Posted on 04/17/2008 6:28:52 AM PDT by OESY
In recent years, we've heard that climate change could be catastrophic for nature and humanity. But it's becoming increasingly evident that over the next few decades, climate-change policies could prove even more catastrophic.
Food riots have erupted in Mexico, Morocco, Egypt....
Supposedly climate-friendly policies in the United States and the European Union- subsidizing the production and consumption of such renewable biofuels as ethanol and biodiesel- have diverted such crops as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. This, in turn, has increased prices for food worldwide at a time when the highly populous and newly prosperous East and South Asian countries are demanding more of it.
Together, China and India constitute 40 percent of the world's population. Not long ago, these countries were on the brink of starvation, but now they're seeing food demand rise ever higher because of years of near double-digit economic growth rates....
According to World Bank data, by March of this year, grain prices had tripled, fertilizer prices had quintupled and energy prices were up 21/2-fold since 2000. Since January of this year alone, food prices have increased a staggering 65 percent....
Thus, even if biofuels produce an energy surplus, they would not necessarily be environmentally sound. Worse, they harm the US economy. Higher energy and food prices reduce consumers' disposable income more or less equally, meaning they disproportionately affect poorer people. Higher food prices, alternative energy subsidies and greenhouse-gas-emissions controls only make it harder for these people to earn a living or afford better education and health care.
Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction - some of the very misfortunes that they're supposed to prevent. In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies' unintended effects....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Middle East, Asian and African countries want us to freeze by charging $115 per barrel of oil in their monopoly of OPEC.
And the we have the audacity to convert some of our food to fuel so we won't freeze.
And then they have food riots and wonder why food prices are so high and how evil America is...
FUELS VS. FOOD—US ENERGY POLICY HURTING WORLD’S POOR
Should read, Oil—Price’s Hurting World’s Poor !!!!
May-be the oil Sheiks will have to buy this expensive food to keep peace and order in their country’s?
Blame it on liberals who won’t let us drill our own oil. Use it against them with the mantra of the poor suffering children.
Blame the right idiots, Al Gore and the hippie enviromental fools!
Let them eat cake.
“Middle East, Asian and African countries want us to freeze by charging $115 per barrel of oil in their monopoly of OPEC.”
$115 oil is courtesy of our Federal Reserve printing money, and the Greens restricting oil recovery and nuclear, it really isn’t an OPEC problem.
That's the problem isn't it? We don't have an effective opposition party to do that. The Congressional Republicans are too busy worrying about how the NY Slimes, the Washington Compost and the TV drive-bys will portray them if they say anything against the RATS and the national party is too busy making seating charts and ordering petits fours for the country clubbers who will attend the convention.
In order to take the dollar and the Fed out of the picture, oil should be priced in bushels of corn rather than dollars, euros, etc.
sounds to me like the USA is in the catbird seat here.
The EU is doing the same thing.
Spare me.
It's highly debatable whether there is any significant net energy gain with corn-based ethanol. Its primary purpose is an vote-winning electoral boondoggle in farm states.
Meanwhile, it is helping drive inflation.
A blast from the past, courtesy of Paul Erlich in 1968:
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
Sounds like the same beat as the anthropogenic global-warming alarmists, doesn't it?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
“$115 oil is courtesy of our Federal Reserve printing money, and the Greens restricting oil recovery and nuclear, it really isnt an OPEC problem.”
Bingo. Socialism + Fairness in Lending Act + 911 + Market Manipulation + More Socialism bailouts = Devalued dollar & inflation, exported abroad to every country that is coupled with the dollar. That’s about 2/3rds of the globe. The G7 wasn’t too happy with us in the last meeting a couple of days ago, think some global resentment is forming against our monetary policy? You betcha! We do not have food shortages, we have people that CANT AFFORD THE PRICE OF RICE, GRAINS, MILK on a global scale and that includes our own poor and middle class.
It is shocking that otherwise conservatives at this conservative forum would support a diktat worthy of the old Soviet Union.
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