Food or Cars?
Just reading an article about the US government's plans to develop a parallel mechanism to the Kyoto Protocol to deal with global warming. I firmly hope it goes nowhere because as bad as Kyoto is (did you know that aviation is excluded from Kyoto?) any plan developed by the Bush Administration would be a nightmare.
Anyway this article mentioned how exited the US, Brazil and other countries are in developing biofuels or biodiesel as an alternative to imported oil. Despite their glad-handing and jubilation, biodiesel is a nightmare waiting to happen.
For one it's going to make the price of food soar. This will destroy the livelihoods of poor people in Canada and beyond. Mexico is already seeing the price of their staple, corn rise in response to rich North Americans' desire to drive "sustainably". I also found an article linking a rise in beer prices in Germany to biodiesel. This is only the beginning.
Most industrial food production already relies on huge energy inputs. Currently we are essentially eating oil and taking more from the earth than we put in. To produce say 100 food calories you have to input say 1000 oil calories. This is the definition of unsustainable. So if we're going to move to biodiesel we'll need to spend most of the harvest fueling up our giant agricultural machinery.
And what will be the result. Some will drive and continue to live high on the hog while others will starve. Sounds just to me! At the same time, I recognize that the human population on earth is highly dangerous and is endangering the survival of this most perfect world. We could do with a decrease in membership.
So I find this to be a sticky situation in terms of my moral approach to this violent gamble on biodiesel. If only we could step back and choose to decrease our population in a responsible and thoughtful way instead of creating new structures that will cause intense hardship and suffering.
But that would be giving our species too much credit. And is capitalist democracy even able to make these vital choices? Does the failure of Kyoto and the primacy of the "economy" demonstrate that this is the case?
Labels: Business, Civilization, Climate Change, Future, Peak Oil
posted by Mentat Oom at 11:01 PM
2 Comments:
Nice blog. Stimulating - and understandably enough: angry - thoughts. Keep on writing!
UJ
7:59 AM
hello mentat. may i make some points in response?
biodiesel is something the US wants and poorer countries with extensive poverty and infrastructure problems (like brazil, my current home) naturally want to supply biodiesel to the US at nice high prices. people like chavez and castro have already noted something along the lines of your observation: that is, that the price of (national) food will rise as food crops are switched for (international) fuel crops. that´s a valid point for a small country, but the arable areas in brazil are massive. just as brazil can´t resist selling giant amounts of soya to china, it doesn´t want to miss out on GWB´s latest weapon in the war against terror - maize in the SUV tank.
when you see poor, uneducated people struggling to improve their lives - to literally move from bicycle to motorcycle, to get out of violent, unhealthy shantytowns, to put electric light in their homes: changes of this order of magnitude - it is extremely difficult to mandate policy positions which make perfect sense in the west.
for example, it is crazy for brazilians to be so in love with meat. but they are, beef in particular. similarly beans. in this country of 200m people, the vast majority eat beef and beans twice a day, every day, without fail. i wd like to say there are interesting and groundbreaking ways to stop the march of soya farms and cattle ranches. but i cannot see it happening.
will the biodiesel and beef/beans stories collide? maybe. but given the "frontier" culture in brazil i think there is plenty of expansion left to come.
something we agree on is the population problem. abortion remains illegal here and although some leftwing politicians like to wave the "legalisation" flag, to excite some of their middle class anti-clerical supporters, all Brazil puts a pregnant woman on a pedestal. children are so adored that the idea of abortion is rejected not so much for religious reasons as for reasons of sentiment. when you realise that Pres. Lula has 20 siblings you see what the extent of the problem has been among the dispossessed. families of this size are no longer common but 7 or 8 is not unusual, especially in poor areas.
job creation and education are the great challenges ahead for Lula and his successors. the man himself is a dinosaur; someone who did great things in the 70s and 80s, fighting the repressive military juntas of those decades. but has he any idea of how to deal with 21st century Brazil? sadly not.
4:56 PM
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