Offshore Drilling for Corn

Rob,

Suppose we wanted to avoid the whole "corn is for food, not for fuel" polemic.
Would it be possible to work up similar acreage figures for turning corn stalks
into alcohol with the not yet perfected cellulose to alcohol technology?

 

Because they want it to be true. So they can keep driving the gas hogs they already own.

 

It works for christians, they want it to be true so it is, in their heads anyway.

 

Because if you repeat it often enough and loud enough, people will vote for you...

 

Uhm, I hate to rain on your parade, but that column was in thousands of acres, so it's actually 70.6 million acres, not 70.6 thousand acres of corn.

Even with that correction, your general point is true.

Now that's a gross stereotyping. There are non-Christians who are just as stubborn or ignorant. There was a group of conservative pastors who issued a statement that we need to conserve oil and prepare our country for a peak oil scenario. (Can't remember details enough to Google it without getting a million wrong hits).

 

Part of it is the "they want it to be true" thing, but I think that another part of it has to do with the way the subject is being talked about. I didn't get this until the other night when I was watching the debate with a group of people and someone explained to me why they didn't buy the arguments against off-shore drilling.

I don't agree at all with the explanation I received, but at least it helped me understand why people who are otherwise reasonably intelligent seem to get caught up in what I think is nonsense.

The bottom line is that the people who told me this feel that the whole "we use 25% of the world's oil, but only have 3% of the supply" is an apples and oranges comparison. The number they don't understand is the "3% of the supply"; they don't understand how anyone could know this. Their incredulity seems to be based on the shear magnitude of the numbers ("how could so much oil be less than we need") and on the fact that 3% is really a SWAG.

Put that together with the stubborn "it's true because I say so" routine and it becomes really hard to convince them of anything. Like I said, I don't agree with their position, but at least I think I understand it better.

 

Oil companies want to drill, because it's dollars in the bank for them, even though it's an insignificant part of the total world production.

Demagogues in the pockets of the oil companies can get away with saying it because the American public does not know how to think skeptically, because as children they had this ability beaten out of them by preachers telling them that you have to believe in crap that makes no sense.