Ethanol Fuel Additives: Bad
This post is a follow-up to Wednesday’s post, in which I talked about the possible effects of global warming.
One obvious effect already occurring that I didn’t mention was the growth of ethanol as a popular fuel additive. Since ethanol is made from crops like corn, it’s driving up food prices all over the world, stirring up food riots, and causing many poor people to starve.
It sounds like I’m over-simplifying it, but I’m really not. From the New Statesman (I added the bold font):
What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world’s rich consumers.
The message could not have been clearer if the Prime Minister [of Great Britain], Gordon Brown, had personally put a torch to a pyre of corn and rice in Parliament Square: even as you take to the streets to protest your empty bellies and hungry children, we will burn your food in our cars.
Next year, the use of US corn for ethanol is forecast to rise to 114 million tonnes - nearly a third of the whole projected US crop. American cars now burn enough corn to cover all the import needs of the 82 nations classed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as “low-income food-deficit countries”. There could scarcely be a better way to starve the poor.
I don’t know if the environmental extremists care. Like many people at PETA who value animal rights over human rights, Mother Earth is the unholy goddess of extreme environmentalists. This person used the environment as a reason to kill her unborn baby. It’s like ancient Mayans making infant sacrifices at the altar of Gaea.
“So what if people are starving? The earth is suffering, man! To make an omelette you gotta break some eggs! And then put those eggs in your gas tank!”
Understand the crazy environmentalist mindset here. They have campaigns for birth control that talk about having less babies as a way to help the environment. They’re FOR population control. Less humans means less pollution. To them, ethanol is a double wammy of cleaner fuel AND less consumers.
Sick, no?
To these extremists, global warming has taken the level of sacred crusade in which all kinds of sacrifices make sense. To them, it’s holy war against carbon dioxide. “People are starving? Well, wars have casualties.”
Take, for example, Time Magazine’s recent cover, which used a “green” border instead of its usual red. I put up a picture of it to the right.
If my “holy war” metaphor sounded extreme, take into consideration that this cover takes the iconic image of soldiers putting up a U.S. flag after fighting through enemy fire, and substitutes a [bleeping] tree in for the flag.
A lot of marines are upset about this.
For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism.
The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green “the new red, white and blue.”
Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”
Mates went a little further and weirder after that, but I took it out. I think Time can plead ignorance or stupidity on this one, but it’s indicative of the mindset that has allowed ethanol fuel additives to become the scourge of the hungry.
So think about that when you’re filling up your next tank of gas and you’re tempted to join the “green fuels” and “biofuels” craze.
When it comes to global warming, do you trust people to solve their own problems, or do you think people are the enemy?
I was going to write more about fear-based political policies this week, but that will have to wait until next week. I wanted to address ethanol specifically.
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