Killing Poor People in the Name of Climate Change
There are times when Mark Steyn’s columns are merely the most witty and engaging you are likely to read these days. Then, there are times when he lays aside the jests and turns his talent toward cutting through the fog and clutter around an issue like a white hot flame until the core is laid bare and exposed for all to see. This column on how the Cult of Global Warming has conned us into starving people all around the world is one of the latter. Here is the meat of his column.
Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”
This current drive toward biofuels is killing people. That is impossible for any reasonable person to deny. I wish I could tell you that magazines like Time, companies like NBC/Universal (whose “Green Week” was a joke the first time it tried it during a Sunday Night Football game), or people like Al Gore are acting out of goodwill. They aren’t. They’re acting out of a desire for more political power, pure greed, staggering ignorance, or a witches’ brew of all three.
We Americans, unfortunately, have swallowed the hype like it was ice cream and we’re letting them get away with murder. Literally. The hundreds of people who are dying now will be thousands later, and tens of thousands after that. I can darned well guarantee you that Time Magazine won’t write a feature article about how its deceitful drive toward pimping biofuels contributed to the deaths.
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Category: Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin', Oh, THAT liberal media.
[...] scarcity you say? Like the food scarcity and poorer nutrition that’s happening right now thanks to unjustified and half-baked solutions to a perceived global warming problem? How many more [...]
This is a good example of what happens when you try to force a pet issue into the context of an unrelated issue. You end up missing the big picture. Let's be clear, I think corn ethanol subsidies, like all agricultural subsidies, are a very bad idea. But are they really killing people? Not really. In fact they are a pretty small part of the problem.
First, are rising corn prices the problem? No, rising rice prices are the biggest problem. Rice is the world's most popular food item and its price has risen faster than any other grain. Yes, their have been some riots over corn and wheat, but most of the riots are about rice prices. But Mr. Steyn doesn't talk about rice, does he? The reason is obvious: rice isn't used to make biofuels. Nor is rice a substitute crop for either corn or sugar, the primary sources of biofuels. Rice fields need to be flooded at the
beginning of the growing cycle. If you do that to a corn field, the corn will rot and you will lose your crops. So you cannot convert a rice field to a corn field without expensive water control infrastructure. Even if the infrastructure changes were free, farmers still wouldn't do it because rice prices are rising faster than corn prices. So it's clear that the most important price increase has nothing to do with biofuels. But that doesn't fit Steyn's argument, so he ignores it.
So what's causing the rise in rice prices? There are some supply factors. The ten-year drought in Australia has caused rice production to fall by 98%, according to a recent NY Times article. The authors try to lay the blame there, but last year's cyclone in West Bengal and Bangladesh wiped out more rice than Australia ever produced. The article ignores that part of the problem because it doesn't fit their theory. There have also been droughts in Africa, but taken all together, the supply issues are not that much different than in any other year. There are always droughts and cyclones. The real problem is on the demand side. And it's not due to an increase in population, because rice production has risen at about the same rate as population. The real culprit here is the rising affluence of Asia. The growing affluence allows people in Asia to be able to afford to eat meat. And the demand for meat in Asia has surely skyrocketed. In
nutritional terms, meat takes about ten times the amount of grain to produce the same nutrition as the grain itself. This is creating an unusual demand spike that will take years to compensate for with increased production. But few among us are willing to admit that our meat consumption is really the primary cause of the problem. So, like Mr. Steyn, we invent other culprits.
Ahh, but that doesn't explain the rise in corn prices, does it? That is surely caused by ethanol production, right? Wrong. To understand this, we need to understand what corn is really used for. Only 15% of the worlds corn is used for ethanol. By comparison, 55% is used as feed to produce meat. By any reasonable standard, we should place at least three times the blame on meat than we place on ethanol. But most of us eat meat, so we don't want to hear about that, do we? So we say: "yeah, but meat production has always occurred, while ethanol is the new factor." While this is mostly true (whiskey has long been produced from corn), the increase in global meat consumption still accounts for a greater increase in corn demand. But there's another issue as well. One of the byproducts from producing ethanol from corn is feed for livestock. In fact, the ethanol byproducts are actually better nutrition for the animals than raw corn because it's easier to digest. So, we take corn that would have been fed to pigs and make ethanol out of it. Then we take the byproducts and feed them back to the pigs. There is a small nutritional loss in the system and there are assorted transportation costs as well. But the crowding out effect is much smaller than we would think. And much smaller than the overall rise in demand from meat consumption.
But the dirty secret here is that I've so far ignored the primary cause of the increase in corn prices: the collapse of the dollar. Measured in Euros, corn prices have risen fairly slowly. Roughly half of the current price increase is due to the decrease in the value of the dollar. For rice, it's less of a factor because rice has risen more sharply, but it's still a big one. But is anyone blaming the Treasury Department for people starving? Of course not. It would be unseemly to blame a Republican for the consequences of his policies. Of course, that affects the US price, but what about the rest of the world? Well, riots over corn are occurring mostly in Mexico, South America, and Central America. And those countries have currencies that have recently been performing even worse than the American dollar. So the exchange rate issue is even more accute for them. Which is why they're rioting.
The final problem with Steyn's argument is that he equates corn ethanol and biofuels. Corn ethanol is a very inefficient process, but sugar cane ethanol is not. The complaints about supply crowding that aren't particularly valid are even less valid for sugar cane. And Bush's favorite, switchgrass, grows on land that really isn't suitable for food production and produces no crowding effects. For once, George Bush actually got something right. But he is actually a closet environmentalist, so it's not really surprising he'd get it right on switchgrass. If Steyn wants to complain about corn ethanol, that's fine and I'll support him on it. But he should not blame all biofuels for the problems with corn ethanol. And he certainly shouldn't blame biofuels for the current food crisis. He should blame himself for voting for George Bush's weak dollar policy. And, unless he's a vegetarian, he should blame himself for eating meat. And I should listen to my own words and cut down on my meat consumption.
tom – that's a good analysis, but there are two things I see wrong with it. First, it does not account for the amount of land that had been growing other food crops which is not because it's now growing corn. YOu say that it is not happening, but it clearly is. One reason it is is because farmers can get a guarnateed price for their corn thanks to the government which has slapped yet another premium on the crop. better to get a price you know you can get than a price you think you can get, especially if the crop with the guaranteed price is easier to grow. Second, it doesn't take into account what happens when you link the price of food explicitly to the price of fuel. Those two things are directly influencing the price of food in other nations quite seriously.
"YOu say that it is not happening, but it clearly is."
I said it wasn't happening with rice. And it most certainly isn't happening with rice, because it isn't even close to being cost effective to make the switch. Yes, it is happening with other grains, but that has nothing to do with the primary food problem, which is rice. And no matter how much more corn you grow and how much less wheat you grow, it has absolutely nothing to do with the rice supply. They are completely unrelated.
As for the link of corn to fuel. Yes there's a link. But there's a greater link to the value of the dollar and to the much larger consumption of corn to produce meat. My argument is that corn ethanol is the third largest factor causing the price changes, but that we ignore the two larger problems. We do so because we don't want to admit that our dietary habits and fiscal mismanagement are killing people. It's easy to blame corn ethanol because nobody but Midwestern corn farmers and the politicians who appease them support it anymore.
I'm saying that because, right now, ethanol is something we can change nearly in an instant. One of my posts today put the cost increase on food at between 15 and 20 percent, thanks to ethanol. If we simply dropped the subsidies and the requirements for ethanol to be in gasoline, we could eliminate that extra cost.
That doesn't solve all the problems, but it certainly does take the easiest problem to solve out of the picture.
No, the easiest part of the picture is to change our Federal Reserve Policy. The deliberate devaluation of the dollar to mask poor economic performance is the primary cause of high food prices for everyone outside of Asia. In Asia, there is nothing we can do. Because they have stronger currencies that are not closely tied to the dollar, the price increase of rice is not really being caused by the weak dollar policy. Nor is it being caused by corn ethanol. That price increase is solely caused by the rise in meat demand. And we really can't change that.