Even the UN is not biased enough towards climate alarmism for the New York Times, which yesterday bowdlerized a joint statement on the present food crisis from three UN food organizations.
The UN statement is divided into short term and long term concerns. Included in the latter is “climate change,” which the Times dutifully quotes, and it quotes the UN’s long term solutions:
Low-income countries that rely on agricultural imports should invest in safety-net programs for the poor, they recommended. They also urged countries to bolster local production.
But the reason for the urgent joint statement is the short term concern—the immediate food crisis—in response to which the food organizations urge a very specific and immediate policy change that goes completely unmentioned in the Times report, despite it’s being endorsed by a whole further alphabet soup of food and policy organizations. Here is their joint appeal:
Lastly, we also need to review and adjust where applicable policies [are] currently in place that encourage alternative uses of grains. For example, adjusting biofuel mandates when global markets come under pressure and food supplies are endangered has been recommended by a group of international organizations including FAO, IFAD, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, WFP, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. That recommendation, made to the 2011 G20 summit in Paris, still stands today.
When crop failures threaten famine, STOP REQUIRING EVERYONE TO BURN FOOD AS AUTOMOBILE FUEL, at least temporarily. Okay, so they used more subtle language and they put this appeal at the end of their short statement, not the beginning, but this is the primary recommendation from all of these groups and publicizing it is the primary purpose of the UN’s joint statement. It is the only part of their statement that responds to the immediate crisis that the joint statement was issued to address, but the implied criticism of current green mandates—that they make no allowance for simple humanity—is apparently too heretical for anti-journalist Annie Lowrey and her anti-editors at the Times.
It’s not like people don’t know that government is mandating and subsidizing the burning of a huge amount of food as fuel, something that is regularly urged and lauded in the Times itself. Even the retro-grade Scientific American took note last year that more of the U.S. corn crop now goes to ethanol production than to any other use, and even an NYT reader can figure out that if you burn it you can’t eat it.
Still, to the green religionist, any mention of a possible downside to “green” biofuels is off-message. The job of the “green” journalist is to suppress all such contra-indications, even when the world’s food organizations are crying out en masse for the merest accommodation of poor people’s needs, so when the greenie gets a chance to report on that outcry, she hides it. Yes, this is journalistic malpractice, but green must be protected from any possible aspersion/correction as it drives full speed into a pole. These people are flat insane.
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Oh lordy… just stop subsidizing biofuels, and let the people themselves (ie-market forces) decide to what extent the people want to burn it, eat it, or feed it to cows and then eat them.
The Times is less moral than it imagines itself to be. Food for fuel is a sin just about all of the time, certainly now.
I couldn’t agree more.
This is the sort of moral myopia that occurs when you substitute an ideology for the concerns and thoughts of real people. Apparently the left-liberal intelligenstsia are as infatuated with power and control as they ever were in times past- their anti-democratic record speaks for itself- recently they have merely transfered old methods to the new great green cause
OMG … don’t these ppl understand ANYTHING!!??
Economics (subsidies for ethanol artificially changing the price), energy (as in energy balance, efficiency and our sources thereof), agri-business (farm subsidies et al), politics (the MANDATING of the use ‘oxygenates’ like ethanol w/o consideration of the effects and esp. in light of our present economic situation) … is the ‘Newspaper of record’ that totally clueless?
Or, have they ‘drank the koolaid’ and the emperor is truly fully clothed in their view?
(The comments, questions above are all rhetorical, mandating the new use of the following tag:)
/RHETORICAL (i.e. and IOW: “RHETORICAL COMMENT NOW ‘BOOLEAN-ED’ OFF”)
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I just got back from the grocery store, and I’m having trouble seeing any evidence of a “food crisis”. Fact is, we throw enough food away from spoilage to feed a small country…
You may have seen another New York Times article, “The Baffling Nexus of Climate Change and Health” by Dylan Walsh. A rare fungus in 2004 along the Pacific Northwest and West Nile virus outbreak this year are of course, a result of climate change. Experts stated in a different article on the 2004 fungus that it may have been carried by imported trees and plants. Of course the New York Times did not mention this. Are these articles sole purpose to angry up the blood?
even an NYT reader can figure out that if you burn it you can’t eat it.
Actually you can, or at least animals can as this Reuters report explains.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/09/05/us-usa-ethanol-farmbankers-idINBRE88413O20120905
It also highlights the significant risks to the banking system that biofuels have caused.
I really wish I didn’t have to say “I told you so’, but I did.
Next year is going to be very hard on the worlds poor. There are going to be revolutions all over the place.
Perhaps there would be more food to go round if there were just one UN food agency rather than three….
If someone would pay me $50 to burn my hamburger, I would do it and buy lobster instead. That is the current status of subsidizing biofuels. It doesn’t even touch the issue of water wastage for the fermentation processes. We are not just burning coal, but also flushing our drinking water down the drain. Of course, if someone paid me enough to flush drinking water down the drain…
I meant “burning corn”. We should be burning coal, of course.
The brewing of ethanol for fuel does not consume all of the corn feedstock. The leftovers DDGS are used in animal feed. It contains the the leftovers form the yeast that is high in vitamins, it contains kernel oils, etc. The starches and sugars are what is converted into ethanol. DDGS is used in dairy, and poultry feed and has partially replaced soy where it is available at a lower price.
The corn that is used for ethanol and feed is not the type of corn that you can buy at he supermarket for human consumption.
MattN you ignorant smuck,
Of course there is not a food shortage in the US (or other “1st world” nations). What you don’t seem to realize is that we have been supplying many of the poorer nations with food from our surpluses. Now we are burning much of that surplus, causing shortages (and higher prices) in those nations that are dependent on us. Open your eyes and your heart man!
“… the New York Times, which yesterday bowdlerized a joint statement …”
Sorry, I don’t see it. Of necessity journalists summarize; if they did not we’d have no need of them and would simply print press releases in toto. There’s an economic argument to be had about central planning, price fixing, subsidy, and such with regard to which resources acquire which prices in which economies and what effects that has on the use of those resources. Within that, and without regard to climate change, there’s little unexpected in that the UN solution is not less central planning but less ignorant central planning. For which the UN statements presented both by the Times and yourself demonstrate that even the UN can trip over the self obvious from time to time. Even when the only choices are ‘more ignorance’ and ‘less ignorance’ within some scope.
In a broader sense, the only polities that can waste time navel gazing about what plant food might do to the rain are precisely those that have no pressing socioeconomic issues about acquiring and distributing people food. So it’s hardly shocking that the Fireball Earth set would attempt to sign-off on the recommendations of the Feed The Poor set within the UN.
Wasn’t Stalin guilty of the same thing: holding on to a terrible idea that caused people to starve to death, as opposed to acknowledging his mistake?
If the Green Movement does not want to be viewed as mass murderers by history, they really need to stop acting like unintelligent communist dictators.
Imagine a situation where a farmer planted a field of maize. He had to run the 140hp diesel tractor over the ground a couple of times to prepare it. Then he had to plant the seed and the energy intensive fertiliser. He had to run over the ground a couple more times with a sprayer and a bit of nitrogen fertiliser. Eventually a nice tall crop of maize is standing. Nice fat juicy cobs of corn.
Then the whole lot is gathered up and trucked off to a huge coal fired power plant. The entire crop is then burnt along with a few hundred thousand tons of coal that day.
Would anyone be outraged if this was contrasted with the usual pictures of starving Africans?
What I have described is actually MORE efficient than what is happening. In reality a lot more energy goes into processing the crop into alcohol and the energy in the alcohol is a lot less than would have been realised from burning the whole crop.
So bad as the above scenariou appears, reality is even worse. Yet somehow the picture of nice clean ethanol being poured into a ‘low-emission’ bio-fuel vehicle is the pinnacle of green goodness.
I have been publicly commenting on the folly of corn ethanol for over a decade.
Here is a recent sample:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/05/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-57/#comment-1054427
Time to End the Fuel Ethanol Mandate
Re: the Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/31/the-ethanol-mandate-drought-only-compounds-inherent-catastrophic-consequences/
With corn prices increasing to over $8 per bushel, it is surely time to end the ridiculous fuel ethanol mandate in the USA (and Canada). Almost 40% of the huge US corn crop is used for corn ethanol.
This food-to-fuel folly has driven up the cost of food worldwide, causing great suffering to the world’s poor – now poor AND HUNGRY.
This ethanol policy was energy-nonsense from the beginning – but now it is causing increased world hunger.
Oh, sorry – I forgot that these hungry people are all poor, so they don’t matter, apparently.
Apologies, Allan
Allan MacRae, P.Eng.
Calgary
________
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/24/epas-e-15-ethanol-plan-rammed-though-wont-work-in-many-cars/#comment-967790
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/29/canada-yanks-some-climate-change-programs-from-budget/#comment-939257
Excerpt:
In North America, our greatest folly has been corn ethanol. Now, almost 40% of the huge US crop is used for corn ethanol – about 130 million tonnes per year of corn goes into our gas tanks, forced into gasoline by government mandates. This folly has driven up the cost of food worldwide, at great cost to the world’s poor.
Grid-connected wind power, solar power and corn ethanol all require huge life-of-project subsidies to survive, and would go bankrupt the minute these subsidies cease. Many of the subsidies are in the form of mandates – forcing power companies and gasoline suppliers to include these costly and counterproductive enviro-schemes in their products, at great expense to consumers.
The radical environmentalists have been remarkably effective at forcing really foolish, costly and counterproductive schemes upon Western society. The backlash, when it comes, won’t be pretty.
When you hear the term “green energy”, it’s not about greening the environment – it’s all about the money.
The more extreme greens are not at all shy about stating their belief that that the world would be much better with a smaller population. Perhaps they see starvation as a feature and not a bug in their program.
And the GROWING of that ‘ethanol for fuel’ doesn’t utilize any prime growing land or water and doesn’t require any resources to plant, cultivate, fertilize or harvest and ‘silo’ til needed either … nor ‘incentives’ from the government to ‘enable’ that ‘science and economics’ project …
</SARC> (IOW: ‘SARCASM’ TAG BOOLEAN-ED OFF)
.
Hmmm
</SARC>
Allan MacRae says:
September 6, 2012 at 7:37 pm
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You sum it up nicely.
Well spoke. From stupid assumptions, stupid actions grow. Which must be stupidly rationalized.
Eventually, Reality Stomps.
The language of the press release demonstrates the trepidation with which the subject is raised in green bureaucratic circles. You can see how your average journalist would have difficulty analysing the point, and writing about it. But then, if they did understand it, they would ignore such heresy. /sarc
Wherever there is a mandate (i.e. force) there is distortion. That distortion was no doubt recognised, anticipated and debated in regards the ethanol policy, to nil effect.
Consider the probable distortion in mandatory policies as you vote.
Philip Bradley says:
September 6, 2012 at 6:44 pm
Partial quote:
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/09/05/us-usa-ethanol-farmbankers-idINBRE88413O20120905
It also highlights the significant risks to the banking system that biofuels have caused.
==============================
Thank you for the link.
That Reuters article by Christine Stebbins has more holes and BS in it than could be addressed in a blog comment. It would be fun to have it post as a leading article on WUWT.
On thing I would agree with not explicitly stated (Reuters) is that the farm bankers see a farm bubble and want to ride it. That bubble will be the next banking crises when it ultimately bursts and will be indirectly the result of government ethanol mandates. Then we can hear the “too big to fail” argument again.
ELIMINATE the ethanol mandate now! Forget about suspending it.