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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Zeke, I have two questions:
1) Is jimlion correct when he says that most of the crops used for fuel is actually used for feeding livestock? (and that the wasteproducts from that is what ends up as ethanol)
2) Do you propose we reduce the production of livestock feed? Should we all consider becoming vegans?
No. The corn-based ethanol mandate draws one-third of the corn supply away from other uses.
The ethanol mandates of the NFS also draws land away from competing crops. This all needlessly raises the prices for livestock and retail food world both domestically and world wide, with the poorest being the hardest hit.
The farmland used for ethanol mandates is properly used for wheat and corn and other grains, which animals and humans eat. Extra production can be stored for contingency situations and even used as aid.
Fuel for vehicles can be located in ANWR and in huge quantities off shore in the continental shelves.
correction: This all needlessly and arbitrarily raises the prices for livestock and retail food both domestically and world wide, with the poorest being the hardest hit.
@Bikedude
1) Is jimlion correct when he says that most of the crops used for fuel is actually used for feeding livestock? (and that the wasteproducts from that is what ends up as ethanol)
I did NOT say that!
Jeeez guys, this is not rocket science.
1 bushel corn = 56 pounds
Approximately 39 pounds starch per bushel converted into 2.8-2.9 gallons of ethanol leaving
17 pounds of Dried Distillers Grain (DDGs) used as animal feed
@AlbertKallal,
(and I worked with a Kallal from Jerseyville,)
“And someone has to stop giving out those day passes to people who escape from institutions, are off their meds for few hours, and manage to somehow come here to WUWT to get away making some post about some nonsense about how we should be using great productive farmland to burn fuel in our cars.
And, to be 100% fair, if some people do have extra corn to burn as fuel, then I respect that – but not a government program to force feed such a policy and use billions of tons of food in this process.”
So you want to restrict using farmland only for growing food…..hmmm……ok fine. So what do you propose we do with all the surplus that will inevitably result,—- and the grain price collapse that will ruin thousands upon thousands of farming operations forcing them into bankruptcy—which will cause a downward spiral of farmland values, wiping out billions in asset values—Agricultural supply/equipment companies embark on a brutal downsizing/merging path to survive destroying millions of jobs and depressing an already fragile U.S. economy.
Don’t think that would happen? It already has–it was called the ’80s, and my family lived through it, although many did not. The mid-80’s agricultural economic collapse’s cause can be shown to have many contributors, but the trigger was undisputably one event—when that peanut farmer- president Carter put a grain embargo on the then-Soviet Union in 1979, because of their invasion of Afghanistan.
All you Malthusians out there, wringing your hands about the coming food crisis and our inability to feed a growing world, do not have a clue how productive we are today, and that we have only touched the surface on the potential for the future. Direct consumable foods (ie. vegetables/fruits) are grown on a mere small fraction of the arable land availiable in the U.S. Without Ethanol and the RFS, our cereal grain production capacity far outstrips our consumption and is getting better(or worse) after every growing season. We had a drought this year—so what. Market forces are distributing where the grain needs to go and higher prices are incentivising farmers around the world to go into hyperdrive to meet the perceived demand. Next year, we will more than likely be awash with surplus grain and lower prices—and I, or some of my collegues will be out in D.C. argueing that an increase in the RFS mandate is warranted.
Agriculture will feed the world. Hunger is caused by lack of economic activity–which has been discussed on these pages many times. Over 90% of the world population lives on less than $2/day, that’s why there’s hunger. And the true perversion lies with the Grist.com/Motherjones/greenpeace/WWF–scumbags that think fewer humans is better. With their “save the world” policies whether it be global warming cap&trade, carbon tax or the policy du jour, they and their “useful idiots,” like Lisa Jackson, are perpetuating on the planet a genocide that is already making Mao, Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot’s efforts look amatuerish by comparison.
That’s what really at stake here. That’s why WUWT and the other folks standing up against economic tyranny in the form of “environmental protection” is so so important. Thank you Anthony for all your efforts.
RE: clipe: (September 7, 2012 at 5:48 pm)
Spector says:
September 7, 2012 at 12:03 am
Jeff Rubin is an almost eerily perfect example of the sort of expert people should not listen to — but do anyway.
I have seen that one too. He also appears to be among those that you might call ‘professional peak oil’ writers and speakers, such as Dr. Chris Martenson or ‘The Party is Over’ Richard Heinberg.
I do not think we should look forward to being like the ‘happy Danes’ paying 33 cents per kilowatt hour.
But resources do run out — nobody is advocating a ‘dig-baby-dig’ solution for the financial problems in the once golden state–even with gold at an all time high. I think our huge national debt puts also us in a competitive disadvantage is world competition for the resources we use. Your tax dollars have been committed for use to help someone else eventually buy the gasoline that you may not be able to afford. That is why the national debt could be denominated in barrels of oil going somewhere else.
The eventual future looks quite bleak unless someone like Dr. David LeBlanc or Kirk Sorensen can develop a safe, high-efficiency, liquid-fueled nuclear reactor or perhaps if a company like Star Scientific in Australia can develop a practical fusion reactor.
I do not believe that ‘Natural Power’ alone can support modern population levels–perhaps one of the driving factors behind the unrest that has erupted all over the world recently is the energy-cost-related, increasing cost of food among those who least can afford it. I suspect that sky-rocketing prices for carbon power will hit the third world first and hardest.