I read this article in USA Today a week ago, but thought it was appropriate to write about it today given that I just gorged myself during Thanksgiving dinner. The article is about how many children go hungry or are at risk of going hungry in the U.S. One of every four children in New Mexico and Texas and one of every five in a dozen other states live in households that struggle to provide enough food at some point during the year. California is in that latter category of one out of five. That's absolutely amazing to me. I suppose I know very little about the problem of poverty in America. Interesting, cause my last post was all about income mobility in America. But indeed, there are millions of Americans, 35 million in fact (about 12% of the population), that fall into that "food insecure" category. The report found that 13 million children are at risk. It was nice to find that 15 million low-income children get free school lunches and 7 million get free breakfasts. And then more than 50,000 take home backpacks on Fridays filled with pounds of healthy food.
Read an interesting article a couple weeks back in the WSJ on how biofuels may actually increase carbon emissions in the medium to long-term. Apprently the shifts in land-use necessary to support the production of bio-materials like soybeans, corn, or palm could in fact release more carbon emissions. The time it takes to get carbon-neutral on some of these projects is pretty crazy - 319 years for soybean biodiesel from Brazil (assuming you're clearing rainforest), 93 years for corn ethanol from the U.S. (assuming you're clearing grasslands), 86 years for palm biodiesel from Indonesia (assuming you're clearing rainforest). I suppose biofuels really aren't meant to reduce carbon emissions, but just crazy that they potentially exacerbate the problem so much.
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