Risk Expert: GMOs Could Destroy the Global Ecosystem Washington's Blog

Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse

Risk Expert: GMOs Could Destroy the Global Ecosystem Washington’s Blog .

Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted the 2008 financial crisis, by pointing out that commonly-used risk models were wrong.  Distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University, author of best-sellers The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, Taleb became financially independent after the crash of 1987, and wealthy during the 2008 financial crisis.

Now, Taleb is using his statistical risk acumen to take on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Taleb’s conclusion:  GMOs could cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.”

Sound crazy?

Sure it does … but only because we don’t understand statistics, and so we have no handle on what’s risky and what’s not.

Taleb and his 2 co-authors write in a new draft paper:

For nature, the “ruin” is ecocide: an irreversible…

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Producers Panic as Ethanol Mandate Loses Support | OilPrice

GE Comment: It is high time that this asinine program be demolished. Like AGW and the carbon scare, the greens and sheeple were duped by corporate ag into believing that pouring topsoil, RoundUp and tractor fuels into the gas tanks on their Honda Accords would ‘save’ the planet. Facts are, indeed, stubborn things.

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Source: politicalclimate

Ethanol producers are panicking amid speculation that the ethanol mandate could be drastically reduced or scrapped entirely this year as the biofuel loses its allure and bipartisan allies and former friends team up against it.

December saw California Democrat Dianne Feinstein—a renewable fuel champion–coordinate efforts with Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn to come up with a Senate bill to get rid of ethanol from the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), citing fears that corn-based fuel production mandates will harm livestock producers.

In November, Washington proposed cutting the biofuels mandate for 2014 by 16% to 15.21 billion gallons. This would be the first cut in biofuels requirements, which were ideally set to grow each year with incremental increases in renewable fuel targets laid out in a 2007 law.

For renewable fuel targets, this represents a major setback because not only is 15.21 billion gallons for 2014 much less than the originally intended 18.15 billion gallons, it is also less than this year’s mandate of 16.55 billion gallons.

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the E15 blend, which contains 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline, for vehicles manufactured in 2001 or later. There has been little progress towards widespread use of E15 though, and today’s blend is commonly E10. Continue reading