Back to noticing that which some would prefer not be noticed
by George SeldesNovember 6th, 2007 at 21:27:15
The estimable George Monbiot starts his latest thus:
An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity
Posted November 6, 2007
Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th November 2007
It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels – made from wood or straw or waste – become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve. (cont.)
Read the whole thing (the footnotes are there).
Oil is at $97 a barrel and yet, despite the massive profit potential for anything that actually was offering a decent energy return on energy invested, Oregon is subsidizing the construction of agro-fuel refineries intended to turn subsidized foodcrops into motor fuel for SUVs (on top of generous federal subsidies) while driving up prices for all foodcrops at the same time.
In other words, people denied health care for their children through S-CHIP and the defeat of Measure 50 are paying higher taxes so we can give the money to Archer Daniels Midland and its ilk to make agro-fuels so the rich can drive around in Bend and Portland and in Boardman and claim that they are helping the environment.
What will it take to cause Oregon’s enviro outfits to wake up to the reality that they’ve been played like fiddles and are helping an immoral cause (agro-fuels)?
November 7th, 2007 at 9:49 am
How about a five year moratorium on greed, which is really the cause of this situation. And a moratorium on making biofuels a scapegoat for anythng that’s wrong with the world, and on tactics like saying if G.W. Bush likes it, it must be evil. Classic guilt by association, dished out with twisted rhetoric, and seasoned with obsession.
November 7th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I certainly agree that greed is the root issue in our agro-fuels push, and I’d be pleased to shut up about them — let’s end the subsidies to agro-fuels and stop helping starve the world to feed our SUVs.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I’ve never owned a SUV, thank god. If you can’t haul 4′x8′ plywood or sheetrock, where’s the ‘utility’? Driving habits also change with the SUV lifestyle, more speeding, talking on cell phones, tailgating, etc.
Unfortunately, no matter how good the technology or intentions, people will push the envelope too far, for all the wrong reasons. And who hasn’t been deprived by Corporations, has been compromised by drought and famine induced by global warming.