The relationship between the price of energy and the price of food may have devastating implications for the environment and the world’s poor in the foreseeable future. The price of food has become inextricably linked to the price of energy with the advent of plant-based fuels. Furthermore, as the price of energy rises ethanol becomes increasingly attractive. Adding insult-to-injury, consumers are willing to pay a premium for “green” labeling. Global food prices have sky rocketed in the past year in conjunction with rises in energy prices.

I have often argued that nuclear power is the way to go. The issues associated with Nuclear power are legitimate; waste and disaster. However; there seems to be a divide erupting within the broader environmental movement. The fundamental tension stems from whether nuclear waste and disaster outweigh the deleterious impacts of carbon emissions on the environment.

Unfortunately, certain elements of environmental policy are constantly conflated with other policy imperatives. Perhaps the most salient and recent is the intermixing of energy independence and sustainability. The former being a national security imperative with a very unique set of circumstances and the former being a uniquely environmental issue. Many candidates, early on in this current election season chose to conflate these two issues. Recently, Hilary Clinton has found another issue to obfuscate legitimate environmental policy creation.

The American auto industry evokes irrational romantic feelings of Yankee ingenuity, the protestant work ethic, and quite hollowly “The American Dream”. Granted the auto industry, in its heyday, provided a unique opportunity for extremely industrious Americans without advanced degrees to ascend into middleclassdom. This era is over. Our auto industry is no longer competitive for a number of systemic reasons; the high cost of unionized labor, massive debt burden, high turnover at senior levels, varied incentives of shareholders. How does this relate to Green Business?

Given the importance of forests as an important carbon reduction mechanism in an environment extremely sensitive to global warming, the loss of the rain forest is extremely disconcerting. Even so, there are larger political and economic implications to deforestation. Illegal logging leads to political instability as well as massive economic theft. Illegal loggers often have no qualms using violence or force to quell indigenous populations whose way off life they are destroying. There has been a recent spate of violence in the Amazon.