[SustainableTompkins] a view on the biofuels debate from Holland

[Anthony Ingraham]

My friend Piper in Holland has some interesting words about the biofuels debate.

Tony Ingraham
owlgorge at earthlink.net

Hi Tony,

The back-and-forth debate about biofuels is a textbook example of how 
issues are "framed," a concept elaborated in recent years by George 
Lakoff and others. While politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals, 
and ordinary citizens from all segments of the ideological spectrum 
go around and around about "which fuel is best" or "which car is 
best," hardly anyone is engaging is the serious exercises of lateral 
thinking that we need so badly right now: To what extent do we need 
fuels at all? To what extent do we need cars at all? We are only 
going to have a truly productive discussion after we move the frame 
from "fuels" and "cars" to "mobility."

Just one high-profile example: in the "Energy and Environment" issue 
statment on Obama's web site, the word "fuel" and its variants 
appears 25 times, and the word "oil" appears 9 times, while there is 
not a single mention of "public transportation" or of "carbon-neutral 
city design".

Most North Americans have never heard of the Carfree Network or the 
Transition Towns Network, nor do they wonder how it can be possible 
that Dutch people and Danish people have a higher standard of living 
than North Americans in spite of a per capita usage of motor fuels 
that is less than half that in the USA and Canada. George Bush just 
proposed helping to finance his latest wave of military adventures by 
slashing public transportation funding (just one more way of putting 
some more dollars in the wallets of ExxonMobil and Halliburton), and 
were you bowled over by the wave of popular indignation? No? But 
folks will rubberjaw about the pros and cons of ethanol until the 
cows come home.

Take care,

Piper