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Post by marchesarosa on Jun 17, 2011 13:21:47 GMT 1
I’ll never be able to eat Kobe beef againPosted on June 16, 2011 by Anthony Watts Willis recently wrote about The Long View of Feeding the Planet and all I can say about this idea below is that it is too long wrong. But, this is exactly the sort of thing that some wacky eco-types would see as part of a “sustainable future”. Even Soylent Green sounds better. From Digital Trends It’s being called the “poop burger”. Japanese scientists have found a way to create artificial meat from sewage containing human feces. Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces./// more here wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/16/ill-never-be-able-to-eat-kobe-beef-again/
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Post by StuartG on Jun 17, 2011 14:57:14 GMT 1
Hopefully this idea will die a death before we do. This country fed farm animals with bone meal made from their own bones. Never a good move. It's a type of cannibalism, doesn't work with us or many other animals. A lot of the Western world eat meat from animals that are vegetarian [mainly] for us to eat say dog on a regular basis would be bad. I know what You are about to say 'some people eat dog' true, but they must have developed the constitution over centuries in order to digest it, just as those same people have a lesser ability to drink alcohol, and can get very tipsy on half-a-pint. In that case We have developed an adaptation to it to make for a lesser effect. Although it hasn't been totally proven farm animals eating 'bone meal' will not fare well. I remember querying this with a farmer, the reply was 'Well boy, we were brought up to believe that, but they say it's safe. [with the implication that if this wasn't used then feeding would be dearer and you'd lose money] Well we know different now, or if You didn't, You do now. StuartG Refs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathyread this ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism#World_War_II
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Post by marchesarosa on Oct 29, 2011 15:14:45 GMT 1
Norm Kalmanovitch | October 27, 2011 at 6:53 pm on Climate Etc
Lives are at stake here! The world is taking 6.5% of the global grain supply and using it as feedstock for the 85billion litre global annual ethanol production. When 6.5% of the worlds grain is taken away the wealthy pay double for food and the poor simply starve. How many of the now 7 billion people on the planet are now victims of this biofuel for carbon credit fraud spawned by the Kyoto Accord?
The real stupidity is that when the CO2 released in the fermentation process is added to the fact that ethanol only produces 64% of the energy of the gasoline that it replaces and add again the vast amount of energy mostly from fossil fuels used in the distillation process; ethanol produces significantly more CO2 than the gasoline it replaces!
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Post by marchesarosa on Nov 6, 2011 11:57:57 GMT 1
Study: ‘green’ biofuels could be costing the earth Posted on November 4, 2011 by Anthony Watts From the University of Leicester department of inconvenient truths: New study suggests EU biofuels are as carbon intensive as petrolUniversity of Leicester research into greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations provides robust measures now being used to inform international policies on greenhouse gas emissions A new study on greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations has calculated a more than 50% increase in levels of CO2 emissions than previously thought – and warned that the demand for ‘green’ biofuels could be costing the earth. The study from the University of Leicester was conducted for the International Council on Clean Transportation, an international think tank that wished to assess the greenhouse gas emissions associated with biodiesel production. Biodiesel mandates can increase palm oil demand directly (the European Biodiesel Board recently reported big increases in biodiesel imported from Indonesia) and also indirectly, because palm oil is the world’s most important source of vegetable oil and will replace oil from rapeseed or soy in food if they are instead used to make biodiesel. The University of Leicester researchers carried out the first comprehensive literature review of the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations on tropical peatland in Southeast Asia. In contrast to previous work, this study also provides an assessment of the scientific methods used to derive emissions estimate.... more here wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/04/study-green-biofuels-could-be-costing-the-earth/#more-50569
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Post by marchesarosa on Nov 26, 2011 14:10:36 GMT 1
Here is a strongly worded opinon from Rich Matarese on Judith Curry's Climate Etc about the impact of AGW climate alarmism on real world politics. judithcurry.com/2011/11/24/emails/#comment-143057....... One of the effects of the anthropogenic global warming fraud has been the diversion of proven, developed arable farmland, fertilizers, machinery, and manpower to the hideous boondoggle of “fuel ethanol,” the international impact of which has been seen in the present bloodshed and political destabilization of the “Arab Spring.” The national economies of the Sandbox are precariously dependent upon the importation of cereal grains in order to provide the people thereof with their basic and utterly critical calorie intake. The most efficient and productive agricultural sector in the Middle East – in Israel, naturally – cannot meet more than about 40-50% of their national population’s requirements for dietary carbohydrates. Imagine how bad it is in the Camel Jockey countries. It’s all got to be imported, and guess where the world’s greatest and most critically important sources of wheat happen to be? Why, they’re in First World countries where government subsidization – in the name of addressing “global warming” – has been turning the best wheat-producing resources to the production of corn (maize) not for human consumption or animal feed but to fermentation into wasteful, inefficient, objectively unsatisfactory EtOH. The conditions long predisposing to the Arab Spring civil unrest (and civil wars) are not directly due to the AGW fraud, but this “fuel ethanol” crap has sure as hell triggered the bomb. Scarcity in the international cereal grains markets has been steadily pushing up prices even in the kleptocratic Arab autocracies’ government-subsidized markets, and it’s not just unemployment and suppression of personal freedoms that kindled the conflagrations we’ve been seeing over the past year. Those demonstrations in Tahrir Square and Benghazi and Tunis and Daraa and Douma have been – in spite of our incompetent “mainstream” media clowns’ failure to perceive it – very much food riots, and these spasms of bloodshed have been at least indirectly due to Dr. Mann and Dr. Briffa and Dr. Trenberth and Prof. Jones and their “climate science” co-conspirators peddling the pack of flagrant lies we all know and love as the gaudy “global warming” whoop-te-do. Actions have consequences, and only liars and idiots evade acknowledgement thereof.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 4, 2012 18:13:16 GMT 1
From Bishop Hill bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/2/22/booker-on-biofuels.htmlChristopher Booker sends this excerpt from his splendid book, The Real Global Warming Disaster. It describes events in 2008 and ties in nicely with my Entrepreneur post a couple of days ago. Christopher Booker on BiofuelsFeb 22, 2012 In startling contrast, however, one Commission proposal met with a storm of protest. This was its requirement that by 2020 10 percent of the EU’s transport should be powered by biofuels. Over the previous two years a sea-change had been taking place in attitudes towards biofuels, not least among many of the organisations normally looked on as the EU’s closest environmental allies. As early as 2006 various international organisation, including the IMF, the OECD and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had already blamed rapidly rising world food prices on the ever-increasing areas of land across the world being switched from food production to growing crops for biofuels. The FAO published a report suggesting that, for the EU to meet its 10 percent target from home-grown biofuels, would require a staggering 70 percent of the EU’s cereal land, necessitating a huge increase in EU food imports. By the end of 2006, the Commission itself was equally aware that the world was about to face a food shortage, which over the next few months would spark food riots in several countries, ranging from west Africa and Egypt to West Bengal. Yet, in their attempts to show that a sufficient acreage of farm land would be available to meet its planned new biofuels target, the Brussels officials resorted to a curious method which involved including the same areas of land more than once. First the Commission counted in all the ‘set aside’ land taken out of food production to avoid building up grain mountains and other food surpluses. But much of this land was now being used to grow ‘industrial’ crops needed for other purposes. It then conceded, without being too specific, that in addition large areas of land would have to be switched from growing food to crops for biofuels. Finally, however, to meet the world food shortage, it then suggested that this same land could also be used to grow more food crops. This bureaucratic sleight of hand came to be compared to ‘Enron accounting’ Thanks to these efforts to make its policy seem plausible, the EU’s political leaders in March 2007 nodded through the Commission’s 10 percent biofuels target apparently without questioning whether the sums added up. It was around this time, however, that, with startling speed, the backlash against biofuels suddenly erupted on all sides. Even before the EU had adopted its new target, fierce criticism of biofuels was coming from those same environmental groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which had once been their most fervent advocates. Their particular focus was the damage being done in the developing world, not least by the clearing for biofuels of millions of acres of rainforest in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia. It had become distressingly obvious that this was inflicting very serious damage both on locally indigenous peoples and on wildllfe, not least by its threat to the survival of Borneo’s fast-vanishig orang-outans. Next to weigh in had been Jean Ziegler, the UN’s ‘special rapporteur on the right to food’, who in October 2007 made headlines across the world by claiming in New York that it was ‘a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel’. Since the ‘dash for biofuels’, he said, could only bring ‘more hunger to the poor people of the world’, he called for a five year moratorium on their use. A report to be published the following year by the World Bank’s chief economist Donald Mitchell would claim that switching food-growing land to biofuels had been responsible for three quarters of the 140 percent rise in world food prices which took place between 2002 and 2008. Most alarming of all, however, was a succession of scientific studies showing that, far from helping to cut global CO2 emissions, biofuel production could often give off much more CO2 than it saved – not least by disturbing huge quantities of CO2 locked in the soil which, according to the University of Minnesota, could release ’17 to 420 times more CO2’ than would be saved by the biofuels. A study by Cornell University showed that, thanks to the high-energy inputs needed to make biofuels from farm crops – in everything from machinery and fertilisers to the intensive use of irrigation – they took 29 percent more energy to produce than was generated by the biofuel itself. In the week before the Commission published its proposals they were dealt a further devastating blow by its own in-house scientists. Its Joint Research Centre came out with a report dismissing almost every positive claim which had been made for biofuels. The Commission’s proposals, it concluded, would not achieve any overall savings in CO2 emissions. Their energy efficiency was much less than half that of fuel from oil refineries. They would not on balance create any new jobs. And their costs would far outweigh any benefits, amounting by 2020 to a net deficit ranging between €33 and €65 billion. Environmentalist groups, led by Greenpeace, queued up to implore the Commission to abandon its 10 percent target. A Friends of the Earth spokesman said ‘I just can’t see how the Commission can go ahead with its biofuels policy now …it has nothing going for it’. But in no way was Brussels to be deterred from pressing ahead with its policy. Biofuels, it insisted, had not been responsible for the rise in world food prices, which were due to rising world demand, bad weather and international speculation. ‘If you don’t have targets you don’t make progress’ said a Commission spokesman, adamant that the 10 percent biofuels target could not be altered. In the US, where the powerful farmers’ lobby was insistent that nothing should be done to change a subsidy system which, according to the FAO, could soon see nearly a third of US farmland diverted to biofuels, it seemed the ‘crime against humanity’ was equally set to continue. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1441110526/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=bishil-21&camp=2902&creative=19466&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=1441110526&adid=1W2CY23QHW6XEFJ9GG6P&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Frcm-uk.amazon.co.uk%2Fe%2Fcm%3Flt1%3D_blank%26bc1%3D000000%26IS2%3D1%26bg1%3DFFFFFF%26fc1%3D000000%26lc1%3D0000FF%26t%3Dbishil-21%26o%3D2%26p%3D8%26l%3Das4%26m%3Damazon%26f%3Difr%26ref%3Dss_til%26asins%3D1441110526
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 22, 2012 11:53:19 GMT 1
Sugar cane ethanol biofuel produces 10 times the pollution of gasoline and dieseljoannenova.com.au/2012/07/sugar-cane-ethanol-biofuel-produces-10-times-the-pollution-of-gasoline-and-diesel/Indur Goklany calculated that biofuels policies killed nearly 200,000 people in 2010 alone. That was before this study showed things may be worse than we suspected. Brazil is the largest sugar cane ethanol producer in the world, but people are burning four times the area of sugar cane plantations than previously realized, and it’s producing far more pollution than they thought. For every unit of energy generated, the ethanol-biofuel use produces a lot less CO2 (plant fertilizer) but more volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), more carbon monoxide, more nitrous oxides, as well as more sulphur dioxides. (See Graph b below). Compared to gasoline and diesel, over its whole life cycle, every unit of energy produced with sugar cane produces 10 times as much volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxides. The amount PM10′s and PM2.5′s produced with ethanol fuels is even higher. Most of the pollution comes from burning fields of sugar cane (see graph a). Hence the people suffering the most from ethanol production will be villagers and rural farmers living near areas of sugar cane production. While there have been efforts to encourage farmers to produce cane without burning fields, over half of sugar-cane crop loads continue to be burned. Presumably there is a cost to producing sugar cane without burning. Perhaps sugar-cane production is viable and competitive without burning but this study does not discuss the reasons farmers prefer to burn fields. If you care about pollution, and want less of it, and you care about the health of people in developing countries then clearly we should encourage gasoline and diesel use, and discourage production of ethanol that involves burning sugar cane-fields. Likewise, to promote growth in the Amazon (by increasing CO2 levels), we ought to be burning fossil fuels and not fields of cane. If global policies devalue concentrated energy underground and prize diffuse photosynthetic sources of energy above ground, will we protect and retain dirty rocks deep below the surface at the expense of biodiversity and health of plants and people? It seems so.
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Post by marchesarosa on Aug 27, 2012 13:23:00 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Sept 12, 2012 17:43:48 GMT 1
Exclusive: EU to limit use of crop-based biofuels - draft law
By Charlie Dunmore BRUSSELS | Mon Sep 10, 2012 1:59pm EDT
(Reuters) - The European Union will impose a limit on the use of crop-based biofuels over fears they are less climate-friendly than initially thought and compete with food production, draft EU legislation seen by Reuters showed.
The draft rules, which will need the approval of EU governments and lawmakers, represent a major shift in Europe's much-criticized biofuel policy and a tacit admission by policymakers that the EU's 2020 biofuel target was flawed from the outset.
The plans also include a promise to end all public subsidies for crop-based biofuels after the current legislation expires in 2020, effectively ensuring the decline of a European sector now estimated to be worth 17 billion euros ($21.7 billion) a year.
"The (European) Commission is of the view that in the period after 2020, biofuels should only be subsidized if they lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings... and are not produced from crops used for food and feed," the draft said.
A Commission spokeswoman said the EU executive would not comment on the details of leaked proposals.
The policy u-turn comes after EU scientific studies cast doubt on the emissions savings from by crop-based fuels, and following a poor harvest in key grain growing regions that pushed up prices and revived fears of food shortages.
Under the proposals, the use of biofuels made from crops such as rapeseed and wheat would be limited to 5 percent of total energy consumption in the EU transport sector in 2020.
Crop-based fuel consumption currently accounts for about 4.5 percent of total EU transport fuel demand, according to the latest national figures for 2011, ensuring that there will be little room to increase current production volumes.
Such a limit will throw into doubt the EU's binding target to source 10 percent of road transport fuels from renewable sources by the end of the decade, the vast majority of which was expected to come from crop-based biofuels.
In an attempt to make up the shortfall, the European Commission wants to increase the share of advanced non-land using biofuels made from household waste and algae in the EU's 10 percent target.
"It is appropriate to encourage greater production of such advanced biofuels as these are currently not commercially available in large quantities, in part due to competition for public subsidies with now established food crop based biofuels," the draft legislation said.
The Commission has proposed that the use of such advanced fuels should be quadruple-counted within the EU's 10 percent target, in an attempt to at least meet it on paper.
But with commercial production volumes expected to remain low up to 2020, it is doubtful whether the goal can be met.
BIODIESEL BLOW
The proposals are contained in long-awaited EU plans to address the indirect land use change (ILUC) impact of biofuels, a subject that has split officials, biofuel producers and scientists, delaying legislative proposal for almost two years.
ILUC is a theory that states that by diverting food crops into fuel tanks, biofuel production increases overall global demand for agricultural land. If farmers meet that extra demand by cutting down rainforest and draining peatland, it results in millions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.
The draft law includes new ILUC emissions values for the three major crop types used to produce biofuels: cereals, sugars and oilseeds. These values must be included when calculating emissions savings from biofuels under an EU fuel quality law designed to encourage fuel suppliers to cut emissions from road transport fuels by 6 percent by 2020.
While low values for ethanol made from cereals and sugars are expected to have little market impact, a much higher value for oilseeds is likely to exclude most biodiesel made from rapeseed, soybeans and palm oil from counting towards the fuel suppliers' targets.
The Commission says its proposal will protect existing investments until 2020, but biodiesel producers fear that by removing any incentive for fuel companies to use biodiesel, it will put the future of the entire sector in doubt.
"Three years after the EU made biofuels a central plank of its policy to promote renewable energies in transport, the Commission's current proposal threatens an industry that arose as a response to its policies, supports 50,000 jobs and would have provided the next generation of biofuel technologies," said Jean-Philippe Puig, CEO of Sofiproteol, which owns the EU's largest biodiesel producer.
Environmental campaigners welcomed the proposal to limit the use of crop-based fuels, but said the plans should have gone further.
"The good news is that this proposal, if adopted, would stop further expansion of current types of unsustainable biofuels, which is an important step. But the bad news is that it fails to do anything about the current volumes of these fuels," said Nusa Urbancic, clean fuels campaigner for green transport lobby T&E.
If confirmed, the rules are expected to boost European consumption of ethanol, which currently accounts for just over 20 percent of the EU biofuel market, compared with biodiesel's 78 percent share.
But with diesel cars accounting for about 60 percent of Europe's fleet and rising, it is unlikely that increased ethanol consumption will be able to completely offset the likely decline in biodiesel consumption.
The International Council on Clean Transportation has predicted that any emissions savings from the EU's biofuel policy are likely to come from ethanol, while crop-based biodiesel has a worse carbon footprint than normal diesel.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 22, 2012 17:13:00 GMT 1
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 16 Number 1 Spring 2011 www.jpands.org/vol16no1/goklany.pdfCould Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries?by Indur M. Goklany, Ph.D.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 23, 2012 17:37:56 GMT 1
Our Fading Footprint for Farmingonline.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324907204578185491352529884.htmlIt's a brave scientist who dares to announce the turning point of a trend, the top of a graph. A paper published this week does just that, persuasively arguing that a centurieslong trend is about to reverse: the use of land for farming. The authors write: "We are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature." Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick of Rockefeller University, and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, have reached this conclusion by documenting the gradual "dematerialization" of agriculture. Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961, thanks to fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, better varieties and other factors. Even corrected for different kinds of crops, the acreage required is falling at 2% a year. In the U.S., the total corn yield and the total corn acreage tracked each other in lock step between 1870 and 1940—there was no change in average yield per acre. But between 1940 and 2010, corn production almost quintupled, while the acreage devoted to growing corn fell slightly. Similar divergences appeared later in other countries. Indian wheat production increased fivefold after 1970, while wheat acreage crept up by less than 1.5 times. Chinese corn production rose sevenfold over the same period while corn acreage merely doubled. Yet the amount of farmland in the world was still rising until recently. The reason is that increased farm productivity has been matched by rising demand for food, driven by population growth and swelling affluence. But the effects of these trends are waning. Global population growth has slowed markedly in recent years—the rate of change halving since 1970 to about 1% a year today. Growing affluence leads people to eat more calories, and especially more meat. Since it takes two to 10 calories of maize or wheat to produce a calorie of meat, depending on the animal, carnivory demands more cropland. But as a country gets richer, total calorie intake soon levels off, even as wealth continues to rise, and the change in meat consumption decelerates. Chinese meat consumption is now rising less than half as fast as Chinese affluence; Indians have grown richer without taking to meat much at all. What the Rockefeller team did was plug some highly conservative assumptions about the future into a model and see how much land would be required for growing crops in 2060. Compared with current trends, they assumed population growth will fall more slowly, that affluence will increase faster and that the gluttony of people will rise more rapidly. Conversely, they assumed that farm yields would rise more slowly than they have been doing. This seems highly implausible given that the gigantic continent of Africa seems to be at last embarking on a yield-boosting green revolution as far-reaching as Asia’s was. Even with these cautious assumptions, the researchers find that over the next 50 years people are likely to release from farming a land area “1½ times the size of Egypt, 2½ times the size of France, or 10 Iowas, and possibly multiples of this amount.” Indeed, the authors find that this retreat from the land would have already begun but for one factor so lunatic that they cannot imagine it will not be reversed soon: biofuels.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 24, 2012 0:51:07 GMT 1
and there's the rub. These things (including improved processing, packaging, storage and distribution) all depend on fossil fuels!
The only variable that can be modified to produce a high, sustainable standard of living, is the human population. Somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the present population could enjoy a western standard of living indefinitely.
Why don't we do it?
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 24, 2012 12:40:20 GMT 1
Some of us have been "doing it", Mr Calverd. I have no offspring. Have you?
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 24, 2012 12:51:39 GMT 1
I have four children. The mark of a good scientist is the ability to change his mind when faced with facts.
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Post by marchesarosa on Jan 23, 2013 19:29:49 GMT 1
Philip Bratby comments From the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Eichelmann Germany: It is hardly possible to describe in words the damage done to German nature, as Eichelmann describes it in his film. The country side is made desolate by monoculture of corn fields stretching to the horizon, and biosphere reserves are not spared. Everything is done just to ensure enough biofuels are produced to meet Germany‘s climate targets — all in the name of a supposedly clean energy. Many bird species have already disappeared completely, others will follow. Hares and other soil dwellers will not be seen again. The largest biogas plant in the country needs 1,000 tons of corn per day. 7,000 plants have already been built, about 1,000 on average will be added each year. Due to generous subsidies, the corn farmers can pay any rent, so the rents have more than doubled and farms are going bankrupt. By the way: in 2011 Germany could not cover its cereal needs for the first time. riverwatch.eu/climate-crimesThese days, much is spoken and written about the destruction of our planet as a result of climate change. In his evocative film “Climate Crimes”, the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Eichelmann who was an active member of WWF for 17 years and worked in conservation for decades, now documents that it is rather the reverse: he shows how many ecosystems, species, habitats and the cultural heritage too are threatened – but, as he sums up, “not by climate change, but by climate protection and the things done in its name.” It is predominantly hydropower and bioenergy projects that threaten to destroy precious areas of our planet’s nature. www.thegwpf.org/climate-crimes-green-policies-killing-nature/John Shade adds ...this film is helping expose the slipshod thinking of eco-adventurists based around CO2 alarmism. Slipshod, superficial, and deadly.
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