Indeed, the world produces more than just enough to go round. Allowing for all the food that could be eaten but is turned into biofuels, and the staggering amounts wasted on the way, farmers are already producing much more than is required—more than twice the minimum nutritional needs by some measures. If there is a food problem, it does not look like a technical or biological one.Biofuel and it's cousin "sustainable" materials strikes me as a glaring example of how 21st century man has gone stark, staring mad. Last week, I was watching a documentary*. On the telly was a young American gentleman talking to his audience of alleged adults as if they were five-years old about how the Ford Motor Company is building a car in which the plastic is made out of soy beans.
It was at this point that I wanted to tear my hair out and throw the dog out the window. These grinning ninnies were all incredibly proud of how they weren't using nasty petroleum to make plastic. No, they were using soy beans. Never mind the fact that Henry Ford Primus was fiddling about with that back in the '20s, I couldn't for the life of me understand why this was in any way progress. In the 20th century, chemists spent decades working like Trojans to come up with ways to stop using food for industrial purposes. Dyes, adhesives, plastics, fuel, and all manner of other things were once made out of foodstuffs. You know, things people eat and if they don't get enough of, they wither and die. This was seen as a bad thing, so science was tasked with alternatives. The result? Millions of tons of food freed up to feed people and fatten livestock.
Of course, this meant a better standard of living and that is anathema in Blessed Gaia's eyes, so now scientists are told that we must march back into the 19th century and leave the world a hungrier place. Serves the greedy little bourgeois bastards right for being alive.
*Heaven knows why. I think it was out of pure astonishment. Documentaries, especially on PBS, seem to have more in common with Sesame Street than The Ascent of Man these days.
2 comments:
The One and his various fellow "idealists" want us all riding trains instead of driving cars, eating only "approved" foods, and powering everything with windmills and solar cells. And, I suspect, only reading "The Utne Reader" as opposed to, say, "The Weekly Standard". Enroute to, I suspect, living in caves.
They apparently think the 1800s, and before that the Bronze Age or Stone Age, were wonderful times. I can only conclude they are as ignorant of actual history as they are of everything else.
The amazing thing about this lot's delusional state is that they believe they can take us back to any of several brutally Darwinian times in history, without the attendant violence. Once you start restricting peoples' access to the necessities of life (food, heat, etc.), they tend to go to any lengths to obtain what they can in those categories. Add in homicidal mystics (Islamists, environmentalists, etc.) and you have a recipe for disaster that would make Nostradamus blanch.
Or maybe that's what they really want. After all, they think there are too many people around as it is. (See Ehrlich, Paul, and Holdren, John.)
I am forced to conclude that this will not end well.
cheers
eon
You almost have to wonder why oil is held up as a cancerous blight on the Earth when it's something that was made deep within Mother Gaia her own self and we are on this constant search to create energy out of flapping pelican wings as the only way forward.
That's right, because it works.
If we ever needed proof that the "green" movement wasn't about creating energy but instead about creating a controlling way of life, we have to look no further than this burn-the-food nonsense
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