What Took the Environmentalists So Long?

                          Ethanol and the Corn It Comes From

                                 (Image from evworld.com )

Environmentalists are objecting to biofuels?  Just what is going on?  Well, exactly what was predicted.

The hand-wringing is getting frantic.  Yesterday Simon Jenkins wrote in "The Cost of Green Tinkering is in Famine and Starvation" in The Guardian, that "Biofuels threaten food supplies, rain forest and climate - yet our leaders push them in the name of the environment" 

Jenkins begins:

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so.

Jenkins is not a lone voice.  The day before in The Guardian, environmentalist George Monbiot wrote about biofuels causing world hunger, with humane anguish and alarm.  Already, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the World Bank have all joined the hue and cry against the wicked biofuels that are causing world hunger.

What a change!  Only two or three short years ago, they supported the very enviromentalists who were demostrating, lobbying, pressuring and hounding governments to use alternative fuels to avoid global warming.  Finally, most governments caved in and started such programs.  Naturally, it took awhile for these new programs - mostly for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel - to come online.

But also at the very same time, a few years back, hundreds of scientists who opposed the concept of global warming warned about the many problems of biofuels..  They pointed to the self-evident fact that using crops for fuel, not food, would lead to increased world hunger.  They were dismissed, including by all the above-named media.

Now after just two years, those predictions have come true.  Already 37 countries are in a "hunger crisis," which is expected to get worse.  Oddly, that also happens to be just two short years after U.S. ethanol subsidies started.  About that time, the Brits also planned their program to force biofuels to be added to all fuels.  That program finally came online 3 days ago.

Now the leftist Guardian, environmentalist to its toes, has been running articles that practically scream out against the same buifuels they once thought were so necessary, because, just as predicted, they are causuig world hunger.

Excuse me, but what took the environmentalists and their media supporters so long?. Shouldn't they be publicly repenting their previous arrogance and eating a little crow? 

It might help people's heads to stop spinning.

Comments

[Norm]

Good post Gerry...

I've been away from my ISP and have not been able to 'SEND' emails (although I can receive).
Thought I'd let you know just in case you've been wondering why I haven't been reponding lately.
(While on the road I use my yahoo mailing address for SENDING)

Norm

ps: I should be heading back to Alabama in a few days.

[Ivan walters]

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I remember reading somewhere tht even if all of North America was planted in corn it still would not produce enough ethanol to supply the USA's energy needs, so pushing corn based ethanol as a solution is just down right stupid!