The trouble with liberals is they feel - they feel an imperative to save the environment and will do so using bio-fuel (as one source), but like every other progressive idea, a little good comes with a great deal of harm. Harm that liberals are unable, or unwilling to foresee, when they are plotting out the safety to planet earth using biofuels.
Interesting that people, reasonably bright I am sure, so passionate, myopic, and blinded by the desire to save the planet that they fail to understand what they are creating is worse than the problem they seek to remedy. Time and again this has been the case. From the US to Australia to Europe. And the people suffer. That's the good thing about liberals - they don't need to worry about human suffering, they just have to feel they are doing their best.
We know that ethanol is dangerous to the atmosphere and in case of some pollutants, more deadly than petroleum based fuels.
We also know the human cost of biofuels has not even begun to get exposure ... until the article in the LA Times on June 16, 2008.
Human Cost of Brazil's biofuels boom
by Patrick J. McDonnell
[...]
More than 300,000 farmworkers are seasonal cane cutters in Brazil, the government says. By most accounts, their work and living conditions range from basic to deplorable to outright servitude.
[...]
at least 18 cane cutters have died of dehydration, heart attacks or other ailments linked to exhaustion in this region
[...]
In its annual report, Amnesty International last month highlighted the plight of Brazil's biofuel workers, more than 1,000 of whom were rescued in June 2007 after allegedly being held in slave-like conditions at a plantation owned by a major ethanol producer, Pagrisa, in the Amazonian state of Para.
[...]
Brazilian officials acknowledge that fines and prosecutions have largely failed to improve the workers' lot. Cases drag on in court until sanctions are reduced or owners cleared. Few, if any, violators go to jail. Too few inspectors are available to police this giant country and its behemoth agribusiness, which have made it a world leader in exports of soybeans, beef and coffee, among other foodstuffs.
Brazil
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