This just in: Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom is shutting down on May 21. This is an online version of Disneyland in which many members -- children and adults -- have created their own rooms and content. This week's Spark podcast on CBC has interviews with people who have spent years there building community and making friends -- friends whom they will never be able to contact after VMK's demise because they can't give each other contact info. (Safety first and all that.)

They are distraught at the thought of their community being wiped out. Sad, very sad.

In other news, a cyclone has killed 100,000 in Burma. 1.5 million are without homes.

Not much time for an entry this week, so I'll do what I usually try to avoid (but which most bloggers do) -- quote from another source. In this case, it's George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of the indispensible and witty Heat: How to Keep the Planet from Burning.

He's long held that biofuels are folly. A few months ago, he had this to say in his column:

The European Commission … does have a plan, and it’s a disaster…. It has ordered the member states to ensure that by 2020 10% of the petroleum our cars burn must be replaced with biofuels. This won’t solve peak oil, but it might at least put it into perspective by causing an even bigger problem.

To be fair to the Commission, it has now acknowledged that biofuels are not a green panacea. Its draft directive rules that they shouldn’t be produced by destroying primary forests, ancient grasslands or wetlands, as this could cause a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Nor should any biodiverse ecosystem be damaged in order to grow them.

It sounds good, but there are three problems. If biofuels can’t be produced in virgin habitats, they must be confined to existing agricultural land, which means that every time we fill up the car we snatch food from people’s mouths. This, in turn, raises the price of food, which encourages farmers to destroy pristine habitats - primary forests, ancient grasslands, wetlands and the rest - in order to grow it. We can congratulate ourselves on remaining morally pure, but the impacts are the same. There is no way out of this: on a finite planet with tight food supplies you either compete with the hungry or clear new land.

The third problem is that the Commission’s methodology has just been blown apart by two new papers. Published in Science magazine, they calculate the total carbon costs of biofuel production. When land clearance (caused either directly or by the displacement of food crops) is taken into account, all the major biofuels cause a massive increase in emissions.