The Complexities of the Earth for Liberals

I consider myself a liberal, mostly, but the world is sometimes too complicated.  Consider today's NYTimes:

• liberals like historical preservation, but Greensburg, KS was leveled by a tornado.  The result, as they build from scratch, is highly environmental friendly town.  Lesson: there's trade-offs between history and efficiency. Technology in this case is a friend to the environment.
  
•  a judge rules USDA needed to do an environmental impact statement before approving GMO sugar beets.  But there's the claim: "Mr. Grant, who is also the chairman of the Snake River Sugar Company, a grower-owned cooperative, said easier weed control allowed farmers to reduce tillage, which in turn saved fuel and fertilizer and reduced erosion." People don't realize it takes significantly less energy per unit of output now than in 1970 for most major crops, precisely because of such advances in technology.
  
• the UN bought carbon offsets for the cost of its meeting on climate. "They offset those emissions by directing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agricultural leftovers like rice husks and sunflower stalks are turned into electricity for the local grid." I always shudder when I hear such promotion of this use of biomass.  Don't people recognize that organic farming requires the return to the soil of organic matter, such as rice husks and sunflower stalks?  Otherwise you're mining the soil, to use a familiar idiom.
  
• an article describes a decade of stability in global temperatures and the problems it creates for  people pushing the fight against global warming.