The Occasional Observer

We're learning an important fact about the mixture of government mandates, biofuels, and liberal self-righteousness: it's a toxic mixture that is taking lives.

Mark Steyn has captured the essence of the situation beautifully in his column, "Feed Your Prius, Starve a Peasant". First, on the questionable validity of the claims of our self-righteous ecoliberals and their parrots in the media:

For the past 10 years, we all have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the ecowarriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of "climate change." But let's take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately 1 degree. That's the "war": 1 degree.

Still, since the media has branded all who doubt these ecoliberals as flat-earthers, the government had no choice but to act to "protect" us all. And act they did:

The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from "biofuels" by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold 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.

All those "No Blood for Oil" types managed to convert horticulturalists into energy magnates. Ah, the irony.

Next comes the consequences. We always know that heavy handed government mandates create inefficiencies in the marketplace. We should have been able to guess the outcome here, and I'm sure some smart conservatives out there probably did. Mark Steyn gives us the cold hard facts about what our "eco-friendly" policies have done:

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?

Think this is mere exaggeration? Maybe some pawn of Halliburton out to distort the truth of the situation? Well, even MSNBC managed some actual reporting on the food supply situation, and came up with this headline this morning: "The New Economics of Hunger":

...[as] hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence [my emphasis]...

...The crisis, [the UN World Food Program] fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills...

Read the article if you'd like to see the rundown on the particulars each poor nation is facing. A few of the areas mentioned in the article: Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, North Korea and West Africa.

After getting in the required jab that global warming is the problem (in this case, via drought in Australia), they slip in some astounding facts:

...wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy.

This year, at least a fifth and perhaps a quarter of the U.S. corn crop will be fed to ethanol plants. As food and fuel fuse, it has presented a boon to American farmers after years of stable prices. But it has also helped spark the broader food-price shock.

Steyn sums up the situation nicely:

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.