The experts who have helped establish a global reliance on oil and wasted billions of dollars trying to turn corn into gas, have now turned their attention to nature’s biggest natural power generators. Volcanoes and hot springs could supply up to 25-percent of America’s power needs–and as fuel prices soar, Alaskan officials announced the exploration of the state’s volcanoes.

Companies are being invited to lease the rights to explore geothermal resources beneath Mount Spurr, a snowcapped 11,070-foot volcano that most recently erupted in 1992, showering much of Anchorage with volcanic ash. The state Division of Oil and Gas hopes the lease sale, due to go ahead in August, will be the first of many. It is also considering allowing exploration of the 4,134-foot Augustine Volcano, 171 miles southwest of Anchorage. (more…)

Exclusive trailer premiere for King Corn, a documentary where Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.