By Ernest Istook, WorldNet Daily
Drought. War. Poverty. These are leading causes of hunger, according to the United Nations. Soon we may add another. Ethanol.
Across the globe, people are discovering it’s a new contributor to world hunger. Led by the United States, governments are paying companies billions to make ethanol from corn and other crops. The result: these crops are diverted from the food supply, creating artificial shortages and higher prices. Even record harvests haven’t suppressed food prices. Instead, prices are soaring to all-time highs. Corn that traded around $2 a bushel just two years ago is now well over $5 a bushel. The impact ripples through the food chain of milk, butter, eggs, flour, pasta and everything else, because dairy cattle, beef cattle, poultry and swine depend on the corn for their feed. When chicken feed doesn’t cost chicken feed anymore, then neither does anything else. Other grains, like wheat, are also at record highs because farmers are planting less wheat and more corn, thanks to the ethanol incentives. Less supply, plus more world demand, means higher prices for wheat products, too, from flour to bread to pasta.
Full-scale food riots may arise in some parts of the world, as more and more grain is diverted into fuel production. The Earth Policy Institute reports that ethanol-related food protests occurred last year in Mexico, Italy, Pakistan and Indonesia. A price-driven stampede killed three and injured 31 at a supermarket in China. “We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history,” the EPI proclaimed in January. “The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.” EPI’s president, Lester R. Brown, says, “We’re putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm. The result is that more people will go hungry.” Read more here.
Ernest Istook is recovering from serving 14 years in Congress, and is now a Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Stuart Tomlinson, The Oregonian
The controversial head of the Oregon Climate Service—stripped of the “state climatologist” title last year by Gov. Ted Kulongoski—announced today that he will retire effective May 1. In February 2007, Kulongoski asked the president of Oregon State University to stop George Taylor from calling himself the state climatologist because of Taylor’s skeptical stance on global warming. Taylor, who has a master’s degree in meteorology and runs the state-funded Oregon Climate Service, has been widely known as Oregon’s state climatologist since 1991. Technically, however, the position was discontinued along with federal funding in the late 1980s. The climate service tracks weather and generates maps from its offices at OSU.
“I’m walking out voluntarily—it’s good timing for me,’’ Taylor, 60, said this morning. “I’m going out willingly.” Taylor said he believes climate change is a combination of natural factor and human factors. “I don’t deny that human activities affect climate change,” he said. “But I believe up to now, natural variations have played a more important role than human activities.” Those views didn’t sit well with Kulongoski, who believes the science increasingly points to human activity as the most likely cause of global warming. He has appointed task forces of well-known Oregon scientists and business leaders to advise him on climate change
Taylor said he will continue to work as an independent consultant, with an emphasis on extreme precipitation and precipitation analysis at his home in Corvallis. He said he has nothing but fond memories of his 19 years at OSU. “There have been a lot of nice, supportive people,’’ he said. “It’s been fun.” See more here.
For more examples of the intimidation skeptics face, see this link.
By Keith Lockitch, for SPPI
Many people are calling for drastic political action to cope with climate change. But the authors of a new book, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, go much further, claiming that global warming can be effectively dealt with only by “an authoritarian form of government.” In an article promoting the book, co-author David Shearman praises China’s recent ban on plastc shopping bags, expressing special admiration for its authoritarian quality. “The importance of the decision,” he writes, “lies in the fact that China can do it by edict and close the factories.” “Views like this reveal an ugly and ominous aspect of the political frenzy surrounding global warming,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, a resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute.
“While few global-warming activists are willing--as Shearman is--to come out in favor of openly dictatorial policies, the kinds of laws and regulations that activists do call for will hand a comparably frightening degree of control over our lives to politicians and environmentalist bureaucrats. “In one form or another, every minute of our every day involves the emission of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas claimed to be the cause of climate change. Every moment we spend running our computers, lighting our homes, powering countless laborsaving appliances, driving to work or school or anywhere else--we are using industrialscale energy to make our lives better. “But global-warming activists want our use of the fossil fuels that provide the major source of that energy to be strictly controlled by the government and severely curtailed, no matter the harm that causes.
Read more here.