Dennis Avery

Corn Ethanol and a Non-Warming Earth

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earth has failed to warm at all for 15 years now, and American farmers are afraid of losing the “renewable fuel” mandate for corn ethanol—which has given them record crop prices and incomes since 2007. So, they’re proposing a new entitlement designed to ensure that they’ll never lose money again. Their proposed new federal farm bill would guarantee that farmers’ incomes don’t decline—and if future farm prices rise even more, the Feds’ guarantee would ratchet up too.

My Second-Most-Remarkable Moment

Churchville, VA—I had my second-most-remarkable moment while at the Heartland climate skeptics’ conference in Chicago last week. The conference was terrific, for climate scientists, geologists, economists, NASA engineers, and interested attendees. The highlight for me, though, was Sebastian Lunning, who co-authored Germany’s best-selling new book The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Catastrophe Won’t Happen.

BIG CITY LIB

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Heartland Institute, a Chicago libertarian think-tank, put up a billboard outside Chicago on May 3rd that showed a photo of a raddled-looking Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The cut line said, “I believe in man-made global warming. Do you?”

Locovore’s Dilemma: A Different View on Buying Locally

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A Canadian couple of my acquaintance has just published a book provocatively titled The Locovore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet. A new review in Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “daring, bare-knuckled, frequently sarcastic defense of the status quo in Western industrial agribusiness. From the point of view of the well-off, well-fed North American who does not have to toil much of the day for his subsistence, what’s not to praise in the West’s ability to provide the world with cheap, fast, uniform, reliable, bug-resistant, vitamin-enhanced food?”

Bjorn Lomborg adopts high-yield farming

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Bjorn Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus have just joined one of the smallest clubs in today’s world: people who believe that high-yield farming is the path to a sustainable future for people and wildlife despite, and even because of, its pesticides, chemical fertilizers, irrigation dams, and blast-freezers.

Is it Oil Speculators?

Churchville, VA—President Obama stood in the Rose Garden and pledged to prosecute “oil speculators.” Bill O’Reilly goes on TV night after night and blames “speculators” for gas pump prices, while guest after guest tell him he’s wrong. My wife asks” “What’s an oil speculator?”

Pesticide Adventures at TriangleLake

Churchville, VA—My brother lives in TriangleLake, a small community in Oregon’s CoastalRange foothills, surrounded by pastures and forests. Recently, a wealthy couple from Chicago bought a local property and is kindling what they call the “Pitchfork Rebellion” against pesticides. They allege environmental damage and health hazards to local residents from tree, crop and roadside spraying.

Darwin vs. Free Markets

CHURCHVILLE, VA—President Obama says the Republicans want to throw everyone under the wheels of a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” machine. He says the dog-eat-dog of the free market will be bad for blacks, Latinos, women, and the handicapped.

UN Climate Panel and “Extreme Weather”

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted last week it had no evidence to support the various claims that the planet’s weather is becoming “more extreme.” The new IPCC report on weather extremes reads: “While there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gases have likely caused changes in some types of extremes, there is no simple answer to question of whether the climate, in general, has become more or less extreme.”

Pesticide Residue Risks Recalculated

For the past 15 years, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has been trying to scare U.S. consumers about pesticide residues on the fruits and vegetables in supermarkets. The EWG annually selects a “dirty dozen” produce items that they say pose the most pesticide residue danger to consumers and their kids.

Africa: The Next Megadrought

Africa is suffering serious drought again—in both the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya) and in West Africa’s Mali. How bad is the drought likely to get, Lake Bosumtwi, Little Ice Age,

The Vikings: Victims and Victors

It’s ironic that we remember the Vikings best for one small failure— their frozen far-north Greenland colony. We should instead be praising the Vikings for struggling through the cold and stormy Dark Ages, for designing those fabulous dragon ships, for swaggering their way through the abundance of the Medieval Warming—and ultimately for leaving many of their descendents in warmer locations to survive the Little Age..

Raw Milk: Buying Danger

CHURCHVLLE, VA—The U.S. Centers for Disease Control finally confirmed that drinking raw milk is more than twice as dangerous than drinking pasteurized milk. And the raw milk disease outbreaks are more dangerous’ especially for kids and the elderly. This is the CDC’s reluctant response to a craze among the alternate believers for “all natural.” CDC made the announcement after a 13-year review!

Unknown volcanes caused the Little Ice Age

Churchville, VA –Here we go again. Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago Christopher Columbus was being blamed for the Little Ice Age (AD 1300 to 1850). Now, a new computer “study” announced that volcanoes caused the Little Ice Age! A research team led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado says eruptions of four volcanoes just before AD 1300 spewed huge amounts of sulphates into the air, which cooled the Arctic and “grew” the Arctic ice sheets and glaciers.

Response to plant species to CO2 levels

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earth has stopped warming, but the greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate at higher levels in the atmosphere. In fact, it seems certain that the planet will have rising levels of atmospheric CO2 for the foreseeable future. No country has actually produced substantial cuts in its greenhouse emissions, and Asia continues to strongly increase its output of industrial gasses. Nor have any of the “renewable” energy sources been cost-effective enough to survive the coming budget cuts in Europe and the U.S.

Will Seaweed be the biofuel solution?

Churchville, VA—Researchers may have broken the biofuel barrier. A new biotech discovery enables ethanol to be made from a common variety of brown seaweed. This would by-pass the biggest problem with corn ethanol and biodiesel—the world’s shortage of cropland. The new ethanol process uses the familiar E coli bacterium working on kombu, a variety of edible brown kelp, which is common in the world’s seas and oceans. It has been grown and harvested commercially by such countries as China, Japan, and Korea for hundreds of years. If you like sushi, it is the brown wrapping on your favorites.

Shale gas: Boon for humanity or bane?

CHURCHVILLE, VA –The carbon footprint of shale gas is about one-third as high as if coal was burned to produce electricity, says a team of researchers who were obviously offended by the rush-to-block-any-new-fuel “study” of Cornell University’s Robert Howarth.

How Columbus Caused the Little Ice Age

CHURCHVILLE, VA—In a remarkable example of human-centeredness, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle blames Christopher Columbus for a sharp reduction in atmospheric CO2 during the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that man-made warming believers never tire of telling us how powerful humans are, usually for the worse, in our ability to change nature.

A new strategy to feed the world

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Can we successfully grow more plants per acre as a future strategy for increasing our crop yields and food production? Sixty thousand corn plants per acre—twice Iowa’s current average—could be one route to higher productivity. The world will need twice as much food in 2050, and we’ll need to triple the crop yields on the best land. Doubling would be a very good start.

Washington Post converts to conservation?

CHURCHVILLE, VA—For 25 years, the Washington Post has praised organic foods—while I warned that low-yield organic farming posed a threat to the world’s wildlife. I estimated that Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution not only saved billions of people from starvation, but at the same time saved 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat that would otherwise have been plowed down for more low-yielding crops. Seven million square miles is the land area of South America. That’s “high-yield conservation.”