The identity crisis this site is having

Nobel Prize for Death

by Dr. Arthur Robinson
Posted: 04/17/2008
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26067

And so it has begun. Word is beginning to spill into the news of food riots and starvation in poor countries, as a result of shortages and the resulting high prices for grain. This suffering is a direct result of the unprincipled actions of self-interested people in developed countries who are promulgating the scientifically refuted myth of human-caused global warming.

Frightened by this myth, U. S. federal and state governments have diverted a significant amount of the American grain supply into the production of ethanol -- an entirely counterproductive action that has helped to cause these grain shortages.

There is no intrinsic shortage of food. Since, however, food is perishable; the market produces each year an amount of food comparable to that which will be consumed. Stored food -- primarily grain -- usually suffices to smooth fluctuations due to weather and other factors. Prices fluctuate within a range narrow enough that most of the world’s people have sufficient food at a price they can afford. When, however, a large amount of grain is suddenly withdrawn from the market, severe shortages can result.

This current food shortage is only the beginning.

We have been down this road before. Unprincipled opportunists -- falsely claiming that DDT is dangerous to the environment -- managed to engineer a world-wide ban of DDT. DDT had eradicated malaria from the developed world and was well on its way to eradicating it from the less developed countries at the time this ban of DDT was instituted. The initiation of DDT use against malaria was rewarded by a Nobel Prize, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT had saved hundreds of millions of lives.

One of the principal political figures who worked to ban DDT was none other than Al Gore.

As a result of the DDT ban, more than 30 million children in Africa and Asia have died from DDT-preventable malaria, and an estimated 500 million adults are today chronically ill from this disease. The ban of DDT was the worst act of technological genocide in human history.

Now, Mr. Gore is the recognized leader of an effort to ban at least 90% of world use of hydrocarbon fuels. Once again, his claims are based upon bogus science and are motivated by personal financial and political self interest. Mr. Gore has been joined by the United Nations and its IPCC process. The goal of the United Nations is clear. It wants the power to tax and ration world energy supplies. This would place essentially unlimited power and money in the hands of the United Nations and cooperating world political entities.

As acts of genocide, the potential effects of the human-caused global warming industry are so profound that the DDT genocide is minor in comparison.

Hundreds of millions of human beings live today on the very edge of existence -- with all of their available resources consumed in the quest for food, shelter, and the minimum necessities of life. Without world technology and the energy that makes that technology possible, these people will slip from the lower rungs of human existence and will die. By abruptly lowering world hydrocarbon use, the human-caused global warmers are going to kill these people.

Politicians in the United States have given us a first taste of the horrible suffering of human beings that is to come. By responding to the myth of human-caused global warming by mildly diminishing American grain supplies -- in a futile, politicized attempt to burn grain as fuel, American politicians have given the world a slight taste of the starvation and slaughter that is to come.

Many people are responsible for promulgating the myth of human-caused global warming – environmentalists, politicians, businessmen, media personalities, and a relatively small band of self-interested scientists. They have done this regardless of an overwhelming body of scientific information that definitively refutes the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. [See Robinson, Robinson, and Soon, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, available at www.oism.org/pproject for a review and 132 peer-reviewed references to the scientific literature that document this refutation.]

In the case of DDT, the truth did not matter. The Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific review board had reviewed the scientific literature and proclaimed DDT entirely safe and very useful. In the case of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming, the truth is also becoming increasingly irrelevant, as perceived political reality replaces reality in public discourse.

Al Gore has surpassed himself. Having helped to kill tens of millions of helpless African, Asian, and South American children and to sicken hundreds of millions of other people with his support for the ban of DDT, Mr. Gore is now attempting to deprive the survivors in these same countries of energy -- life-giving energy that makes possible their meager existences.

Industrially useful energy is fungible. It flows back and forth throughout the world with ease. A projected reduction in supply in the United States and an ill-considered reaction to that projection has caused current world food shortages. These shortages are only very small reminders of the vast shortages that will occur if hydrocarbon use is truly curtailed.

No greater act of genocide has ever been proposed in human history than the proposal to abruptly end the use of much of the world’s hydrocarbon energy.

Al Gore and his United Nations retainers have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The only peace that they are offering to the world’s people, however, is the peace of the grave.

Dr. Arthur Robinson is President and Research Professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

More on the havoc created by this insane idea.

http://www.justsayhi.com/topic/show/99938?page=1

Global Food Riots: Made in Washington, D.C.

by Deroy Murdock
Posted: 04/18/2008
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26090

To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled -- NOW -- before ethanol wreaks further havoc.

Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ April 12 ouster. Haitians are enduring food prices 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.

Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry man.”

Climbing corn prices have ignited Mexican tortilla riots. Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan -- potential Muslim powder kegs -- also violently have protested premium prices for basic staples. Similar instability has erupted from the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. Resurrecting the defeated “import substitution” model of yore, India and Vietnam are among the nations that lately have prohibited grain exports and imposed government price controls. Kazakhstan, Earth’s No. 5 wheat source, just halted wheat exports, hoping to horde local supplies. One third of the global wheat market is now closed.

High oil prices and growing global food demand fan these flames, but government lit the match. Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate, America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022) have turned corn farms into monetary printing presses. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn into motors rather than mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.

Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them.

All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo.
On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”

As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel…100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.” In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people.

President Bush announced on Monday that the United States would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.

This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.
Bad enough if this suffering and strife were ethanol’s ransom for dramatic environmental progress. In fact, ethanol is Earth-hostile. Turning forests into corn fields kills wildlife-friendly, CO2-absorbent trees. Nitrogen-based fertilizers yield nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. Irrigating corn strains fresh-water supplies and fills streams with agricultural chemicals.

Enough!

Congress immediately should abolish federal ethanol subsidies, mandates, and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imports -- including Brazil’s cheaper, cleaner, sugar-based ethanol. If scientists can develop ethanol that neither starves people nor rapes the Earth, splendid. However, this enterprise must not rest upon morally repugnant, ecologically counterproductive, economically devastating, government-ordered distortions.

This is all a sop to U.S. grain growers, arguably the most pampered and endlessly entitled people beside Saudi royalty. Since they are hooked on handouts, here’s one more: In exchange for a two-year federal tax holiday on any income they earn, every actual, tractor-driving corn/biofuel farmer should retreat quietly and let America’s experiment in state-sponsored ethanol enter the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame.

Compared to the global chaos that ethanol is fueling, this is a tolerable, one-time investment to pry these farmers’ and their Washington enablers’ hands off of our necks.

Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

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Morning sweetness. You are welcome anytime.

Been good OC. Over worked and tired of living in a suitcase, but other than that, not too bad.

How you been?

(((Princess)))

Stay up late did we?

Much,, thank you ((((Princess))))

Ahemmmmm!!!

been there done that no thank you.

you can rent them? Does that mean you return them when you are finished with them? Is there a late fee?

would, have, will again.



would you spend the night in a haunted house?

Frustrated