Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Global Starvation Begins Due To Whacko Panic Over Global Warming

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Well, it started already. Shifting economic priorities from food production to reducing CO2 emission has already started causing significant problems. The environmentalist whackos are at it again. Evidently unsatisfied with derailing nuclear power plant construction in the United States 30 years ago, a whackjob by the whackos that has gotten us into the foreign oil dependency mess we’re in today instead of getting most of our electricity from nuclear power like France, their latest stupid panic is going to lead to the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. I don’t often laud the French but they at least got their ducks in a row with nuclear power and the U.S. could have too if we’d had the good sense to ignore the environmentalist whackos. Will we never learn?

Dash for green fuel pushes up price of meat in US
Carl Mortished, International Business Editor
From The Times, April 12, 2007

The price of meat is set to rise in America as the nation’s helter-skelter dash to convert corn into road fuel begins to take its toll on the supply of food.

The US Department of Agriculture has said that meat supply will fall this year because of the high cost of feed. Output of beef, pork and chicken is expected to decline by one billion pounds as farmers react to the soaring cost of feeding their livestock.

Typically, meat production in the United States rises by about 2 per cent a year, but the pressure from American ethanol producers manufacturing road fuel from corn has sent the price of maize soaring to $4 a bushel.

The USDA is predicting that the 2006 corn crop will sell for an average of $3.10 a bushel at the farm gate, the highest for a decade. Faced with extortionate feed costs, cattle and poultry farmers are rearing fewer animals and slaughtering them early. That means a sudden reversal in the annual meat production gain, representing a fall of 1.7lb per person.

“There is a new demand component,” Shayle Shagam, a livestock analyst at USDA, said. “Livestock producers have to bid against the ethanol industry to get supplies of corn.”

The biofuel revolution’s unpleasant negative consequence was first felt south of Rio Grande, when the escalating price of corn affected a food staple. Mexico’s tortilla inflation crisis is spreading north to the heartland of rib-eye steak and chicken wings. The USDA predicts that food prices will rise by up to 3.5 per cent this year as farmers rein in output in response to feedstock costs.

In Washington, the International Monetary Fund added its warning about the consequences of a mass conversion of food crops into fuel. Mounting political panic over carbon emissions has encouraged politicians in European and America to raise targets for the biofuel content in a litre of petrol.

Food prices rose by 10 per cent worldwide in 2006, said the IMF in its World Economic Report, owing to a surge in corn, wheat and soybean prices. The pressure on prices will increase, says the IMF. The EU’s target of a minimum biofuel content of 10 per cent will require 18 per cent of agricultural land to be set aside for road fuel production.

Corn is a vital component of the human food chain, used as cornmeal for baking bread and tortillas, as cooking oil and corn syrup in processed foods and as animal feedstock. Vast US government subsidies for the production of ethanol, used as a petrol additive in America, has encouraged the expansion of ethanol distilleries.

Comments
Keep the Hummer--but eat broccoli? I trust some of you might have seen this, but I enjoyed this recent column from WPs George Will over morning coffee (wondering about my own "carbon footprint" due to coffee production and shipment fuel, etc., ) regarding Fuzzy Math from the "Carbonari" Elite that needs a second glance before we can truly "Think Globally and Act Locally." Will reminds us to think the math with a double take and think rationally as well--at least as if industrial civilization means something. I had mentioned greenhouse hypocrisy from its own greenhouse propriators as outlined by Robert Samuelson a couple of years ago. Here we see, as Bjorn Lomberg points out before his crucifixion, that Kyoto is just the start of the costs, many of which are incalculable at this point, but perhaps in the trillions over half a century or so. Saving ice formations may not just cramp out style, but the very survival of our economy and those of us dependent on its successful running for things like sanitation and science. In short, Will points out in very succinct form what previously the likes of Julian Simon and Michael Fumento and dozens of others have, about the REAL costs of NOT just Kyoto, but also the presumptions about what is more "green" than some other activities. For example, it seems Hummers are no more Greenhouse inducing than the lowly Prius (so enjoy your manly romps) when all international components shipments/fuel costs, battery ingredients, and so forth. Then too someone mentioned MEAT? Will points out that Nitrates are far more Carbonizing than, well, CARBON. The greenhouse effect of nitrogen is many-fold that of what we breath out. All told meat is murder to the planet, and not just because PETA says so. Turns out that per point, meat is more dangerous to the ice caps than (once again) the H-2 Hummer. (this post proudly carbon free) --SWTWakefield Tolbert
April 13, 2007
April
04
Apr
13
13
2007
10:06 PM
10
10
06
PM
PDT
Do you consider Pres. Bush to be a whacko? Not at all. But everyone else does. Check out all the leaders of poverty stricken countries screaming that the U.S. using corn to produce ethanol will lead to billions starving. http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GFRC%2CGFRC%3A2006-49%2CGFRC%3Aen&q=bush+ethanol+hunger The thing is, this is REAL good for U.S. farmers and landowners in the grain belt (also known as the bible belt, red states, and Bush country). They're making far more money selling corn at inflated prices to ethanol producers. He'll happily play to the greenies in this regard. People starving in third world countries don't vote Republican.DaveScot
April 13, 2007
April
04
Apr
13
13
2007
07:01 PM
7
07
01
PM
PDT
If humans became vegetarians wouldn't methane producing cattle populations increase since no one is decreasing their population by eathing them, furthering the so called man-made global warming? Just kidding. Really, it's nice to find people who are also "heretics" in the Church of Global Warming like myself. I must write something against man-made global warming (or as I like to call it fabricated global warming, because the whole idea is a fabrication) at least every other week on The Urban Mystic (http://journals.aol.com/ordinarymortal/TheUrbanMystic/), and have even devoted a section of an upcoming comic book (I'm a cartoonist) to dispelling the myths and setting the facts straight. Keep up the good work.UrbanMysticDee
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
10:24 PM
10
10
24
PM
PDT
Didn't corn prices shoot through the roof right after the 2006 SOTU address by Pres. Bush, where he touted the greatness of ethanol from corn? Do you consider Pres. Bush to be a whacko?phonon
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
02:55 PM
2
02
55
PM
PDT
Output of beef, pork and chicken is expected to decline by one billion pounds as farmers react to the soaring cost of feeding their livestock.
Better late than never I guess. Pork is nasty. Pig farms should be outlawed. The world would be a better place. Chickens- I would never eat anything with a pecker in the middle of its face. :) Beef- It takes more food to feed them than we get back. Raising cattle also takes grazing land. That land which could be used to grow the extra corn we could then use for fuel. The world would be a much better place economically and ecologically if all humans just became vegetarians.Joseph
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
12:06 PM
12
12
06
PM
PDT
Whoa, how did those letters and numbers get into my last post? Must have been that ubiquitous RM+NS again.angryoldfatman
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
06:58 AM
6
06
58
AM
PDT
DanaMcgee, that can't possibly be. That's a fictitious document that has no relevance in this day and age rev 6:6.angryoldfatman
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
06:56 AM
6
06
56
AM
PDT
I remember something a little more specific from that book now about the predicted situation. Something about food being so expensive that the average person would have to work an entire day just to get a few pounds of grain.angryoldfatman
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
06:54 AM
6
06
54
AM
PDT
angryoldfatman THE BIBLE!!DanaMcgee
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
06:49 AM
6
06
49
AM
PDT
I think there was this book one time that predicted that we would have deceptive quasi-religious leaders, followed by global wars, global disease, global famine, and finally mass death and genocide. Where did I read that? Think, think, think... Oh wait...angryoldfatman
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
06:43 AM
6
06
43
AM
PDT
Evidently unsatisfied with derailing nuclear power plant construction in the United States 30 years ago, a whackjob by the whackos that has gotten us into the foreign oil dependency . . . Many in academic leadership bluntly claim that only those with training in specific fields have standing to offer authoritative opinions on matters involving evolution -- a view which is knee-jerkingly accepted by the big media. Now 30 years ago who was the authority accepted by big media concerning nuclear power? And whose opinion was rejected? "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island" tribune7
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
05:43 AM
5
05
43
AM
PDT
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer152.html For a consensus view there is a lot of opposition.Crash
April 12, 2007
April
04
Apr
12
12
2007
02:11 AM
2
02
11
AM
PDT
Yeah--I think it was Patrick Michaels who said recently in a radio interview that ours may be the first civilization in all history to BURN a large portion of its food supply to fuel something else, when in fact, chemically, the most efficient thing to do with corn, wheat, and sugarcane is to....well....eat it. --SWTWakefield Tolbert
April 11, 2007
April
04
Apr
11
11
2007
09:38 PM
9
09
38
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply