Thursday, February 8, 2007 - Editorial

Adopt compromise allowing zoo to grow
City must help plan area's redevelopment.

The Polk County Conservation Board has the makings of a compromise that 
would allow for expanding the Blank Park Zoo as well as increasing 
opportunities for conservation education and recreation for all Polk County 
residents.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070208/OPINION03/702080357/1035/OPINION

Wednesday, February 7, 2007 - LTEs

Cars could run on hot air by now

President Bush's new energy policy is commendable but about four years too 
late.

Just imagine where we might be today if we had put the billions wasted on 
the ill-conceived and catastrophically executed Iraq war into research for 
alternative-energy solutions. Not only would we be much closer to energy 
independence, but we also would have saved thousands of American and Iraqi 
lives in the process.

- John M. Graether,
Marshalltown.

More oil is the obvious answer to energy problems

The problem with energy programs that try to replace oil is that they will 
not work. Even if we used our entire corn crop and put wind generators in 
every available space, it still isn't enough to satisfy our current and 
growing energy needs.

The side effect of that is it raises the cost to everyone. Farmers and 
consumers are hurt, and all those wind generators bring us a bad case of 
ugly. Making cars lighter in search of better mileage adds dramatically to 
highway fatalities and crippling injuries.

Believing that people are the primary contributors to CO2 in the atmosphere 
is silly. Compared to the CO2 and other gases produced naturally by 
volcanoes, both on land and under water, and from the surfaces of the 
oceans, man's contribution is miniscule. And the people referring to CO2 as 
a pollutant are trying to hoodwink us. CO2 is not a pollutant. It occurs 
naturally in the atmosphere the same as oxygen and hydrogen.

Thinking our actions can stop or change anything nature has in store for us 
is the height of arrogance. I'll bet that 3 million years ago, dinosaurs 
thought they were pretty important, too.

It's obvious an ample and dependable supply of oil is the answer. It's 
cheaper, more efficient and plentiful.

New oil deposits are being discovered almost daily around the world. If we 
utilize our own oil in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and any other place we 
find it, the world price of crude will remain stable and affordable for the 
foreseeable future.

It's time we tell the global-warming doomsayers, and our misguided 
representatives in D.C. who support them, to sit down, shut up and let our 
country get on with the job of producing the energy that fuels our economy 
and our lives.

- Jack Banghart,
Des Moines.

Biofuels come with downside

"Sustainable" was not a buzzword 60 years ago. But we farmers knew that 
although fertility can be restored with chemical fertilizers, soil structure 
cannot.

Every farmer who took the whole corn plant (grain, stalk, leaves, husk and 
cob) off the land as silage made sure that the silage stubble got manure.

Proponents of ethanol from corn-plant "residue" seem to be unaware of 
warnings such as G.M. Browning's in the October 1948 Iowa Farm Science 
magazine: "Even though we maintain fertility in the chemical sense, our 
soils won't stay productive if we allow structure to break down too far."

Agronomists at Iowa State University in 2007 know this, I'm sure. But we 
can't assume that the answer to petroleum replacement is a simple, 
problem-free, perpetual harvesting of agricultural "waste."

- Robert A. Rohwer,
Indianola.

Neila Seaman, MPA
Director
Sierra Club, Iowa Chapter
3839 Merle Hay Road, Suite 280
Des Moines, IA  50310
[log in to unmask]
515-277-8868

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