Food Crisis Starts Eclipsing Climate Change Worries

Really!?
What a shock. Here a little over a year ago politicians, liberals and eco freaks were all touting the need to switch to bio fuels like Brazil. Now they are all backtracking. Realizing now the clearly obvious to all the logical thinking people out there. Taking your FOOD and turning it to fuel to run your car is STUPID. There is no nice way to say it. Its STUPID.

News Link

The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.

With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”

“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”

Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects.

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

Now I have not done a study, but I would say that is NOT a very good power output for 400 pounds of corn. Also judging just by the estimate of 400 pounds “providing enough food for one person for 5 years”, I would have to say that its a much larger impact on prices than just 1/3rd as they are predicting. Something tells me they are low balling it.

Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.”

Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article.

Al Gore not willing to do a debate or answer the questions outright on his global warming theory? Say it ain’t so?! Seeing as dozens of scientists have wanted to debate him on this issue noting the several inaccuracies in his “documentary”. Plus the recent discovery that his iceberg scene in the movie was a fake!

However, the scientist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore, Rajendra Pachauri of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, has warned that climate campaigners are unwise to promote biofuels in a way that risks food supplies. “We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security,” Mr. Pachauri told reporters last month, according to Reuters. “Questions do arise about what is being done in North America, for instance, to convert corn into sugar then into biofuels, into ethanol.”

NOW you think of this professor?
Hindsight is 20/20 sir.
This should have been a concern you raised prior to signing off on the “research”. If you did, I’d love to hear a correction.

This is all because of classic knee jerk reactions from people hell bent on shoving their silly ideologies on people as quickly as possible before they get to wise. We saw it with DDT and we now see it with the current global warming myth.

A myth that now even the Greenpeace founder is backing away from:

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power – a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.

The chemistry of the atmosphere is changing, and there is a high-enough risk that “true believers” like Al Gore are right that world economies need to wean themselves off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases, he said.

“It’s like buying fire insurance,” Moore said. “We all own fire insurance even though there is a low risk we are going to get into an accident.”

So I’d love to ask Gore personally.
Who’s the one that believes the world is still flat?