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Maybe it was the martinis I had already drunk, or the beers he had already drunk, or maybe it’s just plain impossible to have a discussion about Biofuels without getting heated. But boy, did I have a doozy on Friday.

It all started with an energetic, but cool-headed conversation with a friend’s husband (who is an engineer, but grew up on a farm) about Biofuels, the government’s policy on using our farmland to put ethanol into gas tanks, and what a generally lousy plan that is in terms of the Climate Change.

I can’t remember what his point was, but I remember nodding vigorously when he made, so clearly I approved. Then for my part I pointed out that we have zero chance of getting the government to back off of this plan because it’s too sweet a deal in terms of PR. They get to appear to care about the environment because the overwhelming majority of our citizens aren’t well enough informed to realize that it takes more fossil fuel to raise the crop and process the ethanol, (not to mention cut down the rainforest to grow the same crop for food because we didn’t leave ourselves enough farm space in our own country to do that), than it would to just burn the gas in our cars in the first place. At the same time, by paying more for an ethanol crop than they would for the same product sold as food, the government is providing a farm subsidy, making farmers happy.

Happy farmers and happy lay people mean a happy government and, in this case, a really bad policy.

At this point though, a young man sitting a few seats away leaned over an asked if I could please explain how on earth this could possibly be considered a subsidy. So I re-capped for him: in the government’s report “A Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act”, they outlined a $1.5 Billion renewable fuels strategy to help farmers grow crops for fuels. When the government gives money to a group of people to bolster the production of their product, it’s generally called a subsidy. But this guy still wasn’t getting it.

Somehow the discussion then veered away from Biofuels specifically and towards agriculture and GHG emissions in general. At which point, he presented his most sensational argument yet: agriculture in North America is actually a carbon sink because, before we all came here there were 2 million buffalo roaming the prairies. We mere humans, he contended, with all of our cows (…and pigs and chickens), our tractors and our fertilizers can’t possibly create more GHG equivalents than those free-ranging buffalo and their methaney farts!

I should have walked away at this point. Ok, I should have walked away well before this point. But, whether due to the Martini-effect, or my general abhorrence of stupidity, I stayed.

I argued that any rational person, who took 3rd grade math can add up the GHGs emitted from our 15.6 million farmed cattle, 13.6 million hogs, the acreage tilled with petroleum-powered machinery to feed those animals, the production for and release onto those crops of hydrocarbon-based synthetic fertilizers, and the transportation of all of those fertilizers, crops and animals around and see that we get a bigger number than we do from the calculating rumblings of a buffalo’s gut.

But he STILL didn’t get it.

Sometimes, I really worry that it’s hopeless.