My favorite man, Mark Steyn, takes his saber pen to the issue of ethenol. You know, that genius plan of the Left to put food into cars in the name of Climate Change, only to cause a worldwide food shortage and the starvation of people in countries across the globe. Well, I suppose with fewer people that helps solve the Climate Change problem, too, since it’s all brought on by pesky humans. Now if we could just get Al Gore to stop eating as much, maybe Italy wouldn’t be having pasta riots.
Feed your Prius, starve a peasant
At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as columnist Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad.
Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.
So what happened?
Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Yes, of course, please link through and read the whole thing.
Umm, the Prius doesn’t run on biofuels. Mine doesn’t. Do they make one that does?
And all for what?
The lie of “Global Warming”.
Oh, wait, it’s now “Global Climate Change”.
Ethanol is a mistake, but runny a biodiesel with waste oil from fast food restaurants has some appeal.
oops. Running.
RonS: if you live in a place where ethanol is mandated as a fuel ingredient (virtually everywhere), then yes, your Prius does indeed run at least partly on biofuels, as does my CTS, my neighbor’s Corolla, and the Harley my aging-hippy friend across the street.
Ethanol is nothing more than yet still another further different crop subsidy.
The biggest problem with the ethanol mandate, is that like anything else brought on by Big Government, it’s inflexable. For example, I currently reside in Baton Rouge. Across the Mississippi, you have massive fields of sugar cane, which are also refined locally. You could use the cane sugar for ethanol, and the stalks to make methanol. Any plant matter can be used for methanol production, and it works so well as a fuel that Indy cars ran on the stuff for years.
Ahhhhhh….Dirt Biscuit….mmmmmmm….That takes me back to momma’s home cookin’!
Watch Gore in the coming weeks say he never signed on for bio-fuels. It will be as funny as Dean saying he never made the “shriek”.
Let’s see…you have a large amount of the world’s food supply being diverted into ethanol, causing a huge increase in starvation in poor countries, and due to cost, a reduction of the standard of living in First World countries. What’s going on here? Could it possibly be that the Marxist Left is finally beginning to orchestrate the final chapter of what they began in the early part of the 20th Century? Does the term Eugenics ring a bell?