Professor David Pimentel is somewhat surprising in that he is a well know Environmentalist, as far from Big Oil as you can be.
I usually disagree with him as he is a leader in "the sky is falling" type environmental alarmism and doom and gloom predictions.
Some of his ideas include:
The sustainable population of the US is 40-100 million max. How should we reduce our population by 85%?
He predicted massive increases in tuberculosis world wide, yet it's gone down.
He persists that there is an ever growing cancer epidemic, yet age-adjusted cancer deaths and incidence are stable or decreasing. As populations age more people will die from cancer which is highly age dependent. Your average 50 year old today will get cancer as often as a 50 year old in 1935.
He claimed that agriculture is causing the loss of 75 billion tons of top-soil annually, totally unsupported, but somehow based on increased yield per acre. This may be why he's not for crop increases for corn/fuel as it would certainly be necessary to vastly increase yield and land usage for crops, the opposite of bio-diversity. Genetic modification might be beneficial but that's obviously forbidden too.
He is one of the most ardent critics of pesticides and attributes the "cancer epidemic" to pesticides. One of his national articles was published in the local Boulder paper saying don't use pesticides including DEET against mosquitos because of west nile, because your chances of getting west nile are in the millions to one. He was off by an order of 50:1, 7 people died and there were 421 cases reported in Boulder County Colorado. It's unlikely that corn/fuel crops will be organic or sustainable by current definitions, another possible reason Pimentel isn't for it.
I'm not sure if Pimentel concerns himself with alternatives, my guess is he hopes humanity will collapse and return to a pre-industrial utopia as is inevitable and necessary.
