Glaciers covering Canada, Russia and China is a bad thing – well, it's not optimal, anyways. We'll handle it better in N America than in Europe and Asia. Saving the Planet – really? You mean saving man kind, the Planet is just fine. Fear the cold, not the warmth.

The Sun is slowing down. Even "communistic" NASA has now admitted (after the damn Waxman Markely bill got out of committee and probably can't be stopped by FACTS) that the 30 years of warming, THAT ENDED 7 YEARS AGO, can now be attributed to increased solar output. You'd think since we paid for the satelites 32 years ago, they could report to us in a timely fashion!!! The last seven years of flattening and now cooling is caused by – again, reduced solar output. Flame on, flame off – any child can tell you what keeps us warm and we have NO CONTROL over it, now can you sleep better?

You can say all you want about "buying gasoline is a sin", but the truth is in another 5 years, we'll need all the atmospheric fertilization and any miniscule warming that can possibly be garnered by Greenhouse Gases – unfortunately tripling the CO2 would only raise the Global temperature a fraction of 1 degree – an inconvenient (physics, not environmental "science")truth indeed!

The California Air Resources Board based a lot of their “reasoning” on a “study” by Searchinger, et al which has been widley critisized by legitimate researchers in this field. John A. Mathews and Hao Tan, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, take issue with the methodology and assumptions used by Tim Searchinger and others in the study, Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases through Emissions from Land Use Change, which was published in February, 2008. (http://blog.25×25.org/?p=404) :

“The two Australian researchers say the Searchinger study “then deliberately ignores possible trade effects, such as a proportion of this ethanol spike being met by imports from countries such as Brazil. It even ignores the congressional cap that was placed on first-generation corn-based ethanol in the United States, which was levied at 15 billion gallons, about half the spike used by Searchinger and his team to come to their conclusions.

“Indeed if you wished to put U.S. ethanol production in the worst possible light, assuming the worst possible set of production conditions guaranteed to give the worst possible ILUC effects, then the assumptions chosen would not be far from those actually presented (without argument or discussion of alternatives) in the Searchinger et al. paper,”

Mathews and Hao said. Noting the Searchinger paper offers no replicable models and parameters to allow others to check its results, it “is perhaps better described as ideology than as science.”

Matthews and Hao even questioned the fact that the Journal Science even published the “study” because the authors have not made all data and models available for real researchers to test their results.

Searchinger is not a trained scientist but a lawyer.

The Farm state Dems you refer to just want to be sure that actual science prevails in determining policy at EPA.

BTW your statement that “Some research demonstrates that the production of corn ethanol consumes more energy than it yields” is rediculous. All the legitimate research shows ethanol returns more energy than is consumed in it’s production. Check with Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory or the recent peer reviewed research by the University of Nebraska which shows ethanol reduced GHGs over gasoline by 51%.

For more on EThanol’s energy balance see:
http://www.pacificethanol.net/site/index.php/media/straight_story_article/319/