Breaking America’s Addiction to oil through agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture has never been more relevant than today. In coming years, we are going to rely on our farmers not just for food, but also for fuel. And that puts farming beyond food and feed at the center of our environmental policy, our national security policy, and our economic policy. There’s no doubt that global warming is happening. At the same time we see just how vulnerable we are to fluctuations in the price of oil. We depend on oil to run our factories, to get to work, to fuel our military. We are borrowing money from our economic competitors in order to burn up our planet and indirectly subsidize some of the very people who we are asking our soldiers to fight. By any measure, our addiction to oil is a huge and growing problem. It threatens our climate, our economy, and our place in the world. It is related to every other big problem we face. This puts added urgency to replace petroleum with alternative fuels.