April 16, 2008
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/green_dreams_kill/
A green panic may be deadly:
We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain
harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral
limits.
Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is
halted. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its
grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil
im****ts. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015. Argentina,
Canada, and Eastern Europe are joining the race. The EU has targeted a
5.75pc biofuel share by 2010. The global food bill has risen 57pc in the
last year.
The heavy moralising, the anti-American bent and the UN involvement all
make me suspicious.
It's perhaps wise to note other drivers of the rise in food prices, some
of which are actually good news: there's the rise in population, of
course, and also the rise in wealth in India and China in particular,
which allows more people to eat better.
But we should also rewrite the last paragraph of the conclusion of this
bombastic piece from London's Daily Telegraph:
While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the
radar screen.
Not "while" but "because", surely. After all, the biofuel industry is
not just fueled by hopes of becoming less dependent on oil im****ts, but
by the global alarmists' dreams of developing a "green fuel''. And a
final calm-down: Never have famines been so rare as they are today.
UPDATE
The cooler Professor Paul Collier explains the various ways green dreams
are getting in the way of solving the food shortage. I count at least
four:
We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable
and human in scale. (T)he World Bank and the Department for
International Development have orientated their entire efforts on
agricultural development to peasant-style production. Unfortunately,
peasant farming is not well suited to innovation and investment.
Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our
newfound environmental romanticism. In the United States fear of climate
change has been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely
inefficient subsidies to biofuel. One SUV tank of biofuel uses enough
grain to feed an African family for a year.
In Europe deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated into a ban
on both the production and im****t of genetically modified crops. This
has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture.
Unfortunately, trade in agricultural produce has been the main economic
activity to have resisted the force of globalisation. The cost of this
is now being picked up by the poorest people in the world.
Green dreams make people hungry.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"How does a small increase in a very small component [of CO2] have such
a large apparent effect [On Climate]? The truth is that no one has yet
shown that it does." Don Aitkin
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