4/13/22

Republicans, Thune join Democrats for socialism, ecocide

Koch is one of four corporations that control the production and sale of nitrogen-based fertilizer in the US. The others are Yara-USA, CF Industries and Nutrien so the Family Farm Action Alliance, a 501c3 non-profit group has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the avaricious rises in fertilizer prices. 

The United States gets much of its fertilizer from Morocco, Belarus and the Persian Gulf but a Trump era tariff and Hurricane Ida in the Gulf of Mexico slowed the movement of product to markets up and down the Mississippi River. Nitrogen fertilizer is normally applied to subsidized corn then ends right back in the Gulf of Mexico where it kills whole ecosystems. 

Koch Industries has given loads of cash to Republicans like John Thune.
Corn-state lawmakers cheered the Biden administration’s decision Tuesday to allow the year-round sale of gasoline with up to 15 percent ethanol, while the head of a petrochemical trade group questioned the legality of the maneuver and environmentalists said it would increase ozone pollution. Congressional Republicans from the Midwest, including Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas, John Thune of South Dakota and Joni Ernst of Iowa, also cheered the announcement. “The president is right to take this step, and I will continue to press for biofuels to play a significant role in a truly all-of-the-above energy strategy that can restore American energy independence,” Thune said. [Biden scores points in Midwest with ethanol announcement]
The Ogallala Aquifer, also called the Great Plains Aquifer, is being depleted at a far faster rate than its recharge flows and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates from industrial agriculture. Koch Industries' relationship with the late Republican Kansas Senator Bob Dole allowed the company to build an ecoterrorism empire.
In a recent telephone conversation, a southwest Kansas farmer casually noted that he had stopped growing irrigated corn some years back because “it cost too much.” Most years, he said, he had applied about 18 inches of water per acre to produce a 200-bushel crop. “That was about 2,500 gallons of water per bushel, and I just thought that was too much. So I went back to wheat and milo," he said. Or, in this case, use 10,000-year-old groundwater to grow a subsidized commodity crop in an increasingly arid region of the country to likely feed a meat animal or an ethanol plant. As public awareness of private water use grows, so does the pressure on how local, state and federal governments allocate today’s dwindling supplies. More importantly, because of agriculture’s overall thirst – 70% of water usage worldwide is sucked up by farming and ranching – agriculture is the biggest, fattest, slowest target in every effort or idea to reallocate it. [Alan Guebert: 2,500 gallons of water per bushel of irrigated corn is 'too much']
In 2021 Thune and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) reintroduced the GREET Act, legislation that would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adopt the Argonne National Lab’s Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model for ethanol and biodiesel.

Ethanol has only two thirds the energy density of gasoline or diesel and less than half of what natural gas contains but has an immensely larger carbon footprint. Nobody farms with gasoline powered equipment and ethanol is being grown with diesel fuel so how is that either conservative or sustainable?

Pulse crops like lentils, split peas, pintos, black beans and chickpeas or garbanzo beans are legumes that restore lost nitrogen to corn-damaged soils.

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