[SustainableTompkins] Cornell and Biofuels Research

[Thomas Shelley]

At 10:11 PM 12/20/2007 -0500, you wrote:
>Maybe I'm naive, but I am impressed and moved by
>the tone and substance of this exchange. I'd love
>to hear others' take on it.
>Elan


Dear Elan and Friends--I have met Larry Walker, on a number of 
occasions.  I don't know him personally very well, but I think that he is 
overall a pretty good guy.  He is a great researcher and he and his 
research staff have done some outstanding research in area of biological 
and environmental engineering.  I do believe him when he says that he has 
not (in my words) sold out to Big Ag industry and that sustainability has 
always been an important focus of his research.  He is one of the younger 
generation of researchers that was never aligned with the military 
industrial complex in the usual sense of the terms.

All that being as it may, we are still faced with the pending energy 
decent.  Appropriately developed biofuels will have a place in our future, 
hopefully not in a Big Ag mode, but in a more sustainable mode.  Even 
so,  we will all need to reduce our energy requirements by 50-80 
percent.  Biofuels will be a drop in the bucket in the long run.  We will 
need to reduce our consumption of other resources by even more as they 
simply won't be available.  We need to reduce our global population to less 
than 1/5th of our current levels--or it will reduce itself one way or 
another.  The energy decent is about using less, making less and 
procreating less and being happy about the fact that possibly we will 
survive.... and enjoying what we do as humans at higher levels, most of 
which is free and consumes no resources to speak of.  My $.02.   Tom

Tom Shelley
118 E. Court St.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 342-0864
tjs1 at cornell.edu
http://www.myspace.com/99319958
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