GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Monday, May 12, 2008

Why do environmentalists make us suffer?

They're going to starve us and send us back to the 11th century - which is why they can't seem to fathom the Islamic threat...
Do today’s soaring food prices and Third World food riots mean we’re headed for global famine?

Not any time soon—if we suspend the biofuels mandates quickly. Unfortunately, if we keep burning corn, wheat, and palm oil in our vehicles, there’s no limit to the hunger, malnutrition, wildlife extinction and political disruption we can cause.

The problem is simple: Food demand is inelastic. People need about the same number of calories whether they’re expensive or cheap. But the demand for biofuels is almost without limit. An acre of corn produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, while humans worldwide burn more than a trillion gallons of gasoline per year.

Biofuels could absorb the whole world’s crop production without bringing down gasoline prices—because we’re banning coal and refusing to drill for oil. If we want to keep on eating, we’ll have to scrap the false “fuel security” of the biofuels.

Even giving up biofuels won’t stave off the world’s hunger for long, because we’ll need more than twice as much food and feed per year by 2050. The number of humans is likely to peak at about 8 billion, up from today’s 6.4 billion, and at least 7 billion of them are likely to be affluent enough to eat meat and ice cream. They’ll have fewer children—but more pets, few of them vegetarian.

If the world plans to have forests, wildlands, and wildlife species in the 22nd century, then we’ll need to triple the crop yields on the land we already farm—just for food and feed. Except for a chunk of western Brazil, there isn’t much high-quality cropland left in the world for cropland expansion, and none of it “extra” for biofuels.

But the same people who don’t want us to burn coal are telling us not to raise high-yield crops either. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund tell us not to use nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air. They demand organic-only nitrogen from cattle manure or green manure crops—but such low-yield systems produce only half as much food per acre.

We’re locked into the same “don’t use it” debate on food as on energy. Is the Greens’ information on high yield crops any better than their “advice” on global warming—which tells us to stop burning fossil fuels though the world has cooled over the last ten years?

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

These people are trying to show their dominance over us. It has nothing to do with the environment. Thus the link between Islam and this motley crew.

Whenever there is talk of actual progress the environmentalists are against it. Think nuclear power vs coal fired plants, plasma incineration plants vs expensive recycling programs.

Because Islam demands submission it's a natural match for those who try to impose their values on others. In then end, the result is fascism by any other name.

9:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Many years ago I had a tour of one of Canada's biological & chemical warfare establishments. That was a few years after the creation of a left wing organization called Zero Population Growth. During the presentation the scientist conducting the tour told us that both the US and Soviet Union's were working on racially selective bio weapons with the aim to controlling population, and specifically between the tropics of cancer and capricorn.
ZPG fell out of favour with the political activists in the late 70's, but with the "climate change scare" and now the "food shortage" scare both directly related to the fact we have 8 billion people on a planet that can comfortably sustain 3 billion, I can't help wondering if some gnome in some lab isn't thinking along the same lines again.

10:41 AM  
Blogger John M Reynolds said...

"...we have 8 billion people on a planet that can comfortably sustain 3 billion."

Read the article next time. It says 6.4 billion -- not 8. Simply putting a number like 3 billion out there with no proof is also pointless. The number of people the earth can sustain depends on its temperature and on our technology. Back 70,000 years ago, as few as 2000 people survived the droughts that occured within the depths of the ice age. If the globe cools by several degrees, then the number of people the earth can sustain will drop. Like the article says, even we can seriously inflict damage. If we keep up the insane biofuel policies, then we will end up burning our food and famine will result.

Just throwing a number like 3 billion out there with no context is pointless.

3:30 PM  

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