A recent study found that urban dwellers are greener, in terms of measurable carbon footprint and are of overall lower impact to the environment than rural or suburban inhabitants. Makes sense when you consider communal portions, condensed personal living space and what I’ll call ”paved paths of access,” meaning, inner-city dependency on public transportation and keeping one on the beaten path means less habitat treading.

The Brookings Institute has released a study this week in which residents of the 100 largest metropolitan areas are shown to produce 14 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per capita than the national average. The reasons for the discrepancy point to population density. As one nears an urban center commute times are shortened, mass transit options are increased, and dwelling spaces get smaller, leading to less individual emissions on average. That’s not to say all cities are created equal. Metro areas in the eastern US were responsible for greater CO2 emissions due to the area’s reliance on coal for electricity generation; they were lower in the West largely because the weather keeps heating costs minimal (for more, see our list of America’s 50 Greenest Cities)

A study shows urban life produces less carbon per capita, but some cities are greener than others

Interesting article by David Wallechinsky in the Huffington Post. Important to remember to be poignant with your displays. I once saw a moron standing at Westlake Center with an alien (read: extra terrestrial) sign in his hand. Turns out that everyone else was protesting police brutality.

As the Olympic Torch Relay makes its way around the world, it is being met by significant human rights protests. To those who wish to protest, I would like to offer some suggestions.

1. Do Not Protest Against “China”
Do not protest against the Chinese people or against “China.” Instead, do protest against the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.

China is a repressive dictatorship run by a single political party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Only 5% of China’s citizens are members of the CCP; 95% of Chinese are not. From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the purpose of hosting the Olympics is to prove to the subjects of their rule that the rest of the world accepts the CCP as the legitimate leaders of the Chinese people. The Chinese Communists want the citizens of China to think that international criticism of the policies of the Communist government are attacks on the Chinese people as a whole.

Apologists for the Chinese Communists try to convince us that the Chinese people are angered by foreign criticism of China’s human rights policies. For all the talk one hears about the spread of the Internet in China, it is worth keeping in mind that 85% of the Chinese population does not use the Internet. The vast majority of Chinese get all of their news from government-controlled television and other media, and they have little, if any, exposure to opposing points of view. To those of us outside of China, Chinese Communist Party speeches and press releases about the Dalai Lama and the “Dalai Clique” orchestrating the violent confrontations in Tibet seem, at best, ridiculous, as does Chinese TV’s assertion that the Torch Relay disruptions have been caused by “a handful of Tibetan separatists.” Yet most Chinese probably believe these accusations to be true because this is the only version they ever hear.

To protest against “China” is to play into the hands of the CCP, allowing its leaders to make the case that the protests are anti-Chinese rather than anti-Chinese Communist Party.

2. Do Not Protest Against the Olympics
Do not protest against the Olympics or against the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The IOC made a mistake by choosing Beijing to host the 2008 Olympics. With 125 democracies in the world, there was no excuse for awarding the Games to one of the 70 or so countries still ruled by a dictatorship. But the vote (56-49) was hardly unanimous, and almost half of the members of the IOC feel as badly about the choice as do demonstrators. The 10,000+ athletes of the world who will qualify to compete in the Olympics deserve to do so. They also deserve the right to express their political opinions if they so desire. When demonstrators attack the Olympics, they weaken the message of the protests.

3. Do Not Attack the Relay Runners or the Torch Itself
Whatever one thinks of the Olympics, the Torch Relay has come to symbolize the peaceful joining together of the peoples of the world. Four years ago, prior to the Athens Olympics, the Olympic Flame was taken all over the world and there were no problems. To attack it is to give fuel to the arguments of those who support the Chinese Communist Party. A more effective means of protest is to non-violently slow the progress of the Relay from a run to a walk.

4. Use Bilingual Signs
To hold up signs and banners in English is fine if you want to influence other Westerners, but if your goal is to show the Chinese people that the rest of the world wants to make contact, translate your message into Mandarin. You never know what images will seep through the notorious Great Firewall of China. Why not try something like a Mandarin translation of “The Chinese Communist Party does not speak for the Chinese people.”

5. Do Not Commit Acts of Violence
Violent acts of protest are just the sort of images the Chinese Communist leaders want to use for their portrayal of pro-Tibetan or pro-democracy protestors. Don’t allow yourself to become a prop in a Chinese Communist propaganda campaign.

6. Look Beyond the Olympics
Protests and demonstrations surrounding the Beijing Olympics are not enough to bring independence to Tibet, democracy to China or allow the Chinese people to finally practice freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The Chinese Communists may make superficial gestures to appease the IOC, but once the Olympics are over, the leaders of the CCP will return to their repressive ways. The only pressure to which the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party will ultimately respond is economic pressure. Because the West is now dependent on Chinese labor, Chinese customers and Chinese loans, it will require long-term strategies to force the Chinese Communist Party to open up more than its economy. In the meantime, why not ask some of the Olympic sponsors what they think about human rights issues in China? Why not ask Coca-Cola, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, McDonalds, Panasonic, Samsung or VISA?

Please treat your concern about Tibet, Darfur or China as a lasting concern rather than as a passing fad.

David Wallechinsky is the author of The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics and Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Living Dictators. He is the Vice-President of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

Short one today. It’s great to be the center fo the universe. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice..

If you haven’t already, chances are that soon you will see an economic stimulus check from the federal government. The stimulus rebate checks were proposed to, well; stimulate a commercial economy in bleak financial times. The bill seeks to put money back into the hands of American consumers, and who doesn’t need a little extra money right? By giving American consumers disposable income the federal government hopes to stimulate (read: jump start) consumption and circulation thereby stimulating sales revenue, stock percentages and overall encourage Americans to re-establish their canceled summer travel plans due to fuel inflation and the like. But there is one small caveat; just where is the money coming from?

We are BORROWING the money for these “economic stimulus checks” from China who we already owe $386.8 billion to, and Saudi Arabia who we owe $100 billion to. Wow, it’s no secret that America is the largest consumer of Chinese goods the world over. It makes damn good sense for them to lend us money they will see back shortly. We are borrowing capital against our future, and our children’s future to spend today, leading further to the indebtedness of America. Screw global warming, THIS IS A CRISIS! It’s easy to be a naysayer, especially during economic turmoil, a time of war, and the rise of puppet candidacy, but this can’t be the answer! My family is feeling the pinch as much as anyone. The cost of diapers is up, food is up and fuel is up, bees are dying from some mysterious disease driving cosmetics and a plethora of uncommon (non petro) staples up as well. But you don’t pay your bills with borrowed money. Unfortunately the stimulus deed is done, and there is no need to fight it now. But for the love of God, buy something made in the States with your stimulus check no matter how last ditch it may seem, and no that doesn’t mean gas!

..If you want my .02 I would go with a nice American made bicycle.

The following is the economic stimulus check payment schedule from the IRS website:

Economic stimulus payments will be issued according to the last two-digits of the main filer’s Social Security number. For joint filers, the payments will go out based on the person listed first on the return. Payments will be made by either direct deposit or paper check, consistent with how people filed their 2007 tax return.

People who use direct deposit also will be among the first to receive the payments starting April 28. Direct deposits will be made daily and completed on the dates listed below. Payments should be received by close of business on the dates listed below.

DIRECT DEPOSIT

PAPER CHECK

People who file a return after April 15 will receive their economic stimulus payment, but probably later than the schedule shows. A return must be filed by October 15 in order to receive a stimulus payment this year. See the online calculator for an estimate of the amount you will receive.

A small percentage of tax returns will require additional time to process and to compute a stimulus payment amount. For these returns, stimulus payments may not be issued in accordance with the schedule above, even if the tax return was processed by April 15.

Max Keiser of the Huffington Post Explains further the economic impact of the stimulus checks on America.

I’ll explain two reasons why you should not spend your economic stimulus check: the first applies to people who work regular jobs for wages, the second applies to people who work in investment banks for bonuses.

If you work for wages (or live on a pension), consider this, if every American said, “No thank you” to Bush’s stimulus check and refused to cash them, the value of the dollars in your pocket right now, in terms of their purchasing power would go up by a factor greater than the face value ($600) of the stimulus check. In other words, if you didn’t spend these checks, you’d be the richer for it.

The reason being that America does not have a hard-money economy, it’s a debt-based fiat currency economy. All the money in circulation in America has been borrowed and then re-lent. So borrowing more money ($168 billion for the stimulus package) and then re-lending it to Americans, as Bush is doing, only increases the debt load and debases the value of the currency outstanding (against a backdrop of stagnant wages and minuscule interest rates for savers).

If an American was planning to spend $40K this year on food, clothing, shelter, health and various other expenses and they were hoping to defray some of that cost thanks to Bush’s stimulus check understand that by simply adding another $168 billion of debt (the cost of the stimulus package) on top of America’s current multi-trillion debt load will continue the Bush-Paulson-Benanke trend of debasing the purchasing power of your money and, therefore, raise the price of goods and services by more than the $600 ‘gift’ (without a commensurate rise in wages or increase in interest paid on savings).

This is why America’s debt problems won’t go away. Every dollar spent adds debt and spawns more fiat currency issuance which has the effect of decreasing the purchasing power of the U.S. dollars in your pocket. Bush tries to make up the difference by borrowing even more; borrowing 340 million a day to fund the war and close to 3 billion a day to cover U.S. operating expenses, not to mention Wall Street borrowing over $30 billion a day to keep their Ponzi scheme going. All this borrowing keeps alive the vicious financial spiral trending lower towards permanent currency debasement and possible sovereignty loss.

Now, if you work in investment banking, the opposite is true. Bigger money supply growth means bigger fees and bonuses. You may lose more than $600 in purchasing power with that $600 stimulus check, but the fees and bonuses you make processing all that debt (read: dollars) is greater still. In other words, the more the government increases the debt load (money supply), the more you make — even discounting for the lost purchasing power caused by the inflationary impact of higher money supply growth.

But listen bankers, resist the temptation to spend your stimulus check even though by doing so you are increasing America’s indebtedness and, therefore, your fees and bonuses.

In a year or so, after 99.999% of America has cashed their stimulus check, any checks that have not been cashed will accrue value as collector’s items.

As such, the value of these checks as un-cashed mementos of the failed Bush presidency should appreciate at the inflation rate plus a collector’s item premium rate for years to come.

As a matter of fact, an enterprising soul might make a pretty penny by setting up a website to buy people’s un-cashed stimulus checks at the face value plus a small premium. Five to six years from now, you might be able to re-auction and sell these un -cashed checks on eBay for double or triple the price you paid to Asian and European collectors buying these up like visitors to the Berlin Wall who buy chunks of concrete left over after the collapse of East Berlin.

Cyber exchange tore a wormhole into immediate commercialism, international entertainment, local lifestyle, voyeurism, propaganda, and now it acts as a portal to cheaper, potentially higher qualified, academic instructors. The virtual barriers that confined academia have come crashing, as the once distant pools of foreign academics have found an outlet to the student. Tiny packets of information are the catalyst of service-based outsourcing beamed over the stretches of cyberspace into the curriculum of the average middle-class American student. Virtual globalization and the geo-localization have shrunk the world, yet the cost of domestic education continues to climb. Aside from the domestic economic, social, and youth development implications, international education means international competition, for educators. It’s only a matter of time before the same vehicle that first hindered our ability to remain competitive in the manufacturing industry first steals our children’s tutor, then their teacher.

Advancements in communication, to a certain degree, have weakened the fabric of the American economic paradigm. Every e-mail that we send overseas to edge out domestic competition is a thread that will one day stitch us into a single conscious mass. We have at our disposal foreign gushes of streamlined thinking; new manifestations of clinical efficiency, and as a result we have suffered tremendous occupational and informational outsourcing. Now don’t get me wrong, global trade and communication are not only necessary for industrial expansion, cohesive scientific understanding and forward momentum of consciousness; they are a vital portion of the world’s social balance. Economic interaction through trade allows countries to engage in conversation, forcing them to remain tolerant of one another as part of a socio-economic whole and global body for greater peace.

The cycle is perpetual, but encouraged, like the pumping of currency through the veins of the world’s marketplace. The heart is an organ comprised of four vital components, two atriums and two ventricles. Each section regulates the current of the flow it controls. Much like the bonds between America and foreign powers the grand function of the heart, is circulation. For the purposes of analogy let’s assume that the two atriums represent economic inflow, consumption and job provision. The two ventricles represent economic outflow, loss of product market and service-based outsourcing. Unlike the heart, an ideal economic model would be to maximizing inflow while experiencing a minimum of outflow. Nevertheless the interpretation of a circulating trade market through unique portions of the same whole is achieved. It is important to keep in mind that all portions of the socio-economic model makeup the entirety of the organ and indirectly affect each other with every pump. Only instead of oxygenated plasma, the life-stream is the diverse economic current from Hondas to math tutoring.

IBM is perhaps the most eloquent model of the current trend to displace American industries to highly motivated transnational enterprise. In April, 2005 the IBM Corporation, America’s “Big Blue,” became, “Big Red,” as an enormous leg of the company, the product division, was purchased by the Chinese manufacturing giant Lenovo. According to the July, 2005 issue of Wired Magazine, “The acquisition instantly moves Lenovo from its position as the ninth largest PC maker to number three…” Not only has Lenovo acquired this once prized asset to IBM, they have absorbed a layer of seasoned U.S. managers that could potentially gain them ground, market wise, to appeal goods and services directly intended for U.S. customers. The once hokey slogans and devices used to appeal to Americans have been superseded by a swirling torrent of dazzling products and highly qualified technical support and training curriculums.

Over the past fifty years America has transitioned from an industrial society to a service-based society, or post-industrial society. We have lost our economic grip of the product industry and we are over it. For the better part of the last century the undisputed dominator of manufactured goods worldwide has been China. We have since found for ourselves a new niche, an industry of services and information, a rapidly declining slice of the American pie. All is fair in the world of product development. If there is money to be made you can bet that it can be made stronger, sharper or faster. The ability to tap into foreign markets is a fairly recent phenomenon. Once a base clientele is established you can solidify the market for upgrades and add-ons. Many times manufacturers will invoke the “give you the handle and knick you with the blades” mentality where, for example, cheap bottom-self printers sting the consumer with stiff price tags on ink that costs more than the printer. Coupled with the cost of additional services or technical support it’s easy to see how the product industry can easily stem onto other avenues.

The world is shrinking, and with the looming cost of education, sooner or later the idea of a physical classroom will be widely challenged. For years academic committees have voted to replace class time with virtual time, starting with a mandatory news broadcast during the 90’s in middle school homeroom named aptly, Channel One News. At first the notion was lucrative and novel, but as time elapsed, it was evident that someday we would be facing the large-scale substitution of in-class teaching for the availability of cyberspace, instructional media and most recently, outsourced tutoring and full-on instruction.

Distance learning solves many of the issues associated with the decline of the American education system, the biggest being cost. There would be no facilities to erect, no grounds keepers, no electricity, water, sewer, garbage bills. There would be no reason to fund after school programs because the students would already be at home. There would be no physical education equipment, loaner shorts, shop goggles or alpha pecking orders. Cafeterias would be obsolete as would the infamous hot lunch. No hair nets, projector bulbs, office supplies, window cleaning materials, tardy slips, security, clay ash trays, protractors or ti-83s. Most importantly there would be no need to hire a full staff of instructors as surrounding districts may already be streaming better qualified personal. Why hire a math teacher when a neighboring school may hold an elitist; twice published and having taught calculus at MIT for 20 years only to end up moving into a small town atmosphere?

The unhindered growth of class size through virtual instruction means the demand of qualified educating personnel could be significantly reduced in just a few years time. And why not; high ranking officials would be naturally fit to instruct the masses, you could even say superior. In a ranking system, less achieved instructors would not be ‘eliminated,’ so much as, ‘not selected’ by board panels and parents, in lieu of the shining stars that dot the academic community. Soon foreign educators will be in direct competition with U.S. educators for teaching jobs. As separated academics link and begin to merge with one another we have to face the reality that they have engaged us in a hybrid extension of natural selection.

Charles Darwin’s theory of isolated populations and natural selection can be adapted to illustrate how two or more societies, competing for the same resources, spawn a global arena in which a hybrid system of occupational “survival of the fittest” has a chance to take hold and flourish, virtually. The boundaries of distance and language are being overcome by technological advancement and the fiber of our product is nearly complete.

The accessibility of distance learning offers a window for foreign talent to meet our needs. Overachievers, regardless of their origin, will at some point become global. Soon we will find even accredited, published, and otherwise infallible American educators in occupational peril. Technically speaking, a select grouping of elite instructors is all that is necessary to instruct millions of students worldwide. However, a more realistic ratio is in the realm of 1000:1 for live, streaming classes, or the limitations of the bandwidth, whichever is greater until bandwidth becomes a currency. Domestic instructors are simply waiting for more qualified personal to replace them. Prerecorded lectures on more standardized and static subject matter, such as the periodic table of elements or Einstein’s law of relativity, can be catalogued in downloadable databases accessible to all students and as such, require no broadcast schedule or constraints. Keep in mind the medium of the virtual is far less rigid than textbooks which require print, updating and circulation. Instructors can easily assign course readings and lectures from a single terminal. The method would be that of blind instruction as online instructors are incapable of identifying or allocating one-on-one time with such a vast spectrum of students. Assessment and grading could be done by a panel of graders, peers, or simply checked by a computer against a digital template.
 
According to searchenginewatch.com, on any given day google.com processes somewhere in the ballpark of ninety-one million pieces of information. To conquer such a daunting chore creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the process of weighted subject matter. Search results are assigned polarity or ‘weight’ of relevance. Criteria is evaluated by a number of unique calculations then reported back to the requester, in order of perceived relevance. Any systems analyst will attest that computing is based on mathematical deduction. A computer will evaluate comparisons with simply; true, or false. As a function of the computer, search engines are built upon rules that quantify an accepted result. Every quarter students and parents ask, “Who is the best/most qualified math/English/science teacher?” The questions are always the same, only the answers have been dynamic, until now. Imagine if parents were able to query a database and draw a definitive answer?

If instructors were evaluated on performance, accomplishments, intelligence, linguistics, charisma, etc. and assigned a score based on this information, patterns would begin to emerge. Much like social media, the users define the organism and inadvertently appoint statistical leadership. Naturally when selecting a potential candidate for a student’s instruction, one will select based upon the greatest attainable score in a given field of study, assuming there wasn’t a price attribute attached. Just as in polling, or product evaluation, the scores serve as the criteria for the search weight, hence a ranked status. Students will quickly be able to narrow to subject and allow the mechanism to override the human qualification process, quantifiably selecting the best instructor for each subject within a given budget, or perhaps match the teacher to each student.

According to a generation raised on Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and Digg, it’s not so hard to envision a lifestyle where it is absolutely unnecessary to meet at a brick and mortar academic facility for class. With each passing quarter more and more online classes emerge that are fully accredited by the American Academic Commission.

The trend seems to have spilled over from adults working at home to the next generation of would be work-at-homers. Small business has picked up shop from strip malls and commercial spaces to settle in the cul-de-sacs of suburbia. Real estate listings now promote with such hot keywords as, “unfinished home office,” and, “hard-wired LAN,” signifying the transition from the corporate-team to the corporate-individual.

The grand picture of foreign talent and our service consumption ‘following the cheap’ is leading us to a paradox. American education has not adapted, it has coped. We have become lazy. Embracing technologies that have made our lives easier and cutting cents that have cost us dollars. Not unlike the paradigm that governs financial affairs; our economy is merely a series of box cars following the engine, and the engine was the loss of our industrial product stronghold. Distance learning can indeed offer a practical and accommodating supplement to higher education, but blindly embracing automation and service-based outsourcing is using duct tape to patch the hull of a battleship. There is no substitution for human interaction, domestic localization, and academic sustainability. Reversing the influence of the very machine that we’ve engineered is no small task. We have to either excel at the current model or change the game altogether. One thing is for certain; without drastic campaigning to sustain domestic curriculums and the next generation of instructors, solidifying foreign policies and cyber governance, our technology will take us from pushing the envelope to stuffing them.

Why go bio anyway? For more than half century cheap oil has stomped, (read: smothered) competing technologies including the environmentally contentious campaigns to drive alternative energies. Let’s face it; no one wants to save the planet at five dollars a gallon. Competing technologies boast cleaner burning fuels with lower emissions, the catch, stiffer consumables and specialty hardware. Oil conglomerates wallow in the margins as we petal SUV’s to Middle America. But as gas prices continue to soar, so does the emergence of developing technologies. Oil has a trajectory; its future can only go up as the underground pools of black goo are systematically sopped up by thirsty countries. Demand in America doubles every few years as China finds ways to sell us new cars for under a thousand U.S. dollars. Indian, Chinese and German demand has also put a terrible strain on the once seemingly infinite resource. The tables of supply and demand have turned on us. Oil fat cats are coasting off our dependency using technologies founded in the early 90’s to bring crude to the surface for little over four dollars a barrel. They are not about to roll over and let some pesky tree-hugging technology take the reins to the biggest golden goose there is. They need to provide some let off in order to retain global clients, namely us. From super deep offshore drilling and tar sands to oil shale extraction, they will stop at nothing to feed our addiction. These are the technologies in their arsenal, each promising to lighten the burden of fifty-five dollar fill-ups in say, seven to ten years. Are you kidding? Seven to ten years of listening to wry gas jokes on the Late Night Show, (thank God the writers are back)? Oil moguls are interested, but not in an overwhelming hurry to drop hundred million dollar checks on streamlining technologies when we are still interested in driving tanks to drop off the kids. Astronomical projections and daunting upwards flux may actually have a positive effect on our pocketbook. Of recent years we have seen a boom in alternative fuel technologies; ethanol, natural gas, coal to liquid and hydrogen, to name a few. But we need something now, not an estimate, not a science project, something that will offer a viable alternative to petro (or petroleum based) fuels, without chocking up the cash for a hybrid. Enter the soybean.

Let’s examine the prospect of soybean biodiesel as a potential oil killer. Many of the benefits of biodiesel, as an eco-friendly fuel source, are well known. Biodiesel can mean the substantial reduction of toxic emissions such as hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, sulfates and particulate matter, normally associated with traditional petrodiesels. The adverse effects on our environment are most notably acid rain, hazardous fumes, accumulation of smog, and ozone depletion. In a quote from the National Biodiesel Board, “It [biodiesel] is less toxic than table salt and biodegrades as fast as sugar.” Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to comply with the strenuous standards of the Clean Air Act (1990) established in an effort to raise awareness of the growing air quality crisis –sounds like a plug eh?

Plants apply photosynthesis to convert solar energy into a chemical energy. This is the main component stored by the production of biodiesel. The chemical energy is then released as it is burned, hence the necessary reaction to propulsion. So of all things, why the soybean? Soybeans in themselves are not a very efficient producer of biodiesel, yielding only 40 to 50 U.S. gallons per acre. However, they are widely used in the food industry making them readily available and accessible. In addition, the cost of cultivation to methylester content is generally acceptable. The more methanol forming methylester is present in a substrate, the higher the reaction levels are. Many plants such as rapeseed, mustard, jatropha and palm oil have higher methyester content boosting efficiency to upwards of 650 U.S. gallons per acre. However, the cost of cultivating and harvesting as well as the turnaround of sustained renewability must be taken into consideration when choosing a potential renewable resource. All in all soybeans offer a suitable blend of natural methyesters and ethyesters that are far superior to other potential candidates.

Of the many challenges presented to the soybean on its conquest, there are three that stand apart from the rest. The first is the effects of cold temperatures on biodiesel. As temperatures drop below 40 degrees Fahrenheit the fuel begins to gel. Currently there is no additive on the market that has been able to correct this issue. Blends, such as with kerosene or traditional petrodiesel, have been better able to withstand this cold weather problem.
The second hurdle is biodiesel’s great affinity for water, in other words, it wants to bond with water. Any water not absorbed or displaced during the process of refining is bonded back to the construct. The same is true for holding tank condensation and atmospheric moisture. An imbalance of water means a reduction in the heat of combustion and therefore harder starts, more smoke, and overall less power. Water can cause the deterioration of vital engine components such as pumps and fuel lines while corroding seals and injectors. In addition, water provides an environment for spawning microbe colonies to take root. They feed on the nutrients in the biodiesel and severely gum up filters and hoses leading to expensive engine treatments.

The third, and perhaps most significant, problem is the encompassing effect on the environment. After all is said and done the eco advocates, or perhaps more fittingly soybean investors, have led us to believe that the driving force behind the development of biodiesel is the supposed urgency to correct the planet before it’s too late. Soybean biodiesel may burn far cleaner than petrodiesel but at what cost? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 23 million additional gallons of pesticide would be leached into the ground and 416 million gallons of fresh water would be needed. Production of sufficient supplies of biodiesel to fuel America alone would require the repeated cultivation of 6,000,000 acres of land. Among the argument is the emphasis on our liberation from the dependency on foreigners, but wait a moment, just who will be harvesting the soybeans again? The unfortunate conclusion is that soybean biodiesel may be better suited to supplement the market for bio/petro blends or as an additive to reduce toxic emissions than the stone that kills Goliath. Even if we were able to sustain it, is it acceptable to burn food while approximately 852 million people starve? Unless the cost of soybeans plummets dramatically we will have to look elsewhere for a solution to our pain at the pump.