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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population
  • Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:12:28 -0600


The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human
Population
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 by: Mike Adams
http://www.naturalnews.com/023091.html

(NaturalNews) It was one of the dumbest "green" ideas ever proposed: Convert
millions of acres of cropland into fields for growing ethanol from corn, then
burn fossil fuels to harvest the ethanol, expending more energy to extract
the fuel than you get from the fuel itself! Meanwhile, sit back and proclaim
you've achieved a monumental green victory (President Bush, anyone?) all
while unleashing a dangerous spike in global food prices that's causing a
ripple effect of food shortages and rationing around the world.

I think politicians need to spend less time bragging about their latest
greenwashing schemes and more time studying The Law of Unintended
Consequences. Because while growing fuel on cropland initially sounds like a
great idea, any honest assessment of the total impact leads you to the
inescapable conclusion that biofuels are largely a government-sponsored scam.
With a few exceptions (see below), biofuels produce no net increase in energy
output, and they cause food shortages while creating strong economic
incentives for the destruction of the very rainforests we desperately need to
stabilize the climate!

And now we're just starting to see the early signs of the economic and social
insanity that has been unleashed by this foolish pursuit of biofuels around
the world: Food rationing in Sam's Club stores in the U.S., rapidly-rising
prices on bread, rice and corn, and price spikes at cafeterias and
restaurants that depend on these staple ingredients. The price of rice has
tripled globally, unleashing riots in Haiti and Bangladesh, and the United
Nations has issued warnings that millions of people around the world now face
starvation because they can't afford to buy food. Americans are even starting
to hoard food once again, after years of avoiding basic preparedness
measures. (One benefit to all this, however, is that farmers are actually
getting paid decent prices for their crops now, after years of operating on
the verge of bankruptcy...)

Most biofuel efforts are a sham
Not all of these price spikes are due to the conversion of croplands to
biofuel fields, but much of it is. As a result, it's suddenly becoming
obvious to nearly everyone that the pursuit of biofuels, as currently
structured, is a grand greenwashing hoax. It doesn't produce more fuel than
it consumes, and it drives up food prices to boot!

Now, there are biofuels programs that really do work. The growing and
harvesting of sugar cane in Brazil, for example, provides an 8-to-1 return on
energy investment. But even that pursuit is tarnished by claims of unsafe
work environments and massive environmental pollution (the sugar cane fields
are burned before being harvested, a process that releases massive amounts of
CO2 into the environment).

The only truly promising biofuels technology available today is based on
microalgae. Feed CO2 to a vat of algae, and you can produce biofuels cheaply
and responsibly, without destroying the environment. But these programs are
only in experimental phases. Nobody is producing biofuels on a large scale
from algae farms (not yet, anyway).

And that leaves the great American breadbasket: The corn and wheat fields. It
is here that food is now being displaced by crops grown for biofuel
processing. So where a farmer used to grow corn as a food source, he's now
growing it to sell to a biofuel processing facility which turns the corn into
ethanol. Obviously, the laws of economics come into play here, meaning that
every bushel of corn used for biofuels production means one less bushel of
corn available for food. Factor in the laws of supply and demand, and you can
see that the more crops we use for biofuels, the higher the prices will rise
for food.

Politicians, it seems, have no understanding of economics. They need to study
the basics as they are presented in Henry Hazlitt's Book, Economics in One
Lesson, which is a Libertarian-oriented guide that explains basic economics
to anyone willing to learn. Economics is focused on the study of human
behavior, or more precisely, consumer choice. Now, it seems, consumers are
about to be faced with a choice they never wanted to have to make: Should I
buy fuel, or food?

In other words: Do I want to drive my car, or do I want to eat?

You can have fuel or food, but not both
Under a biofuels-focused agricultural policy, the same limited resources
(soil, sunlight and water, essentially) can be used for only one thing at a
time. You can't use the corn twice, obviously (you can't eat the corn and
process it for biofuels at the same time), so you've got to make a choice:
Will you grow the corn for fuel, or for food?

The more you grow for fuel, of course, the less food you have, and that
drives up food prices. But if you swing back the other way and grow more corn
for food to ease food prices, the fuel prices go up. Trying to solve both
problems at once is a bit like trying to pick up a wet watermelon seed with
your fingers: It keeps slipping to the side.

One thing that has become abundantly clear in all this is that the era of
cheap food and cheap fuel is over. I've written about this on NaturalNews,
where I use the term "food bubble" to describe the most recent era of cheap
food. As it turns out, cheap food is only made possible by cheap oil, and
with oil now approaching $120 a barrel (a price that virtually no one thought
possible just two years ago), food prices are simultaneously skyrocketing.
(Modern farming practices use a lot of fossil fuel. So does transporting food
across the country or around the world. Eat local, folks!)

Add to this the fact that global climate change is already underway, altering
weather patterns and creating floods, droughts and other agricultural
calamities, and you start to get the picture of just how bad things might
get. That's not even to mention the very serious problem of collapsing
honeybee populations due to a mysterious condition called colony collapse
disorder that's devastating honeybee populations across North America right
this minute. Honeybees, in case you didn't know, pollinate plants that
represent about 30% of all the calories consumed by Americans. That's about
one out of every three bites of your dinner, and it all depends on the "free"
work performed by honeybees -- bees who are apparently going on strike by
refusing to keep working for us.

Prepare for mass global starvation
So, to repeat, the food bubble is now starting to implode. What does it all
mean? It means that as these economic and climate realities unfold, our world
is facing massive starvation and food shortages. The first place this will be
felt is in poor developing nations. It is there that people live on the edge
of economic livelihood, where even a 20% rise in the price of basic food
staples can put desperately-needed calories out of reach of tens of millions
of families. If something is not done to rescue these people from their
plight, they will starve to death.

Wealthy nations like America, Canada, the U.K., and others will be able to
absorb the price increases, so you won't see mass starvation in North America
any time soon (unless, of course, all the honeybees die, in which case
prepare to start chewing your shoelaces...), but it will lead to significant
increases in the cost of living, annoying consumers and reducing the amount
of money available for other purchases (like vacations, cars, fuel, etc.).
That, of course, will put downward pressure on the national economy.

But what we're seeing right now, folks, is just a small foreshadowing of
events to come in the next couple of decades. Think about it: If these minor
climate changes and foolish biofuels policies are already unleashing alarming
rises in food prices, just imagine what we'll see when Peak Oil kicks in and
global oil supplies really start to dwindle. When gasoline is $10 a gallon in
the U.S., how expensive will food be around the world? The answer, of course,
is that it will be triple or quadruple the current price. And that means many
more people will starve.

Fossil fuels, of course, aren't the only limiting factor threatening future
food supplies on our planet: There's also fossil water. That's water from
underground aquifers that's being pumped up to the surface to water crops,
then it's lost to evaporation. Countries like India and China are depending
heavily on fossil water to irrigate their crops, and not surprisingly, the
water levels in those aquifers is dropping steadily. In a few more years (as
little as five years in some cases), that water will simply run dry, and the
crops that were once irrigated to feed a nation will dry up and turn to dust.
Mass starvation will only take a few months to kick in. Think North Korea
after a season of floods. Perhaps 95% of humanity is just one crop season
away from mass starvation.

The carrying capacity of planet Earth has reached its apex
The truth about all this, folks, is that the resources on our planet can only
support a limited population, and I think we've over-populated the planet to
a point where we're wiping out non-renewable resources at an alarming rate.
This means a population correction is due. When there are too many people
consuming too much food, using up too much water and burning too much oil,
you can get away with a rapid expansion for a little while (a few decades,
perhaps), but eventually reality kicks in and there's a global population
correction that brings the population size back down to levels that can be
sustained on the planet.

It's not a pretty picture. We're talking about the loss of a billion human
lives, perhaps more. This is what's coming. It's as predictable as the laws
of gravity. When you over-populate a planet and use up all the resources, the
population eventually finds itself in a resource panic, and mass death
ensues. You can observe the same thing with colonies of bacteria on a
nutrient-rich petri dish: They will expand at an accelerating rate,
multiplying their numbers until there's no more food left in the petri dish,
and then they will experience a massive die-off. You might say that human
beings are smarter than bacteria, and that's true, but as current events are
clearly demonstrating, they're not much wiser! They still doom themselves to
the same stupid fate by refusing to look at the long-term implications of
their actions.

Humans are really good at making babies and eating food, but they're terrible
at thinking even ten years ahead about the implications of their present-day
decisions. That's why the global population control masterminds call people
"feeders and breeders," by the way. Those are the two things human beings do
extremely well: Fornicate and clean their plate. (Not necessarily in that
order, though...)

The economies of our world have, sadly, been based on economic models that
strongly encourage this kind of consumption and growth. We live in a
"throwaway economy," where people are encouraged to consume and expend as
much as possible. No corporation makes money teaching people how to use less.
And so we've pushed for aggressive expansion since about the 1950's: Build
more, eat more, consume more. We've turned farm lands into housing tracts,
and rainforests into biofuel fields. We've over-fished the oceans,
over-farmed the soils and over-extended ourselves to the point where a
population correction is inevitable. We, the human race, have painted
ourselves into a desperate corner, and the simple fact of the matter is that
unless we quickly discover some new energy technology that provides the world
with cheap, plentiful energy, we are headed straight towards a global
population implosion that will leave a billion or more people dead.

And biofuels, of course, are no answer for this problem. You cannot grow
enough corn to solve the problems of an expansionist, imperialistic race of
beings (that's us humans) who have taken over the planet like a cancer tumor,
wiped out countless species, destroyed huge swaths of natural rainforests,
poisoned the oceans and rivers, polluted the skies and, at every opportunity,
betrayed the very Earth that has given us a home in the first place. Humans
can betray Mother Nature for a while, but in the end, we will pay a dear
price for our own arrogance, greed and lack of vision. The human race is
being sent back to kindergarten, where it needs to learn some basic lessons
about living in harmony with the planet. Lessons like: Don't use up all the
resources in a few generations. Don't think you're smarter than nature. And
never forget how much Mother Nature does for us all for free! (Like
pollinating the crops, producing oxygen, cleaning the air, water, etc. Read
the book Mycelium Running to learn more...)

In time, we will either learn these lessons, or we will perish. It's really
as simple as that. And all these suddenly-popular "save the planet" efforts
we've seen by corporations recently are just a joke. We can't save the
planet. The planet will be fine after we're gone, folks. What we're trying to
save here is human civilization. The very idea that we think we can "save the
planet" is arrogant all by itself. All we can do is respect the planet and
find ways to live with it as polite guests living on a generous host.

Whether humans survive the next hundred years or not, planet Earth certainly
will. And frankly, the planet will do much better without us. With humans
gone, the Earth would quickly be restored to a vibrant, pristine state, full
of life and abundance. The Earth doesn't need us, folks. But we, of course,
certainly need the Earth. The real question is this: Can we learn to play
nice and treat the Earth with respect? If not, we won't be around much longer
to worry about it.

Nature needs to be granted legal standing
One final thought: I am an advocate of the idea that Mother Nature needs to
be granted legal standing. I believe that humans do not automatically "own"
nature, and that we cannot simply cut down forests, bulldoze mountainsides,
fish the oceans, build dams and engage in other highly disruptive activities
without first getting permission and paying royalties to a global Mother
Nature Authority that stands up for the rights of the planet. Nature is not
ours to own or destroy. We, as the guests on this planet, have no right to
simply assume ownership over other living systems on this planet and exploit
them for our own financial gain. The "destroy and consume" model of free
market enterprise is simply not sustainable, folks. It does not lead us to a
happy future; it leads to our own destruction.

Or, put another way, over the last hundred years or so, mankind has committed
countless acts of violence against nature. It has pursued a policy of
committing atrocities against Mother Nature -- a kind of genocide against
anything non-human (animals, plants, fish, etc.). Humans have proven
themselves to be, by far, the most violent and destructive life forms to ever
exist on this planet. And yet paired with that violence, humans are an infant
species, with little or no foresight, with virtually no ability to see the
future implications of their own actions. We are, in a sense, the dumbest
intelligent creatures ever to walk the face of this Earth.

We can land a man on the moon, but we can't even prevent our own rainforests
from being clear-cut by soybean farmers and cattle ranchers. We can develop
high-tech medicines, but we can't even openly recognize the more powerful
medicines found in a simple dandelion plant. We can create amazing computers
and televisions and internet technologies the beam information across the
globe at the speed of light, but we pollute those information pathways with
corporate ads for useless stuff and dangerous medicines that only make our
fellow humans beings less enlightened. We are capable of so much, and yet we
have accomplished so little. We are, by any honest assessment, a race of
little children, running around the planet with far too much power and not
nearly enough maturity. We're like a band of infants with flamethrowers.

Frankly, we don't deserve this planet, and Mother Nature is about to take it
away from us. It's time for us to either grow up, or perish. And all these
people who say "we have to protect the economy, not the environment" should
probably just be rounded up and shipped off to Mars where they can play with
the Martian dust all they want until they finally get the picture.

###

About the author: Mike Adams is a holistic nutritionist with a mission to
teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and
has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides,
reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and
improving personal health around the world. Adams is an honest, independent
journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he
writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a
maker of energy efficient LED lights that greatly reduce CO2 emissions. He
also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called
BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer
advocacy programs. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter
software company that develops software used to send permission email
campaigns to subscribers. Adams is currently the executive director of the
Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and enjoys outdoor
activities, nature photography, Pilates and adult gymnastics. Known on the
'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and
personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org




  • [Livingontheland] The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population, Tradingpost, 04/23/2008

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