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 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To unsubscribe from the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to: [log in to unmask] Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information: http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp