[SustainableTompkins] a view on the biofuels debate from Holland

[Margaret McCasland]

Hi Tony,

Your friend Piper reframed the issued very well.  Thanks.

>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
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