BRITAIN NARROWLY ESCAPES “GREEN” BLACKOUT, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on February 27, 2013 by mavery
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For years, many of us have warned the “green energy” craze would throw First World countries into blackouts, factory knockouts, more deaths among the elderly and all manner of avoidable tragedies. It nearly happened to Britain in January, as bitterly cold weather put a massive strain on Britain’s creaking power plants.

London’s Sunday Express says 1 million homes narrowly escaped blackout last month as the island suffered its fifth harsh winter in a row. Blackout was only avoided because of an oil-fired power station, which is, itself, due to be closed before next winter. Only now, after 30 years of cheerleading, are British media finally waking up to the awful future they have been demanding.

The basic problem: Britain feels it put man-made warming on the world map with its Met office and East Anglia University computers. They became determined to lead the world’s “green energy” revolution. However, Britain’s wind turbines, despite decades and billions in subsidized investment, today provide only 7 percent of its electricity. And the turbines must be backed by fossil fuel powered plants, in “spinning reserve,” equal to at least 80 percent of their installed capacity.

Meanwhile:

  1. A whole fleet of Britain’s older coal and oil-fired power stations are being phased out under an EU commandment driven by CO2 hysteria.
  2. They have scheduled another 10 percent of the generating capacity for phase-out next year.
  3. The Met Office has finally admitted there’s been none of the predicted man-made warming for 16 years!
  4. UK coal power is fading just as the North Sea gas, which has powered the UK’s newer stations, is running out.
  5. British leaders had been counting on a big new set of  new nuclear power plants, but the advent of fracking and cheap shale gas has frightened investors about the billions of investment dollars they might never get back.

After my New York Times best-seller, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, came out in 2007, I wrote that the man-made warming frenzy would implode—but would meanwhile cost trillions in misdirected global investment dollars. The warmists since have been giving ground oh-so-slowly as the non-recoverable costs of the renewable fuels “investments” continue to mount.

The German industries that have powered the EU’s economic engine now threaten to leave Europe unless they can get energy as cheaply as India, China—and the U.S. (America’s shale gas revolution has pegged its natural gas prices at about one-third of Europe’s.)

Reuters reports German renewable energy subsidies may cost its consumers an extra $1.34 trillion over the next 20 years (about $6,400 per family)—but won’t provide much dependable power!

Elsewhere, Spain is being sued by green investors after it cut back unsustainable solar and wind subsidies over the past two years, and the Bulgarian government has resigned after consumer protests against high EU-mandated electricity costs.

In the U.S., James Hanson’s NASA continues to “adjust” the temperature records from the 1930s to mask the reality that they were higher than recent “record highs.” Our next big cost will be the dismantling of U.S. coal power. Obama has ordered his EPA to cut back electricity, starting with the coal-fired plants and working up to the natural gas from “fracking.” In case you might have forgotten, the President has not revised his basic goals, which include our having less energy available and only at prices “which will necessarily skyrocket.”

No one yet admits that the “Greenpeace Plan” would kick us back to the days of inner city walk-up apartments, with privies to match.

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GREENS NOW BETRAY THE WILD FISH, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on January 10, 2013 by mavery
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The Food and Drug Administration just approved genetically modified salmon, which grow larger and faster than wild salmon. That’s excellent. There are only so many wild fish in the seas, and biotech salmon could help save wild salmon fisheries from crashing.

The world’s fishermen can’t catch more than the 90 million tons for per year they’ve been getting recently. Doctors meanwhile tell 7 billion people to eat more healthful fish. All over the world, the big increase in fish consumption since 1980 has come from fish farming. Today, 90 percent of the salmon eaten in the U.S. is farmed, here or overseas.

Prices for wild salmon are already too high for most households, and this will worsen as wild fish catches fall farther behind potential demand. Without farmed fish, we’ll see “fish poaching” such as threatens the rhinoceros and elephant. Or more of the mislabeling that is already common. Biotech salmon should help bring the health benefits of salmon within the reach of everyone.

The AquaAdvantage salmon get their extra genes from two other fish, one of them the related Coho species of salmon. The other is from the ocean pout, which has a gene that provides “anti-freeze” and lets the fish eat and grow even in the winter. The Coho salmon provides a gene that reinforces the modified salmon’s own growth hormone. As a result, the biotech fish grow up to 11 times faster than wild fish, and grow larger.

The FDA had long ago decided the biotech fish posed no unusual health risks to consumers and would make more fish available to more people at less cost through the century ahead. Alarmists, however, say the biotech fish will escape and contaminate the wild population. They also imply that our “maximum fishing” is a signal of human “overpopulation.” It’s not. But if it were, it is hard to see how having more salmon available to poorer populations in New York will increase family size decisions.

The world’s birth rate has already dropped from the historic 6 births per woman to about 2.5 births, and is set to start shrinking the human population soon after 2050. The UN Low Variant (which has been predictive in the past) projects human numbers falling from a peak of 8–9 billion in 2050 to 6.2 billion in 2100—and only 2.3 billion by 2300!

Could biotech salmon threaten the wild salmon populations? The FDA says it can’t see how. The biotech fish will be sterile, except for a small breeding stock kept in tanks on land, under tight guard. The sterile market salmon would be also grown on land, rather than in netted ocean pens.   

Society’s real problem is to feed that peak population without destroying the world’s wild fisheries, eroding all its cropland and plowing down most of its wildlife habitat to produce our food in the meantime. Fish farming and high-yield crops are two big parts of the answer. Stanford University recently estimated that higher-yield crops have saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife habitat from becoming poor cropland since 1960. That’s the land area of South America, far more conservation success than the Sierra Club can claim.

Instead, the environmentalists offer “solutions” like organic farming and banning the healthful new biotech salmon. One alarmist website actually calls the FDA “lapdogs” for the salmon approval. Unfortunately, this is a pattern. The environmental movement has opposed nitrogen fertilizer, all synthetic pesticides, and even the genetically modified “gold rice,” which would save millions of little kids from blindness! All opposed with no evidence of harm. The lower yields from organic-only farming would mean severe hunger privation for hundreds of millions of people. Rest assured, tomorrow’s parents will feed their children, one way or another, even if they have to plow down the rain forests, put every remaining gorilla in a stew pot, and take every fish out of the ocean.

The land taken for farming is humanity’s biggest intrusion on nature. Thankfully, the world’s cropland has barely expanded at all since 1980, due to better seeds (some of them biotech) and nitrogen fertilizer. Now, if allowed to do so, biotech salmon can protect one of the critical fisheries, even as we consume more protective omega 3 fatty acids.

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ETHANOL COSTS ONE MILLION JOBS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on November 13, 2012 by mavery
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IF President Obama still cares about more U.S. jobs and high food costs he can now immediately gain on both.. An economist in Indianapolis just calculated that the U.S. is losing a million jobs this year—along with $30 billion in economic growth—because we shifted too much of our corn into ethanol. Tom Elam says direct employment in the food industry would have produced three times as many jobs processing and marketing meat as making ethanol from the same corn. Elam calculates the foregone jobs at 941,000. That doesn’t even count the myriad of jobs that would have been needed to support the newly employed one million Americans.

Based on recent history, U.S. consumers got less meat and milk than they would have liked. Consumer spending on these items veered sharply down from its historic trend after President Bush radically raised the nation’s ethanol mandate in 2007. Elam predicts these problems will only get worse. The EPA‘s approval of 15 percent ethanol in gasoline will likely push corn fuel use up faster than corn yields are rising.

Without the ethanol mandate, U.S. feed exports would increase too (a job creator). Also, our cost of driving would come down even as the prices of pork chops, broilers, and hamburger came back within the reach of stressed-out US food buyers.

No need to worry about Green protests on this one. The environmental groups have turned against the “renewable” fuel they once supported. Ethanol does little to reduce U.S. greenhouse emissions, but diverting grain from to fuel is ramping up survival costs for the poor across the world.

Naomi Klein, a best-selling “green” author from Canada, says climate change is not a big issue to the left. Rather, “ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change. If you have an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, and you tend toward a belief system of pooling resources and helping the less advantaged then you believe in climate change.” But there has obviously been no warming trend on the planet for 15 years, and the U.S. unemployment problem is now center stage. Especially for the lower income workers who are prominent in food processing and transport.

Grain farmers are bidding up the prices of their own cropland to twice the 2006 levels—cleverly raising their own corn production costs for the future. Meanwhile the more numerous livestock farmers risk bankruptcy due to redoubled feed costs. Congress is urgently studying a further bailout of dairy farmers, who can no longer afford to feed their cows. But the nation’s debt limit is looming.

Even after this drought-stricken corn-growing season, the EPA has refused to suspend the ethanol mandate. The EPA has apparently feared perceived failure of a “green fuel” program on President Obama’s watch. A word from the President could set Lisa Jackson’s mind at rest, and create those additional jobs in short order.

However, a temporary suspension of the ethanol mandate is unlikely to work. Temporary moves are discounted by business, as the President found with his stimulus spending. The President should now lift the ethanol mandate as a waste of taxpayer money, a drag on blue-collar job creation—and a threat to many thousands of livestock farmers. To add insult to injury, ethanol is expensive to make and has 35 % fewer BTU’s per gallon. The EPA approved 15% blend will melt fuel lines and burn valves in many cars. Who will pay for the repairs?

References:

Thomas Elam, Ethanol Production: Economic Impact on Meat and Poultry Consumption, Value and Jobs, FarmEcon LLC, Indianapolis, In., Oct 30, 2012. (Dr Elam is a highly experienced agricultural economist who has served on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Outlook and Situation Board and held responsible jobs in agribusiness.)

“Interview with Naomi Klein,” Common Dreams, Feb. 29, 2012.

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CAN ROMNEY CREATE THOSE 12 MILLION JOBS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on November 2, 2012 by CGFI
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Mitt Romney says he could create 12 million jobs in a four year term. Could he really do it? The odds are he could.

Romney would start, of course, with energy, where gasoline prices have doubled under Obama. High energy costs have scuttled lots of small businesses; people could no longer afford their goods or services. High gas prices also drove some employees out of the job market as they could no longer afford commuting to a job with modest pay.

Obama campaigned on raising energy costs even higher; to protect us from the man-made global warming that is not occurring. He even hints about further slashing fossil fuel use after he wins “more flexibility” in a second term.

Romney would also eliminate the fear that the EPA will restrict the fracking that is delivering a wealth of lower-cost oil and gas. This should, instead, create more and more new jobs. Writing in London’s Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says “Swathes of American industry have acquired a massive and lasting advantage in energy costs over global rivals [due to fracking]. . . . Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting toward energy suicide.”

With fracking, some 50 new U.S. petrochemical projects have recently been unveiled. Royal Dutch Shell is planning a big ethane plant near Pittsburg. Dow Chemical is shutting down operations in Belgium, Holland, Spain, the UK and Japan—but pouring money into a new propylene plant in Texas.

The American Chemistry Council says shale fracking has also reversed the fortunes of the aluminum, iron, steel, rubber, coated metals and glass industries. It is encouraging a “homecoming” of machine tool, electrical products, transport equipment, and furniture industries back from China, says PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Chinese wages have been surging, so our new low-cost gas offsets higher U.S. wages— under a government they can trust.

Interior Secretary Salazar has sharply reduced permits for drilling on Federal lands and offshore waters. Now he’s quietly put half the National Petroleum Reserve in the Alaskan tundra off limits to drilling. That reserve has been designated for energy development since 1923! The eco-activists already have the nearby Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for the caribou and migrating birds—though today’s North Slope oil production doesn’t even threaten them.

Romney would also end Obama’s senseless war on coal, restoring vitality to the heartland states, which depend on burning coal cleanly to keep their electricity costs competitive.

Then there’s the huge uncertainty of Obamacare. One of the President’s health-care advisors has just predicted the cost of private health insurance will rise 30 percent by 2016. At the same time, large numbers of doctors are opting out of Medicare because their mandated government payments won’t cover their costs. One of those rising costs is medical liability insurance—the “tax” imposed by the trial lawyers who support Obama.

That’s all before we even get to the mounting debt and the out-of-control spending he seems determined to continue. “Investments” in education and infrastructure still will cost money we don’t have, unless we cut spending elsewhere. On debt, spending, energy, health care, appointing Supreme Court justices–and even following the laws on the books—I label Barack Obama the “uncertainty President.” His National Labor Relations Board even barred Boeing from building a new plant in South Carolina!

Obama seems to want to dismantle the country that elected him and wrestle it into some different shape only he can see. That means a President Romney could eliminate the political uncertainties that have kept even companies with cash from expanding in the Obama years.

Twelve million more jobs? It might well be more.

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TROPICAL RAINBELTS STILL SHIFTING GLOBAL CROPS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 30, 2012 by CGFI
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Michel Nasibu, of business consultants KPMG/East Africa, warns that global warming has begun to devastate his continent. He writes in AfricaEagle that: “The mother of all troubles has already started rooting her tentacles all over the continent: Global Warming. . . . . Africa is slowly becoming a desert.”

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, writing at Forbes.com, says “Not so fast.” Taylor notes a 2009 Boston University study that found satellite data showing a long-term shift in the Sahara Desert from dryer to wetter conditions. BBC News, in fact, has reported that, “Satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the southern Sahara.” Taylor also notes correctly that as the Arctic ice has melted, global rainfall has gotten slightly heavier due to more evaporation from the seas.

Both men’s forecasts are wrong, however. What’s really happening is not that the tropical rainbelts that govern Africa’s critical food production are starting or stopping. They’re moving.

I have written often about the natural 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle, which brings us a global warming—and then a global cooling—every 15 centuries. Give or take 500 years. Such a lengthy time scale seems almost incomprehensible. Luckily, we now have historical documents that record the Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD), the Medieval Warming (950–1300 AD), and the Dark Ages (600–950 AD). Paleoclimate evidence from ice cores, fossil pollen, and the sediments at the bottoms of lakes and seas is now extending our knowledge of such climate cycling back at least a million years.

When the Arctic ice melts in a global warming period—as now—the tropical rain belts are drawn roughly 600 miles north. Julian Sachs of the University of Washington told us in “A Shifting Band of Rain,” (Scientific American, March, 2011), that the rain belts are currently about 330 miles north of their location during the depths of the Little Ice Age in 1600. He’s been measuring the stable isotopes of algae (deuterium and hydrogen) in the lake sediments of scattered Pacific islands. Carbon dated, they clearly show the rain belts moving north over time. Sachs predicts they will move even farther north as the planet continues to warm.

That will obviously mean problems for the tropics, endangering banana crops in Guatemala and stealing the moisture from the coffee crops in Colombia and Indonesia. The Mexican desert can also come to the southern tier of U.S. states.

Africa at the best of times suffers a drought every 30 to 65 years, and when the rainbelts shift they can have awesome impacts. For example, Ghana’s Lake Bosumtwi suffered a 350-year drought during the Little Ice Age!

Ethiopia’s Aksum Empire thrived during the heyday of the Roman Empire. In one of history’s most dramatic rainfall transitions, the tropical rains had moved north about 200 BC to water North Africa—and thus fed Rome on the other side of the Mediterranean for nearly 800 years. As the Roman Warming ended, however, and the Dark Ages began, the rain belts shifted back south to Kenya and Ghana. Both Aksum and the Roman Empire collapsed.

Who will win and who will lose during the Modern Warming? Primitive man could do nothing but try to walk away from the droughts. Modern man can produce extra food where the rains have shifted, and transport the food to people where the rains have left. Only time will tell whether that’s a better strategy than moving the people. But we now have the transport capacity to do either or both.

All of this simply underlines the reality that the earth’s human societies are now vastly more sustainable than their primitive predecessors.

References:
Michel Nasibu, “Global Warming and Africa’s Future, AfricaEagle, www.africaeagle.com/2012/10/opinion-global-warming-and-africas.html
James Taylor, “Contrary To What You Hear, Global Warming Has Been Good To Africa,” http://www.forbes.com/search/?q=contrary+to+what+you+hear
Tim Shanahan et al, “Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa, Science 324 (2009): 377–380

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GERMAN MEDIA’S VEER FROM GREEN ENERGY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 24, 2012 by CGFI
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German media, writing in one of the “greenest” European countries, are now veering away from green energy as fast as lagging public opinion will allow. A few years ago, Germany was “fully committed” to the EU’s goal of ending fossil fuel use. It was building lots of wind turbines, and even some solar farms despite its often-cloudy skies. After the tsunami, Prime Minister Angela Merckel announced Germany would phase out its nuclear plants quickly, implying more power from renewables.

Now, Germany is burning more coal than ever, and choking on the huge set of green subsidies to which it is already committed.

The green energy retreat surely began with the end of the global warming trend after 1998. Then, beginning 2008, Germany has had four bitter winters in row. In a long-time leftist co-authored a book called The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Catastrophe Is Not Taking Place. Fritz Vahrenholt and geologist Sebastian Luning pointed up the natural 1,500-year cycle and the sun’s recent shift into a cooler phase (patterned on my best-selling Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.)

Vahrenholt’s German timing was perfect. The high costs of “green” electricity were beginning to impact ordinary Germans. The phase-out of the nuclear threatened to deliver brown-outs. Germany’s energy intensive industries threatened to take their jobs to the Third World.

Major German news organizations spread Vahrenholt, his activist history, and his renunciation of green energy all over the country. Then, last week Der Spiegel published a story charging that the huge German re-insurance company Munich Re had been promoting fears of global warming to justify higher insurance rates. Reporter Alex Bojanowski says Munich Re “claims to have found the first proof that man-made climate change is triggering more and more weather catastrophes in North America.”

“Nowhere in the world,” claimed Munich Re, “is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America. [Their study] shows a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades, compared with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America.”

Munich Re director of geo-research Peter Hoppes added: “Such a chain of evidence for the impact of climate change is unprecedented.”

However, Der Spiegel quotes Roger Pielke, Jr of the University of Colorado, whose study of U.S. tornado damage is slated to appear soon in the journal Environmental Hazards. Pielke says  U.S. tornadoes since 1950 have actually caused less property damage and U.S. droughts have also been shorter and less severe over recent decades.

The journal Natural Hazards had already published a special edition (June, 2003) on extreme weather. Its experts failed to find evidence of any increase in extreme storminess during 20th century’s warming trend.

Atmospheric scientist Clifford Mass of the University of Washington is quoted saying “Most of the claims make no sense and contradict observations.” Mass warns “hyping the trend and distorting it is irresponsible.”

Bojanowski’s “news” instincts are excellent. He doesn’t attack the government-sponsored wind turbines that bid to bankrupt the average German. He attacks the corporation that is merely playing off past German green fears. Nor does he attack the UN climate panel or the climate models, which started the craze with forecasts that now appear laughable. That will surely come later, unless the temperatures defy the ongoing cooling phase of the Pacific Oscillation and start to rise sharply again.

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NO FARM BILL: JUST FOOD AND TAX INFLATION, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 18, 2012 by CGFI
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“Congress has failed to  put in place a farm bill for the first time in more than 60 years,” says a reporter for station WBNG in New York State.  U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, debates this however: “President Obama has a strong record of supporting America’s farmers, ranchers, and rural America. Today, agriculture is thriving. . . . Today there is a record amount of biofuel production. The administration recently announced new renewable fuel standard targets that will increase biodiesel production. . . . And he has increased the amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline.”

That’s not a farm bill. That’s a costly, short-sighted biofuels policy. There are far fewer corn/soybean farmers in America than livestock, poultry, and dairy farmers. At $7–8 per bushel of corn, the livestock farmers can’t afford to feed their animals—unless meat and milk prices rise to gouge consumers even more severely.

Consumers have been reeling under food-burning inflation since 2007. The tax costs for food stamps have roughly doubled too. Fewer and fewer low-income people can afford to buy their own food with higher food prices, reduced family incomes, and lower employment under Obama.

A gas station in Los Angeles recently charged $5.99 per gallon of gas! Not to mention the high tax costs of ethanol subsidies buried in the federal budget. And why are we burning corn instead of eating it? Supposedly, to fend off man-made global warming. But, we’ve now had 16 years of global non-warming! The warmists said non-warming wouldn’t be a real trend until 15 years had passed and now they have.

The models were wrong. The UN climate panel was wrong. The billions spent on futile climate modeling exercises only misled the public with government “research” money. It was all a sham, based on a single short period of temperature rise, from 1976–1998. (The similar temperature surge from 1915–1940 came just before the big surge in global CO2 emissions.)

Meanwhile America is rapidly becoming  more energy-independent—no thanks to corn ethanol. The real energy independence is coming from the private sector, which developed a new high-tech way to wrest the oil and gas from our vast deposits of shale rock. The environmental movement says fracking will endanger clean drinking water. Perhaps more truthfully, they know fracking, worldwide, means the end of their vast green-power play. With no global warming, their cause is gone and so is the rationale for destroying our energy systems.

Russia is facing economic recession as natural gas prices worldwide are forced down by the technology that U.S. industry pioneered. The U.S., which recently built terminals to import liquefied natural gas, will now use them to earn export dollars instead. The carbon emissions from the gas are about half those of coal-burning, so our “greenhouse footprint” has come down sharply even as the Greens have tried to block the fracking that made it possible.

German industries are threatening to take their jobs to the Third World as their electricity costs rise to pay for German windmills. Britain is facing power blackouts as its coal-burning power plants are forced to close by an EU “green” edict and its windmills generate little usable power. Potential nuclear investors have lost their enthusiasm because of the falling natural gas prices.

U.S. farmers must face the reality that there may not be an old-style “farm bill” under the pressure of $1 trillion-per-year deficits. We can’t afford to pay big enough subsidies to the dairymen because we’re already spending so much on corn subsidies.

Pity the dairy and hog farmers who have been bankrupted while temperatures stalled. Pity the American public facing food, fuel, and tax poverty.

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WHERE’S THE CASE FOR ORGANIC FOODS?, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on September 6, 2012 by CGFI
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Stanford University has just published a new study on organic foods—reporting that its physicians and nutritionists found no evidence that organic foods are more nutritious. There was great surprise some quarters and statements such as “a $25 billion a year industry and no one told us it made no difference?”

My son, Alex Avery, had already written an excellent book in 2006 titled The Truth About Organic Foods (available at Amazon and other booksellers). Alex had likewise reviewed the broad range of organic/nutrition studies and found no organic advantage—but the Stanford label has naturally attracted more attention.

The Los Angeles Times ignored Alex—and pooh-poohs Stanford too. Their September 5 editorial said:  “We doubt that the folks at Whole Foods are trembling in the Birkenstocks. We’re not aware of too many people who thought otherwise—it doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume the application of pesticides would have much impact on a fruit’s vitamin content. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t safer to eat. . . . Stanford’s [study] points up how little is yet known about the benefits of organics and the harms done by widespread pesticide use.”

The LA Times is wrong on that, too. The University of California’s own Bruce Ames won the National Medal of Science from President Clinton in 1998. He invented the Ames Test for cancer risks in our food back in the 1970s. He found that half of all synthetic pesticides caused cancer in rats at high doses. The Greens applauded and gave him the Tyler Prize, the “environmental Nobel.”

Then, however, Ames started testing the cancer risks in the natural compounds that Mother Nature herself inserted in the food—to discourage pests. Half of the natural food compounds also caused cancer in rats at high doses!  Ames published “Dietary Pesticides (99.99% natural)” in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science clear in 1977.  Ames concluded that eating organic foods reduces your dietary cancer risk by just one ten-thousandth of a percent!

The Ames paper didn’t faze the organic movement however. We, the people, apparently wanted to believe that the synthetic chemicals were dangerous and that “natural” was better in all things—despite “natural” rats in grain, Salmonella bacteria in food, and tuberculosis in milk. In fact, many buyers don’t know that organic farmers use as much pesticide as conventional farmers. “Organic” pesticides aren’t much different than non-organic—they all kill pests, not people.

We also wanted to believe that we could protect our families by paying extra for our fruits and vegetables! Unfortunately, the world of 2050 will need perhaps 3 times as much food and organic farmers produce about half as much per acre as conventional farmers. The combination makes organic farming a long-term threat to the world’s wildlife.

The L. A. Times’ editorial also seems to indict chemical fertilizers. But if it makes no sense to believe spraying pesticides on plants will change their vitamin content, why believe that adding more of the most important plant food to the soil will make the plant unsafe?  The nitrogen that fertilizer companies take from the air is the same N that makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe. The plants can’t tell the difference between clover N and N from a bag of ammonia crystals. They have to wait for the soil to break down the N in both cases. Nevertheless, “no inorganic nitrogen” is the most basic tenet of organic farming. No reputable study supports this fear of nitrogen taken from the air.

Humans come wired with lots of fear genes. When Spanish explorers brought tomatoes and potatoes back from the New World, Europeans people refused to eat them. The Duchy of Burgundy outlawed potatoes because the tubers were said to look like the lumpen hands and feet of lepers!  Are the arguments for organic food today based on any better science?  The Stanford study seems to say they aren’t.

Source:  Bravata et al. “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier than Conventional Alternatives: a Systematic Review,” Annals of Internal Medicine, September 4, 2012: 348-366.

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ETHANOL MAKES THE TOP TEN LIST, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 19, 2012 by CGFI
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Recently I watched John Stosell’s program on “Politician’s Top Ten Promises Gone Wrong.” Ethanol’s promise gone wrong was surpassed only by the housing subsidy bubble and the promise that more and bigger Europe-style government was the answer to the future.

Six years ago, when President Bush expanded the corn ethanol mandate, I wrote that producing more corn ethanol would take too much of the scarce prime cropland the world needs to produce its food. Almost immediately, in 2008, a spike in oil prices created a global shortage of corn, with food riots in two dozen countries. (The price of corn is inevitably global.)

Now this year’s Corn Belt drought has brought us face to face—again—with high-priced hunger for the world’s poor, no answer to global warming, and a sinful waste of the world’s currently scarce financial resources.

It’s now obvious that corn ethanol is too expensive to burn, and burning it is driving world food prices too high. The tragedy is that corn ethanol isn’t even needed! We’ve had no global warming trend in the past 15 years, even though CO2 levels in the atmosphere keep rising.

The UN is now reduced to pleading with the U.S. to suspend its ethanol mandate—to prevent food price poverty for the world’s poor. Apparently, they don’t talk to their own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ardently pushed “renewable fuels” not only from corn, but from jojoba and switchgrass.

This year’s corn yields are expected to be the lowest in six years. The Department of Agriculture is predicting that corn prices, which were below $2 per bushel in 2007, will soon reach $9.00 per bushel. U.S. livestock and poultry producers, far more numerous than our corn farmers, are in a state of shock over their sky-high feed costs. Consumers will start getting their new, far-higher bills for groceries months from now, but rest assured they’re coming.

However, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack—a former Iowa governor—says the corn ethanol mandate is “creating jobs.” That’s as close to lying as an honorable man should get. The farmers are producing the corn with bigger machines, lots of nitrogen fertilizer, and cropland shifted into corn from cotton and wheat. There are only a few hundred more jobs in the ethanol plants.

The farmer impact of the high corn prices, unfortunately, has also been predictable. The price of farmland that can grow corn has doubled. It’s a classic case of farmers driving up their own production costs with another government “bubble.”

The farmers’ next step would be to drain more wetlands and clear more woodlots for still-more corn. That’s why congress has set a limit: only 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol can be made per year. However, the corn farmers have already gotten approval from the Environmental Protection Agency for gasoline with 15 percent ethanol. (The President wants more renewable fuels!)  No one is betting that the EPA won’t approve E-85 in a second Obama term, and never mind the potential engine damage to cars, boats, and mowers.

Vilsack is still claiming that providing about 10 percent of our auto fuel from ethanol has “moderated” our gasoline prices. Far more of such credit goes instead to the non-subsidized shale gas and oil producers—who pay tax dollars in instead of taking them out. Yesterday, diesel was over $5.00 in DC, hard to call that “moderated.”

Corn farmers are good people, pleased to be blessed with government largesse. However, they should take no more pride in their high subsidized profits than the promoters who got big Energy Department grants for now-bankrupt Solyndra and Fisker Automotive.  When the bubble bursts, will the government bail them out too?

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WHAT REALLY TRIGGERS A RESOURCE CRISIS?, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 7, 2012 by CGFI
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During a symposium held recently at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yale historian, Tim Snyder told the attendees: “Climate change acts as a “multiplier of other resource crises  leading to “the ecological panic that I’m afraid will lead to mass killings in the decades come.” In his attempt to predict the future, he is relying on historic resource crises that have led to mass killings, revolts, invasions, and famines. However, almost all of those resource crises came during the earth’s “little ice ages,” not during our planet’s warm cycles. (Neither Hitler nor Mao Tse Tung were driven by resource crises; Japan may have thought it was, but their invasion of China cost a terrible price)

On the whole, the warmings have been the good times. The long summers, sunny skies, and moderate rainfall in the Medieval Warming tripled human numbers around the globe, according to respected Medieval population scholar Josiah Russell. The long Roman Warming delivered similar benefits, with ample food and a massive increase in economic growth, trade, and prosperity.

The key resource crises have always been about food. It’s hard to grow much food if your farmers are beset by short, cold, cloudy summers, century-long droughts and violent, flooding storms. The six cultural collapses in Egypt’s famously fertile Nile Valley were all caused by centuries of too little rainfall in the Sudanese and Ethiopian highlands during the “little ice ages.” Half the Egyptians may have died in the resulting famines, and records say that parents literally ate their own children. That was truly a resource crisis!

The famed Bronze Age collapse occurred at 1200 BC because of a global stab of cold and storms. Roads turned to mud, and sea-storms sank ships. Making bronze required tin, and the ships could no longer safely reach the major tin mines in southern England, Turkey, and the Malay Peninsula. The Greeks, the Hittites in Turkey, the Egyptians, the Akkadian Empire in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the Harappans in northwestern India, the steppe nomads on the grasslands across Eurasia, and several cultures in China all collapsed. For several centuries, famine ruled most of the populated world

Dian Zhang calculates that 80 percent of China’s wars, rebellions, and failed dynasties have come during the floods, droughts, and famines of its “little ice ages.” What comparable “resource crises” does Dr. Snyder see in our globally warmed future?

The global computer models’ predictions have already failed. We have no reason to expect their predictions of sudden catastrophic warming to come true. Nor has the UN’s climate panel told its computers about the long, natural 1,500-year climate cycle. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle has afflicted humanity with eight “little ice ages” since the last Ice Age. However, it has also given us an equal number of warm, stable centuries-long warmings.

Humanity only began to rise above the “little ice age” famines as we began to develop high-yield farming, out of desperation, toward the end of the last Little Ice Age (AD 1200–1850). The new gang plow permitted cropping the heaviest, richest bottomlands for the first time. The mechanical seeder allowed planting in rows, so the crops could be weeded. The potato and tomato came from the New World. Turnips, from China, permitted a livestock feed crop after the grains were harvested.

History tells us that if we have food, the other resource crises can be handled. In the current Corn Belt drought, our grain and yields will still be about six times as high as during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. We have developed no-till farming during the intervening 80 plus years to protect the land from erosion when drought events happen. Our biggest recent mistake has been to put a sizeable percentage of our food crops into corn ethanol—so the U.S. drought will now drive up the costs of both food and fuel to excruciating levels.

Take the food out of our gas tanks and put it back on the table. Reinvigorate high-yield farming research. Our ancestors coped with the “resource crises” as long as they could eat.

 

Reference:

1. Rebecca Berg, “Foreign Policy Experts Discuss Ways to Avert Future Genoide” NYT, July 24, 2012.

2. Josiah Russel, “Medieval Sourcebook: Table on Population in Medieval Europe,” Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pop-in-eur.asp.

3. Dian Zhang, et al, “Climate change, social unrest, and dynastic tradition in ancient China,” Chinese Science Bulletin 50 (2005): 137-144

 

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