And Reality Sets In

China - you know, those friendly folks who are deforesting the planet - have another bit of bad news for the true believers. They have decided to halt production of ethanol. Why? Because it uses too much food. And you know what? They right this time.

China’s communist rulers announced a moratorium on the production of ethanol from corn and other food crops yesterday at the very time that Western leaders are rushing to embrace alternative food-based fuel technology.

Beijing’s move underlines concerns that ethanol production is driving up rapidly the costs of corn and grain. It appears to reflect a growing reality about food-based alternative fuel: it is far more expensive both economically and environmentally, than Western politicians are likely to admit.

Calls for biofuels are politically attractive for European and US politicians, amid rising petrol prices and concerns about global warming and an overreliance on Middle Eastern oil.

Communist officials in Beijing, however, who do not have the political concerns of democratically elected leaders in the West, have reacted to a rapid rise in food prices and an intense demand on farm land that threatens to make ethanol production unsustainable.

President Bush, who with Britain wants to see a huge increase in corn-based ethanol, called in January for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in the US.

Although that is a hugely popular rhetoric in the Mid-west wheat belt states — the heart of America’s political battleground — environmentalists soon pointed out that such a goal would require an additional 129,000 square miles of farmland, an area the size of Kansas and Iowa combined.

The rush to corn-based ethanol is causing food-price inflation in the US, as it increases the cost of corn grain feedstock and the availability of the crop for such staples as cereal and corn syrup. The ethanol boom has created mass planting of corn at the expense of other crops, which helps to drive up prices, too. Futures prices for corn in the US have nearly doubled in eight months.

In China grain security has for decades been at the top of the party’s political priority list, and a 43 per cent increase in the price of China’s staple meat — pork — over last year to recent record highs as a result of rapidly rising feed prices is certain to have triggered concern at the highest level of the party.

The impetus from the true believers to "do something" with no forethought whatsoever; the kneejerk genuflection to the Al Gore cult is going to have devastating results on the people of this planet who can least afford it. The sanctimonious pontifications of the indulgence sellers - oh, sorry - carbon traders - will sentence a huge number of people and animals to a horrible death. Gaia worship is all about human loathing, nothing more. And the new boss will be much more ruthless and uncaring than the old boss. That should be evident. It is already happening. Ask the orangutans. Ask the poor people in Colombia. Ask the forests. Oh that's right, you can't.

They're all dead.