What should we do with corn?
Shove it into cows that become fatty, high-cholesterol meat that contributes to heart disease? Turn it into cheap sugars that make people fat or sick?
Or use it to produce biofuels that will help reduce the U.S.’s dependence on Middle East oil, improve our balance of payments and create jobs instead of funding terrorists?
That’s a loaded question, of course, but that’s the way that James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA who is now a venture capitalist, put it to a friendly audience of biotech executives.
The biofuels industry has been subject to “propaganda” and “false narratives,” he said
Putting a new twist on the food-vs.-fuel debate, Woolsey argued that there’s plenty of acreage to grow corn and, in any event, that corn is better used as a biofuel to replace oil than it is to make “cheap junk food” so that the “grocery manufacturers association can make more money making our children obese.”
“We need to go on the attack,” he declared.
No wonder he’s been called a “green hawk.”
Woolsey, a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist and relentless advocate of biofuels, spoke today to BIO’s World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing at the National Harbor convention center, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
{ 0 comments }
