and quality of life; it is powerfully reversing a downward spiral of poverty. Consider what happens when hoards of people in a Sub-Saharan African village – husbands, mothers, children, caretakers, breadwinners, guardians – are suddenly incapacitated if not wiped out forever. Work stops. People stop. Entire towns become grief stricken or whittled down. In countries of high malaria transmission, GDP can decline by 1.3% yearly. These aggregated annual losses create tremendous rifts between the wealth of nations over time.

In heavily infected countries, malaria can also account for 40% of public health expenditures, 50% of inpatient hospital admissions, and 60% of outpatient health clinic visits. Poorer families are disproportionately affected by their lack of funds for treatment. This puts incredible strain on governments, healthcare facilities, and villages forced into economic regression.

A sudden decline in malaria cases would surely require some societal reorganization, but there is no question that eradication would dramatically improve quality of life and potential for economic stability. A study of Sri Lanka’s malaria eradication in the mid-twentieth century, for example, showed that while the subsequent population rise after eradication can pose negative economic effects, these are only temporary. Sri Lanka’s campaign brought malaria from 97% in 1935 to 17 cases in 1963. The initial effect of eradication was increased fertility in the population, but this suddenly larger cohort then displayed fewer births and higher human capital after a temporary congestion period.

 

This generation can stop it

Activists are often frustrated by mandates to eliminate poverty, achieve universal education, and instill gender equality on a global scale. When? How? At what cost? Sweeping panaceas for these problems are hard to come by.

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But ending malaria does not require a miracle. It does not necessitate new governments or major cultural shifts. It does not have to take a lifetime. There are scientific, finite, and viable ways to stop the spread of this disease, most of which involve aggressive dissemination of mosquito nets. Andrea Gay, the U.N. Foundation’s director of Children’s Health, explains, “Theoretically, if every person in Africa slept at night under a tent, nobody need ever die of malaria again.”

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Buying $10 mosquito nets through the UN’s Nothing But Nets initiative is one of the most effective ways for us to stunt the growth of this disease. Common drugstore bug spray brands like OFF and Cutter cost about 5 to 7 dollars a bottle. If you’re willing to pay that amount to ward off mosquitoes from a summer picnic, consider making a comparable donation to shield your peers in need.

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The average person may unconsciously perceive malaria as a distant problem indigenous to economically depressed countries. They may believe no one person can have an immediate effect on such a massive health crisis. Yet just one person’s ten dollar bill can shield a family for years. If enough people do so, malaria could potentially disappear from Africa within half a lifetime.Make a holiday donation to Nothing But Nets. We are so close. Be part of the generation ending history’s most catastrophic epidemic.

Squashing the Bug: New Developments in Malaria Vaccine

Most malaria victims are under five years old (Photo: flickr/millenniumpromise).

Sophomore Stephanie Chedid began Fordham’s campaign to buy $2,000 worth of mosquito nets for Nothing But Nets by Christmas, and your help is greatly needed to provide these nets for 200 families. A donation of only $10 will buy a net.

Check out this article from Mother Nature Network about the world’s first malaria vaccine - Mosquirix – soon to be available as a viable eradication strategy for the disease killing 800,000 people a year. Still, the article explains that the new vaccine is not yet a sweeping solution at an efficacy rate of only 50 percent; To be trustworthy on a large scale, scientists and doctors would need at least an 80 percent success rate. Medical communities worry that at this point in development, the shots could instill a false sense of security and cause people to neglect more pull-proof measures like mosquito nets. Yet the vaccine is a promising step toward more efficient protection methods, and it signifies just how close this generation is coming to total eradication of the disease in Africa.

Purchasing mosquito nets for families in Sub-Saharan Africa through Nothing But Nets is crucial at this point, when doctors and scientists are on the verge of offering game-changing drugs on a large scale. Reach out and help squash the bug for good – with only $10 you will provide years of protection for a family fighting to cleanse their homes of the world’s worst epidemic.

Squashing the Bug: How to Save Lives with a $10 Bill

Malaria has destroyed more life than any other epidemic in history. Activists feeling hopeless over malaria-plagued Africa may forget that this disease is preventable. We eradicated it in the United States in the 1950′s. You can help us achieve the next eradication with a mere $10 bill. Buy a mosquito net that directly save lives. Fordham has a $2,000 donation goal through Nothing but Nets, so contribute today and help us buy 200 shields by Christmas for families fighting to eliminate malaria.

Check out Fordham’s fundraising progress and contribute to the cause at our Nothing but Nets donation page, established by Fordham sophomore Stephanie Chedid.

Join the Facebook group for Nothing but Nets to show support and hear about our progress and updates.