Ah, who cares? It’s only those filthy wogs anyway
on 06/30/2008 at 04:52 PM
I have mixed thoughts on this. I don’t think making ethanol from corn is a good idea particularly. However making diesel fuel from canola or “oil seed rape” is in my view a good idea. What bothers me about this is report is the dependency culture that seems to have built up. Thanks to clever farmers in the US, Canada and Australia, Britain etc. The Australians have had a run of drought in the past few years and the price of wheat has soared. At the same time the idiots in the EU have cut back on subsidies for wheat production in Europe and the “grain mountains” have evaporated.
This will sound very harsh I fear, but I still believe it to be true. There is currently a potential famine in Ethiopia and Somalia. Putting aside their eagerness to keep killing each other, the one thing these people never seem to have a shortage of is children. My feeling is that we have encouraged a dependency culture built on cheap food. Now things are tightening up and the marxists blame us for the stupidity of people overseas. If they maybe cut back on the number of children, and maybe they thought about investing in agriculture rather than AK47’s they might be able to feed themselves. What would happen if there was a genuine crisis like the one Drew mentioned previously with wheat rust? If this devastated wheat production we would be facing famine. Ultimately we have to take care of ourselves first. The feckless will have to learn to sink or swim.
Yes, there is a strain of pesticide resistant rust called UG99 that is sweeping up out of Africa into the Middle East and heading towards India and the -stans. It has now been found in Iran and will badly impact the harvests there.
Now more than ever the rotten corners of the world need food imports. Since the rest of us only have limited amounts of land that can grow food, giving over wide swaths of that land to grow plants for fuel is very simple math: less food available for export.
Mix less exportable food with less food being harvested over there and people start going hungry. Demands escalates rapidly, and in a free market economy it becomes more lucrative to export the food than to sell it at home. So our prices shoot up too. We have more money than they do, so we’ll eat. They’ll starve. Or start wars for food.
The feckless will have to switch over to rust-proof crops that suit their environments. Problem is, I don’t know if there are any. More than 80% of all the varieties of wheat are susceptible to this rust. You can’t grow rice in a wheat field, though you could try emmer, teff, or quinoa. Does UG99 harm them too? I don’t know. Those people might wind up sinking regardless.
The only way that the ethanol idea makes any sense is to distill the stuff from crop waste and lawn clippings, and boil the mash using solar energy. Otherwise it takes away necessary land AND requires more energy to run the distillery than you get from the alcohol.Personally I don’t think the “biofuels” idea makes any sense unless and until EVERY DROP of used cooking oil in the Western world is converted into biodiesel. If even one restaurant anywhere in the US or Europe is not making a profit selling its old cooking grease to a company that makes fuel from it, obviously the problem isn’t severe enough for free market economics to treat it seriously. To be fair, we may already be at that point, I can’t claim to know. And yes, once biofuels become practical in terms of supply and demand, it’s still only practical using plant *wastes*. Central America and the Caribbean should be making a killing off this, processing sugar cane waste.
Beyond that, well… read the works of Garrett Hardin. “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept”, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, etc. All anyone accomplishes by sending food relief to a starving population somewhere is to ensure that the problem is WORSE a few years later. If they are starving, FOR WHATEVER REASON, to the point where they have to *beg* for food rather than contract for a short term loan at worst, they are living beyond the carrying capacity of their land. Keeping them alive *as* they continue to live beyond the carrying capacity of their land insures one thing and one thing only: That they will breed a yet larger population to be in even worse straits a few years down the road. In short, feeding them accomplishes nothing except to ultimately RAISE the death toll and increase the suffering.
If you want things to change, help them gain self supportive means to feed THEMSELVES. Nothing short of that helps in the long term, and most things short of that just exacerbate the problem.
07/01/2008 at 03:05 AM
