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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 5, 2011 21:46:15 GMT 1
From Roger Pielke Jr Maybe if we don't mention it no-one will notice Food Price Index (February data out today – you guessed it, another record high). What do they think is driving cereal prices upwards? The increase in February mostly reflected further gains in international maize prices, driven by strong demand amid tightening supplies, while prices rose marginally in the case of wheat and fell slightly in the case of rice.In other words, this is mainly about corn. And who’s the biggest corn exporter in the world? The United States. And where is 40% of US corn production going this year? Ethanol, for use in US car engines. rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/03/maybe-if-we-dont-mention-it-no-one-will.html
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 6, 2011 10:17:56 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 6, 2011 10:21:20 GMT 1
Indur Golkany says:
Yes, higher food prices are linked to, among other things, climate change, specifically to climate change policies — and the fear of climate change.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 21, 2011 12:36:47 GMT 1
How we engineered the Food CrisisHenry Miller guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 March 2011 14.30 GMT Thanks to dysfunctional regulation of genetic engineering and misguided biofuels policy, the world's poorest are going hungry www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/20/food-farmingThe Guardian looks at the effects of misguided greenery on poor people, and in particular how scaremongering over GM crops is leading to massive hikes in food prices.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 21, 2011 12:40:21 GMT 1
Mac on Bishop Hill says
The big problem for the Greens is that they see the world's poor as being part of one big social experiment.
The West has gridded electricity, the environmentalists insist that world's poor use solar stoves and solar powered fridges.
The West has DDT, and uses it, the environmentalists insist that the world's poor use only mosquito nets forcing people to live indoors after dark.
The West utilises mass food production methods, the environmentalists gave the world's poor bio-fuels.
It would be so blood funny if it weren't so bloody tragic!
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 23, 2011 20:32:06 GMT 1
Biofuel policy is causing starvation, says Nestlé bossBy Stephen Foley in New York www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/biofuel-policy-is-causing-starvation-says-nestl-boss-2250075.htmlSoaring food inflation is the result of "immoral" policies in the US which divert crops for use in the production of biofuels instead of food, according to the chairman of one of the world's largest food companies. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, lashed out at the Obama administration for promoting the use of ethanol made from corn, at the expense of hundreds of millions of people struggling to afford everyday basics made from the crop. Mr Brabeck-Letmathe weighed in to the increasingly acrimonious debate over food price inflation to condemn politicians around the world who seem determined to blame financial speculators instead of tackling underlying imbalances in supply and demand. And he reserved especially pointed remarks for US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, who he said was making "absolutely flabbergasting" claims for the country's ability to cope with rising domestic and global demand for corn. "Today, 35 per cent of US corn goes into biofuel," the Nestlé chairman told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York yesterday. "From an environmental point of view this is a nonsense, but more so when we are running out of food in the rest of the world. "It is absolutely immoral to push hundreds of millions of people into hunger and into extreme poverty because of such a policy, so I think – I insist – no food for fuel." Corn prices almost doubled in the year to February, though they have fallen from their peak in the pastfew weeks. Anger at rising food prices contributed to protests across the Middle East, and rising commodities costs were among the factors pushing UK inflation to 4.4 per cent in February, according to figures out yesterday. US exports account for about 60 per cent of the world's corn supply. Demand has surged as more people join the middle classes in emerging economies such as China and India, not just because these new consumers demand more food made from corn, but also because demand for meat has increased and livestock farmers need to buy more feed. Nestlé, the company behind Shredded Wheat, Nescafé and Aero chocolate bars, has been lobbying European regulators and governments around the world against setting high targets for biofuel use, even though many countries see the production of ethanol as a means of meeting obligations to cut carbon fuel emissions. The lobbying has fallen on deaf ears in the US, however. Ethanol production from corn is heavily subsidised, with output running at more than 13.5 billion gallons annually. Policies to promote its production are "absurd", Mr Brabeck-Letmathe claimed yesterday, and meeting a mooted global target of having 20 per cent of fuel demand with biofuels would involve increasing production by one third. "What is the result? Prices are going up. It's not very complicated," he said. "This question is now the number one priority for the G20 meeting in Nice, and the main thing we are going to do is fight against speculation. We are concentrating on the irrelevant." Speaking to farmers earlier this month, the Obama administration's agriculture secretary said he found arguments from the like of Nestlé "irritating". Mr Vilsack said: "The folks advancing this argument either do not understand or do not accept the notion that our farmers are as productive and smart and innovative and creative enough to meet the needs of food and fuel and feed and export." Mr Brabeck-Letmathe was chief executive as well as chairman of Nestlé until splitting the roles in 2008. He is also on the board of luxury goods maker L'Oréal, the investment bank Credit Suisse and oil company ExxonMobil. Speaking at the CFR yesterday, he also advocated the idea of setting a price for water used in agriculture, as a means of more efficiently allocating scarce resources. And he suggested that alternative sources for biofuels could be algae and stems of harvested corn.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 27, 2011 10:20:37 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 27, 2011 10:41:12 GMT 1
Figure 1. Food and Protein per capita. The LDCs are the “Least Developed Countries”, the poorest of the world’s countries. Red and orange are total food supply (right scale). Dark and light blue are protein (left scale). DATA SOURCE Let’s start by considering the real issue. People eat a host of things, not just grains. So the issue is not the number of kilogrammes of grain produced per person. That’s only part of the story. The real issue is, how well are we feeding the ~ 7 billion people of the world?........ Has global grain production per capita been “falling for years”? The observations say no. Globally, it peaked at just above 350 kg per person around 1980 and has dipped less than 10% and come back up since then. For the LDCs, on the other hand, their domestic cereal grain production was unable to keep up with their domestic population growth until the early 1990s. Since then, due in part to decreasing population growth rates, LDC grain production per capita has been rising steadily. There’s no sign of any recent change in that rising trend. Anything is possible tomorrow, of course. But there’s no sign of falling grain production from temperature or any other cause..... PS – The continued ability of the world to feed itself, despite adding a total of four billion people to the planet in the last fifty years, is an unparalleled and largely unrecognized success for humanity. I am so tired of people like McKibben not only not acknowledging that, but going so far as to claim that the trend has reversed and that things are getting worse. That’s nonsense. In terms of world nutrition, things are better than they have ever been, even for the poorest countries. Not only that, but they continue to improve. That’s a huge success. So rather than incessant whining about how terrible things are, how about we take some pride in that success, and think about what it is we’ve done right to achieve that, and how to do more of whatever that was that got us here? more here by willis Eschenbach nominated 'Climate Communicator of the Year'! wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/26/farmers-versus-famine/
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 27, 2011 11:03:59 GMT 1
Walt Stone on WUWT says: March 26, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Every time I fill my car with 13 gallons of gasoline diluted with 10% ethanol, I figure I’m burning up 34.2 pounds of corn. That’s corn already removed from the cob, mind you. I always wonder how much corn meal that would make.
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Post by louise on Mar 27, 2011 11:53:15 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 27, 2011 11:56:39 GMT 1
And your point is?
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Post by louise on Mar 27, 2011 12:03:14 GMT 1
Food prices have increased at a much faster rate than either ethanol production or population increase yet show remarkable correlation to extreme weather events such as the Russian heatwave last year that damaged the Russian grain harvest.
Follow the link I gave and you can see the analysis laid out.
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Post by rsmith7 on Mar 27, 2011 22:32:24 GMT 1
So the fall in production caused by the russian heatwave is ok yet the fall in production due to eco-fuel nonsense is spurious? A true zealot.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 28, 2011 0:20:40 GMT 1
Food prices always rise when weather spoils harvests. Supply and Demand. So what's new?
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Post by marchesarosa on Apr 6, 2011 16:43:59 GMT 1
From Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist:
I call it my tourniquet theory and it goes like this: if you are bleeding to death from a severed limb, then a tourniquet may save your life, but if you have a nosebleed, then a tourniquet round your neck will do more harm than good. This metaphor can be applied to all sorts of scares and their remedies, but it is climate change that I have in mind. Over the past few years it has gradually become clear to me that climate change is a nosebleed, not a severed limb, and that the remedies we are subsidising are tourniquets round the neck of the economy.
Last month, the Government’s plan for a job-deterring carbon price floor, and an Australian official’s admission that even if the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, the temperature would not drop for several hundred years, reminded us that the pain could well outweigh the gain. Two new peer-reviewed scientific papers ram the point home. The first makes it clear just what a mild nosebleed climate change is proving to be; the second just what a lethal tourniquet climate change policy is. Note that this is different from arguing about whether climate change is real. Nosebleeds are real.
The nosebleed paper appeared in the Journal of Coastal Research (salute the web, in passing, for its extraordinary capacity for giving us access to such sources) and it concludes: “Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in US tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are . . . one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 [millimetres per year squared] accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by [three recent mathematical models].”
To translate: sea level is rising more slowly than expected, and the rise is slowing down rather than speeding up. Sea level rise is the greatest potential threat to civilisation posed by climate change because so many of us live near the coast. Yet, at a foot a century and slowing, it is a slight nosebleed. So are most of the other symptoms of climate change, such as Arctic sea ice retreat, in terms of their impact. The rate of increase of temperature (0.6C in 50 years) is not on track to do net harm (which most experts say is 2C) by the end of this century.
The tourniquet paper is from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons; its author, Indur Goklany, concludes: “The production of biofuels may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost disability-adjusted life years in 2010. These estimates are conservative [and] exceed the World Health Organisation’s estimates of the toll of death and disease for global warming. Thus, policies to stimulate biofuel production, in part to reduce the alleged impacts of global warming on public health, particularly in developing countries, may actually have increased death and disease globally.”
In short, biofuels are doing more harm than good by pushing people into malnutrition, which makes them more vulnerable to disease: a tourniquet round the neck of the poor. Not far from where I live, there is a biofuel plant on Teesside, and to my disgust I find that some of the wheat grown on my farm goes there after it’s sold. About 5 per cent of the world’s grain production is now going to make motor fuel rather than food, with the result that rich farmers like me get better prices, but poor Africans pay more for food.
Yet that 5 per cent of world grain has displaced just 0.6 per cent of world oil use, so biofuel is hurting the patient without even stopping the nosebleed.
Almost every other climate change policy suggested so far is similarly futile. Wind: costs a fortune, kills eagles and does not even reduce carbon emissions because of the need for fossil fuel back-up. Solar: the tariff paid for energy fed into the grid is so high that you might even make money if you shine off-peak electric lamps on your panels at night. Tidal, hydro: far greater impact on natural habitats than climate change. Wave: does not work.
As the world begins an historic switch from coal and oil to abundant natural gas (which the International Energy Agency now says will last for at least a quarter of a millennium), carbon emissions are bound to start falling in a decade or three. Electricity from gas produces 37 per cent of the carbon dioxide that electricity from coal produces, and cars running on natural gas produce 25 per cent less carbon emissions, not to mention costing half as much to run.
As the climate nosebleed dribbles down our collective chin, we will look back in horror on those who proffered a tourniquet for our collective neck.
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