In that ahead-of-the-curve spirit, I did a few China-related cartoons last year. The following is an exchange from One Man's Tragedy:

Frank: The Chinese word for crisis is opportunity.

Horst: The Chinese word for terrorist is Dalai Lama. The Chinese word for toxic is toy. I boycott Chinese words.

And the fact that iPods are manufactured in what amount to slave labour camps, glancingly mentioned in the cartoon above, is dealt with at a little more length in Pod People.

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.

Shocked by the information that filling up his fuel-efficient Honda Fit deprives someone somewhere of a half a meal (if the gas has five percent biofuel), Cosmo has given up driving and is trying to live on the 240 kg of corn, or 600 grams a day, of the World Bank estimate.

I took the easier route: I asked nutritionist and Guelph Councillor Maggie Laidlaw (who, conveniently enough, represents my ward. For easing this cartoonist's late-night research, she's got my vote.). Maggie graciously did the math and sent me this email:

The average adult North American female requires about 1800 kcal/day to maintain an average weight and the average adult male requires about 2400 kcals. That works out to an average of about 2100 kcals/day between the two sexes. 1 cup of corn weighs 164 g and contains 131 kcals of energy. Therefore, to get 2100 kcals, you would need to consume 2100 X (164/130) = 2629 g corn, which is 2.629 kg. That is the per day amount, so you need to multiply that by 365 to get the yearly amount, which gives you a value of about 960 kg.- in other words, way more than the African would require. Looking at it the other way, 240 kg would only keep the average North American going for 91 days. Is this what you needed?

Yes it is! Thanks Maggie! So, the it looks like the World Bank needs to go take Nutrition 101. Or perhaps they figure a starvation diet is what Africans "need."

So, I figure Cosmo is going to run out of both sexual energy and vegan fuel pretty soon. But we will take a break from his hunger strike. Next week, we visit Horst again and find out how his broken heart is faring.

One of my favourite columnists, whom I cite all the time, is George Monbiot. I'm a reformed vegetarian, and I eat chicken now and then (every week or so), and other meats once in a blue moon. I've long been aware of the environmental arguments against eating meat. Monbiot, among others, has put it in the biofuel context in this column.

As he says there,

Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed.

However, he isn't a vegetarian, as he explains below, in a style that shows why I like his writing.

But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.

He calculates a sustainable level of meat consumption and comes up with "420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption."

Does my attempt work? Am I even close?

This series has been in the works for years. That is, I'd written it as denouement of the whole Cindy-Horst-Celia plotline way back long before they even broke up. 2002, I think it was. There have been a number of variations and rewrites before pen went to paper, but this and the next three are the final result. I hope you enjoy. It's as close to a sex farce as Weltschmerz will ever get.