Exhibit A

With Administration officials currently in the hot seat, facing (old) allegations of tampering with climate science, pressuring scientists and redacting reports according to their own political agenda, we thought we'd highlight this Decoder item (See No Evil) that appeared in Sierra magazine last January. The documents show how one Philip Cooney, then chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, now of ExxonMobil, had his way with reports from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, wielding his red pencil like a razor blade. It was not long after this slash-job that Cooney -- a lawyer, not a scientist -- took his lucrative position with the denialist oil giant.

Mean Joe Green

Hats off to Grist's Amanda Griscom Little for a great interview with GOP pollster and Republican spinmeister Frank Luntz. Luntz, (who is kind of like George Lakoff's alter ego), is the guy credited with adding "death tax" to the lexicon and who, early in his dubious career, helped craft Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." One thing is clear from the interview: Luntz can't stand environmentalists, who he says are not nice people. They're mean, mean, mean. You may not agree with much of what Luntz has to say, but I think he makes a couple valid points. Mostly, though, it's the window to his worldview that makes the exercise worthwhile. I'd urge folks to read it. As Luntz sees it:

The problem the environmental community has is they don't listen to their opponents. When I do my research, I spend more time studying the opposition argument because that's what I need to respond to.

The 'Why' in Wild

The Why Files takes a hard look at wilderness and asks, what's the big deal? Putting aside the obvious and essential ecosystem services -- clean water, oxygen, biodiversity and the like; things that, for better or worse, we take for granted -- the authors wonder just what it is we value in Nature. Here's an excerpt:

What explains the pull of the wild? One compelling answer comes from evolutionary psychology -- the idea that the human experience and the processes of evolution have shaped how our brains operate. We tend to favor situations that promoted our survival, and to fear the opposite type of situations.

The notion cannot be tested scientifically, but there are some intriguing arguments in its favor. Since the 1970s, says Roger Ulrich, a professor of landscape architecture at Texas A&M University, social scientists have found a striking similarity in human preferences for certain types of landscapes. "We now have more than 100 studies of esthetic preferences for different kinds of outdoor scenes, using roughly comparable methods, across very diversely different societies and locations, and we find a strong pattern of agreement. Almost all nature scenes are esthetically preferable to almost any built or urban scene lacking nature," he says.

In fact, preferences are much more specific. Studies show a near-universal preference for specific features in a nature scene, such as flowing water, small, innocuous animals, and an open, tree-studded view. Undesirable elements include large animals staring back at you, snakes, venomous insects, and deep, dark forests.

It seems an interesting and worthwhile inquiry, especially in an age when most of us now live in cities. For all the verbiage brought to bear, however, the 'why' remains elusive and the most satisfying answers are not so much answers as value statements, such as when David Brower says, "A world without wilderness is a cage."

Bears, Beetles and Everything

So, here's what I was able to glean from this article in the Times about bears, beetles and pines in Yellowstone:

It seems the pine nuts of the white pine are an important energy source for a wide variety of Rocky Mountain critters, including red squirrels, who work hard to cache as much of it as they can, only to watch the grizzlies come and raid those caches in the fall before hibernating. Bummer for the squirrels, one supposes, but life and death for the grizzlies who need to fatten up in order to increase their chances of survival.

Now, however, warming temperatures have introduced a new factor into the whole equation; namely, pine bark beetles. Previously kept to lower altitudes by the cold, the beetles, who have to kill the trees in order to successfully reproduce, have now invaded the furthest reaches of white pine habitat -- the very rooftop of the continent -- leaving whole stands of white pine dead in their wake. You see the problem.

Grizzly bears, you may know, are poised for de-listing under the Endangered Species Act. And this information calls that decision into question. It also brings home something the Australian scientist Tim Flannery wrote in his book, The Weather Makers -- something this kind of news always reminds me of. He wrote that, "In the years to come this issue [global warming] will dwarf all the others combined. It will become the only issue." I know not everyone agrees with that assessment, but the more I follow the news, the more I'm convinced it's true.

Let the Earth Do the Work

Of all the alternative energy solutions out there, geothermal is the one that seems to get the least attention. Now, in what is hailed as the 'first new look at geothermal in 30 years,' an MIT-led, Energy Dept.-funded panel of scientists concludes that geothermal energy (heat from the Earth's crust) "could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact." Among the benefits: It's non-carbon producing, it's not intermittent (like wind and solar), there's no fuel required and the physical plants have a relatively small footprint as most of it is underground. Of course, you still have to drill down thousands of feet to make it work, but then that's what the oil and gas companies are good at, right? Well, okay then: Let's show them where they can put their drills.

Charioteering for Dummies

Especially in the United States, the political debate about global climate change became polarized along the conservative–liberal axis some decades ago. Although we take this for granted now, it is not entirely obvious why the chips fell the way they did.

That's MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emmanuel in a Boston Review essay called "Phaeton's Reins."

Pheaton, you may remember, (I sure didn't) was the son of Helios, the sun-god of Greek mythology. In Phaeton's starring role in the mythos, he borrows the keys to his dad's chariot, then drives it like Jehu. As the story goes, Africa became hotter than blazes and the skins of all its inhabitants were blackened with sunburn, thanks to him. And to top it off, Phaeton gets himself killed.

Getting back to Emmanuel's essay, it may help to know that he is no stranger to the conservative-liberal polarity of the climate debate, having been caught in the middle of it after publishing a paper in the journal Nature, positing a strong correlation between rising sea surface temperatures and the destructive power of tropical cyclones. I mention it, because Emmanuel doesn't. His article is mostly a primer on the science, with much attention given to all the complications and uncertainties. It's also a dispassionate critique of factions on both the right and left (scientists, journalists, politicians and environmentalists included) who have made global warming a partisan issue.

Without saying as much, he suggests we are behaving like reckless teenagers, too caught up in our petty bickering to pay adequate attention to the road ahead. And we'd better knock it off, because, like Phaeton, we're driving this thing and headed for trouble.

We R the World

The World Economic Forum gets underway tomorrow in Davos, Switzerland. This is basically a meeting of all the world's business and political leaders plus Bono. A Gallup International survey of attendees shows that protecting the environment ranks second to the global economy in the list of top priorities this year. Protecting the environment was mentioned by 20 percent of respondents, in contrast to the year before when it ranked fourth and was mentioned by only 9 percent of respondents.

Global warming is expected to be a top agenda item, and Davos will serve as an appropriate backdrop for discussion, since, as Fortune's Nelson Schwartz notes in a blog from the conference, there is almost no snow there this year. In fact, the Alps have been hurting for snow year after year, and experts say half of the nearly 600 ski resorts in the Alps will have to shut down or move to higher elevations by 2050, as the snow level rises.

Roll Out the Red Carpet

This just in: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth garnered two Oscar nominations -- one for best documentary and another for best original song. Gore is reportedly 'thrilled.'

I was more impressed to learn that the former VP packed a 10,000-seat arena in Boise, Idaho for the keynote address of the 2007 Frank Church Conference. Idaho Senator Larry Craig was quick to trash Gore's message as was some of the local media.

Oh well. Dogs may bark but the caravan rolls on.

Under Mayor David Bieter, Boise became the first city in Idaho to sign on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, making it one of our Cool Cities. Go Broncos!

Extra Curricula

Real Climate, the global warming blog authored and maintained by climate researchers, has posted a message to science teachers everywhere, urging them to get their free copy of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. This after the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) turned down an offer of 50,000 free DVDs for its membership to use in the classroom. Wondering what was up, someone at Real Climate looked a little deeper at the NSTA's online resources and found that:

Doing a search on "Global Warming" on the NSTA site turns up only a paltry supply of useful educational material. It is also illuminating to go into their "recommendations" section and type in "global warming." That will turn up this recommended book by Kenneth Green, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute whose article Clouds of Global-Warming Hysteria in the National Review endorsed Michael Crichton's view of global warming and called supporters of climate change action "One-worlders and other socialist sorts." Needless to say, the NSTA recommendations (as of today) did not turn up "An Inconvenient Truth" either in its DVD or book form. Nor did it turn up [New York Times science correspondent Andrew] Revkin's book directed at juveniles The North Pole Was Here, nor any of the other scientifically respectable introductions of which we are aware.

Sigh. Well, if nothing else, it may help to explain this.

Good Lovins

Upon finishing Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of efficiency guru Amory Lovins in the latest New Yorker, I found myself merrily humming Johnny Mercer's 'Accentuate the Positive'. Talk about 'latching on to the affirmative,' Lovins -- founder of the Rocky Mountain Insitute, coiner of the term 'negawatt' and author of Winning the Oil Endgame -- is an irrepressible optimist, and the effect of the piece was to make me feel hopeful despite myself. I say that because, honestly, optimism is not my normal turn of mind. Fair or not, my tendency is to view a sanguine outlook as the mark of dim-wittedness and/or a delusional disorder. What makes Lovins different is a genius IQ combined with a solutions-oriented, can-do attitude. He may wear rose-colored glasses, but he wears them like a welder wears a welding mask, in order to get down to work, fixing stuff. "I don't do problems," he tells Kolbert. "I do solutions." No Mr. In-Between there and, judging from the profile, no mere Pollyana either.

The article is in the Jan. 22 issue and is not available online, but if you hurry you might still snag a copy from the newsstand. It's the cover with George Bush in Nero kit, standing at a flame-licked lectern, strumming a harp.

Whither Winter?

So, what's up with all the weird weather? Is it El Niño? Is it global warming? Is it both? Yes, yes and yes, answers the Why Files. While El Niño (or more properly, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) -- the enfant terrible of global weather -- is in full effect, the natural variations it causes are now layered atop warmer background conditions, such as higher average sea surface temperatures. The Why Files notes that one near-term result of the warm North American winter has been a slide in fuel prices, which can be expected to lead to greater fuel consumption and, in turn, still greater emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide ... and, finally, more warm winters.

Pollution-Free Coal?

Ordinarily, we at the Sierra Club would not encourage readers to go to a coal-industry funded Web site. But these are not ordinary times.

Clearly, with everyone and their sister talking about global warming, the coal industry is nervous. As they should be. Coal may be abundant, but it contributes more to global warming than any other fuel.

So a consortium of coal companies have founded a national nonprofit called, “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices,” and created a bunch of commercials starring cute racially diverse kids and a slick Web site at learnaboutcoal.org. It's scary.

The industry is claiming that “within the next 10 to 15 years, the ability to produce pollution-free electricity from coal will be a reality.”

Pollution-free.

How?

Well, the plan is to capture and then “sequester,” that is, bury underground, billions of tons of carbon dioxide.

And how will they accomplish this? Through “significant government support of carbon capture and sequestration technologies,” according to The Coal Based Generation Stakeholders Group.

So Big Coal want the taxpayers to pony up research dollars to find out how they can burn more coal and keep it from heating up the atmosphere.

Seems to me that if we’re going to be spending all those dollars on researching and developing new technologies, we might want to focus them on renewable technologies like wind and solar that don’t pollute in the first place. But that's just me.

Visit learnaboutcoal.org. And don’t forget to put on your skeptics cap.

Strange Rumblings in Greenland

From the New York Times article, "The Warming of Greenland":

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.

It's important to remember that melting of the Arctic's polar ice cap does not affect sea level. It's already floating. Not so Greenland's ice sheets.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland's ice will melt in the near future, Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

Strangelove Rides Again

The Economist has a short introduction to 'geo-engineering,' which I wrote about previously. When I heard James Lovelock speak some months ago, he voiced qualified support for Paul Crutzen's idea of spraying sulphates into the stratosphere to help counteract warming -- but not because it would get us out of our fix. Rather, he said, it might buy us time to restore the carbon balance. The Economist piece is very good. I especially appreciate the quote from the Carnegie Institute's Ken Caldeira, who says: "I started doing this work in an attempt to show that geo-engineering was a bad idea. I still think it's a bad idea, but every simulation we do seems to shows it could be made to work."

Obama, Where Art Thou?

Barack Obama, the Democratic Senator from Illinois, announced his presidential candidacy today. Well, kinda sorta -- he formed an exploratory committee.

While Sen. Obama has gotten high marks from environmentalists, he ran afoul of them just last week when he introduced, along with Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning, the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007. Coal-to-liquid (CTL) would take America's prodigious coal reserves and turn them into diesel fuel -- a good thing for Obama's home-state coal industry and American energy independence, but a very dangerous one in terms of global warming, which Obama has publicly recognized as a problem in need of urgent remedy.

In fact, at the same time that Obama is supporting the dubious promise of "clean coal," he is also joining potential presidential rival John McCain in re-introducing legislation to cap and rollback carbon dioxide emissions. And earlier, he introduced the Biofuels Security Act to ramp up use of ethanol and biodiesel -- to the tune of 60 billion gallons a year by 2030.

All this adds up to a muddled picture of where Senator Obama stands. For now, it seems, he's in two places at once.

Update June 2007: Obama Walks Away From Liquid Coal. On his blog, Climate Progress, Joe Romm notes that Obama has now clarified his position in ways that are "all but fatal" to coal-to-liquid. That's welcome news.

Such a Thing

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak....there is such a thing as being too late....Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity....Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”

- Rev. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

"We knew something about the drought, weren't much interested in global warming and never thought the two might combine to create a bushfire season so terrible it is without precedent in recorded history."

- It is time Australians listened to the stories of the land, The Age, December 28, 2006

Warming to Dams?

Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing to finance the construction of two big dam projects in California, citing global warming as the reason. I wondered when this was going to happen.

The logic here is easy enough to grasp. California depends on its snow pack (and what is probably the world's most elaborate waterworks) for its water supply. As the world warms, freezing levels rise and snow pack is diminished. Without the natural reservoirs meting out snow melt during the dry periods, some kind of man-made water storage will be needed to make up for it.

The idea of building new dams seems a little anachronistic. In recent decades, the trend has been toward removing dams, not building new ones. The age of big dam projects -- at least in the US -- was widely thought to be over. Now this.

And it isn't just a California problem; many arid regions of the world are up against the same predicament. Building reservoirs seems like a simple enough solution until you take a closer look. For one thing, with more than 75,000 big dams in America alone, most of the best dam sites have already been developed. What's more, dams are expensive to build and politically contentious, as they displace people, transform habitat and interfere with migratory fish. Just maintaining, repairing and upgrading our aging dams is a massive expenditure -- one we shortchange at considerable risk. A dam failure could wipe out a lot of people very quickly.

Critics of the current plan say the Governor's proposed project is not really about global warming at all, but about giving Big Agriculture more subsidized water. Could be. Others argue that money should be spent shoring up the earthquake-vulnerable levees of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which, in the case of collapse would cut off water to millions of southern Californians. Probably right. Whatever the case, I suspect we're going to hear many more proposals to build dams in the name of global warming.

Home Grown

Any show featuring Willie Nelson and titled "Home Grown," ... well you might expect something a little different. But this is Bio-Willie we're talking about here and the show is PBS's NOW. The next episode (check listings) looks at the prospects for harvesting our way to cleaner fuel and out of oil dependence. Definitely worth tuning in.

High Noon

Greenwire reports that newly installed Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) plans to hold global warming hearings starting January 30th. Boxer said she wanted to "take the pulse of my colleagues as to where they are on this issue." Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the Energy and Commerce Committee's ranking member, responded as if his party had been challenged to a shootout at the OK Corral. "Certainly the Democrats in the Senate have signalled they're going to make climate change a big issue. We need to have our guys locked and cocked over here." Easy there, Joe.

Greenwire, by the by, is part of Energy and Environment Publishing which is doing a good job covering the shift of power in Washington and what it means for climate change.

Our Guy in Interior

J. Stephen Griles was the #2 man at Interior behind Gale Norton -- a revolving-door guy who showed little regard for things like rules and ethics and conflict-of-interest. So, it's no surprise to learn that he has come under investigation by the Justice Department and will most likely be indicted for his involvement in L'Affaire Abramoff. It seems Mr. Abramoff, who often used the disingenuously named Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy to make his desires known to Mr. Griles, regularly referred to him as "our guy" within the Interior Department. Not that there's anything incriminating about that. Griles' lawyers claimed to be "shocked and disappointed at this turn of events." I'd say the rest of us are pretty stoked about it.

The Cockeyed View

In Federal Way, Washington the school board put the clampdown on any further screenings of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, after a parent complained of indoctrination.

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

What do you bet that makes it to this week's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me? No way they'll be able to resist the name Frosty -- he of the seven kids.

Asked by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer what she thought about the controversy, Jefferson High senior Kenna Patrick took the view that, "Watching a movie doesn't mean that you have to believe everything you see in it." To which I can hear Paula Poundstone or Roy Blount adding: No. It's not like it's the Bible, after all.

Silver Bullet

Heartlands rocker and Detroit homeboy Bob Seger seems to have, um, turned the page on his latest album, Face the Promise. In a hard-driving new track called Between, the man who once peddled supersized pickups for Chevy, now sings:

World keeps getting hotter
Ice falls in the sea
We buy a bigger engine and say it isn't me

Okay, it's not exactly Dylan, but it ain't bad. And it sure beats the Chevy anthem Like a Rock, which was stirring, I admit, but metaphorically challenged. Like a rock, chargin' from the gate?

No matter. Seger's singin' a new tune and I say right on. Next thing you know, Kid Rock will be writing songs about hybrid cars and carbon credits.

The Birds

First Austin, then Australia, and now another case from Colorado. What the hey's going on? The Longmont Times-Call quotes the resident who reported the scene to authorities:

“There were slews of starlings on the (telephone) lines, like they were in mourning. Then I saw all these black balls on the road and realized they were birds,” he said. “It was kind of eerie, kind of Steven King-ish.”

Warming Trends

The National Climatic Data Center(NCDC) says 2006 was the warmest year on record in the contiguous U.S.. Globally, it ranked sixth. The previous warmest-year in the US (and globally) was 1998, when a very strong El Niño in the Pacific exacerbated warming. El Niño has struck again this year, and it's the combined effect of global warming and El Niño that led the British Meteorological Office recently to predict that worldwide average temps would hit a new high in 2007.

Globally, the 10 hottest years in 150 years of record keeping have all been logged since 1994. And according to the NCDC, (which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- NOAA), "The past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record."

New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin notes that the report marked the first time under the Bush Administration that NOAA had ever explicitly acknowledged anthropocentric global warming as a fundamental factor in its annual climate report.

Revkin quotes Jay Lawrimore, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center, who says,

Year after year as we continue to see warmer temperatures, there are more and more converts convinced that it’s not just natural variability and not just something that’s going to return back to temperatures we saw 40 or 50 years ago — that in fact we are doing something to the climate.

Yes-No Question

In the right-hand margin of this page at National Geographic previewing an article about global warning called "Signs from Earth," there's a one-question poll that asks one very simple, very open-ended question:

Are you willing to change your lifestyle to curb global warming?

With more than 20,000 responses, the results split right down the middle. I wouldn't want to read too much into that, since the question doesn't elaborate on what kind of lifestyle changes we're talking about. But still...

Neutrality, Inc.

A piece in the Christian Science Monitor examines the business of carbon offsets and its role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finds that, while the market is fraught with complications and ripe for fraud, almost everyone agrees that a) offsets get people to think about their carbon output and that b) offsets translate to more money for the development of alternative energy.

While those outcomes are unambiguously good, however, there are still some caveats. As the Sierra Club's Dan Becker stresses, it's important that offsets not be seen simply as a license to pollute. And, ulimately, offsets are no subsitute for legislation which would establish the social costs of carbon emissions across the board.

In the meantime, carbon offsets do gets things moving in the right direction. And when Al Gore -- the man who gets credit for making "carbon netural" part of the American lexicon -- was in San Francisco last month for the Sierra Club's energy panel, he strenuously defended offsets. Quoting the vice president from memory, I believe his exact words were: "Don't let anyone tell you offsets are a waste of money. Without offsets, we'll never get there."

To delve deeper into the subject and learn more about the business of offsets and see a Consumer Reports-sytle ranking of carbon offsetters, download this report (pdf) from Clean Air/Cool Planet.

Newsiness

I spotted this news ranking utility over at Huffington Post. You type in keywords separated by commas and the thing generates a graph (bar or pie, you pick) showing the comparative news mentions for each. I searched for: Iraq, global warming and Britney Spears. Results above.

Lord have mercy.

What Ayles Us

The news may have broken over the holidays, but the collapse of the 40-square-mile Ayles Ice Shelf in the Canadian Arctic actually occurred in August of 2005. That comes as some relief, as it was truly alarming to think that ice sheets in the Arctic were giving way during Winter. Considering the presently balmy conditions in the Northeast, however, it sounded halfway plausible. Go here for everything you ever wanted to know about the (belatedly) headline-grabbing event. The ice shelf was dated back at least 3,000 years. It took less than an hour to collapse.

Talk About Atlas Shrugging

Headline writers everywhere are having a heyday (at least they should be) with the news that a million-dollar sculpture depicting the Earth and meant to honor Sierra Club icon David Brower, collapsed last week.

The newly unveiled installation was called "Spaceship Earth." And, as if gravity (combined perhaps with the temptations of irony) were too much to bear, the whole thing came crashing to earth on the campus of Kennesaw State University in Georgia, whereupon it broke into pieces. Students on campus said they could still make out part of the inscription at the base of the monument: Our fragile craft.

According to news reports, the collapse is under investigation and the statue, financed by the makers of Power Bar, was insured. Plans are to rebuild it. Personally, I think they should leave it be. I think Brower would have appreciated the not-so-subtle message embodied in the rubble. It's like a final warning from beyond the grave.

What Gives You Hope?

What are you optimistic about? And why? That's the annual question for 2007 as posed by the Edge Foundation. The idea in a nutshell: One big question each year answered by people with generally big ideas. Makes for good, inspiring reading.

Pimentel's Red Herring

Finally, a nagging question (it's been nagging at me anyway) has been answered. This article in the Chemical & Engineering News sets out to answer the question, Is ethanol worth it? 'It' in this case being the environmental and economic costs of producing the stuff.

To even begin to discuss ethanol, however, one has always been obliged to tackle the question of whether or not corn-based ethanol (the dominant form at the moment) represented a net energy gain. The most outspoken and persistent critic of corn ethanol has been Cornell scientist David Pimentel, and he has long maintained the answer is no.

By Pimentel's calculations -- factoring in all the inputs you can think of, from the energy involved in building farm machinery to the energy expenditures on transporting and processing grain -- it takes 29 percent more energy to produce a unit of energy from ethanol than is gained from burning it. The figures are even worse, he says, for cellulosic ethanol, which most eco-visionaries favor. Biomass, he says, involves a 50 percent net energy loss.

Hmm. This always had me scratching my head and wondering how, say, gasoline refined from petroleum would compare if subject to the same analysis. Ditto any other fossil fuel. Thankfully, the article provides some answers, reporting that:

Bruce E. Dale, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, backs the USDA numbers and has applied Pimentel's methodology to making gasoline. He found gasoline production has a 45% net energy loss, worse even than Pimentel's charges for ethanol. He also looked at generating electricity from coal and found a net energy loss of a whopping 240%.

Wow! Let's pause for a moment, shall we, and let that sink in ::::::::: Has it sunk in? Okay, moving on: Even Pimentel has to concede the basic point, telling C&EN that,

he recently applied his model to gasoline production and found it takes about 1.2 gal of oil to produce a gallon of gasoline. He also acknowledges that electricity requires about three times more energy to make than it provides. Consequently, he admits that the net energy losses for corn ethanol and gasoline are "close" ...

But apparently unwilling to admit defeat, he goes on to argue that corn is still a bad feedstock for ethanol as it erodes the soil, uses scarce water for irrigation and requires massive nitrogen inputs.

"Corn is the prime cause of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is the size of New Jersey," he says, referring to an area off the coast of Louisiana that is depleted of oxygen due to high levels of nutrient-rich agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River. "These are serious problems," he says.

They are indeed, so how 'bout we focus on those problems instead of this red herring regarding net energy loss?