A new report from Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) recommends using the state's public forests as an underground dumping ground for CO2 captured from coal plants.

The agency's twisted reasoning follows, from John Quigley, chief of staff:

Coal is with us and will be part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future, but if we want to avoid frying the planet, we're going to have to do something about controlling carbon emissions.

What is the fastest way for that to happen? Well, we've advanced the idea that public lands should be part of the mix.

Except for one thing: Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) -- as it's called -- isn't a quick fix at all. 

Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s biggest poultry producer, faced disgrace several years ago when undercover investigators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals documented slaughterhouse workers abusing chickens. Here's what investigators witnessed in 2004 at a Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse in West Virginia that was supplying Kentucky Fried Chicken:

[W]orkers were caught on video stomping on chickens, kicking them, and violently slamming them against floors and walls. Workers also ripped the animals’ beaks off, twisted their heads off, spat tobacco into their eyes and mouths, spray-painted their faces, and squeezed their bodies so hard that the birds expelled feces—all while the chickens were still alive.

Essentially the chickens were treated like what they would eventually become: cheap meat.

Roughly nine billion chickens are slaughtered annually in the U.S.—23 million killed each day—in a brutal but efficient system of industrialized animal agriculture. The cheapness of their meat is a function of the huge scale of the operation in which they are raised, reliant on two main ingredients: cheap oil and cheap grain.

The times they are a changing, though. In an age of peak oil, are we also reaching peak meat?

The price of corn reached a record $5.795 a bushel last week in Chicago as a result of U.S. mandates promoting ethanol production. That has pushed the price of feed for its chickens too high for Pilgrim's Pride Corp., the world's biggest poultry processor, which announced last week it would close a chicken plant in Siler City, North Carolina as a result.

The company is also going to close six of the company's 13 U.S. distribution centers in Oskaloosa, Iowa; Plant City and Pompano Beach, Florida; Jackson, Mississippi; Nashville, Tennessee; and Cincinnati.

In announcing the closings and the loss of 1300 jobs, the company blamed U.S. ethanol policies for pushing the industry into crisis. Feed represents about half the cost of raising a bird.

Each summer an oxygen-starved, lifeless “dead zone” swells in the Gulf of Mexico from the toxic nitrogen fertilizer that runs off farms in Midwestern corn country.

But now that dead zone is expanding -- dangerously. And it’s starting to put the health of a nearly $3 billion fishing industry and an entire ecosystem of aquatic life at risk.

Last year the dead zone covered an area the size of New Jersey -- 7,700 square miles.

The culprit? The USA’s corn ethanol boom. That’s the conclusion of new research published in the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences.

B.Y.O.M—bring your own meat—is the strategy the U.S. Olympic committee plans to implement this summer in Beijing. Wary of steroid-laden proteins from China, U.S. Olympians are relying on Tyson Foods to send them 25,000 pounds of American meat—beef, chicken and pork—for the summer games.

Meat produced in the U.S. won’t fully alleviate their concerns. Remember the recent massive beef recall? And let’s not ignore the carbon footprint of this Olympic strategy, which is not limited to the gas-guzzling transport of goods across the globe. The other downer—the inconvenient truth the other Nobel Laureate spoke—is that “meat is a very carbon intensive commodity.” Even before you fly it across an ocean.