Really Inconvenient Truths

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You To Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them

Author Iain Murray's new book is discussed by the author himself at this remarkable seminar at the Heritage Foundation.

The story of Rachel Carson (whom Al Gore and the liberal environmental movement consider an idol and heroine) and the global malaria tragedy will cause anyone who hears it to never see environmentalism as populist cult and secular religion quite in the same way again.

Mr. Murray also exposes the role of biofuels such as corn and sugar-based ethanol in the unfolding food price crises and the wholescale destruction of the world's forests. Meanwhile, here Sen. Migz Zubiri and DOE Secretary Angelo Reyes are continuing to beat the biofuels drum as if they do not hear the ominous warnings against this entirely deluded leap. Mr. Murray calls the biofuel mandates in Europe and the US, and of course here in the Philippines, "an affront to the ideals of humanity." He notes as an example that the 450 pounds of corn needed to produce 25 gallons of ethanol could feed one person for a year. The corn burned as automobile fuel in the US alone in 2006 would've have fed 260 million people for a whole year.

Most significantly he presents the alternative to Al Gore's "decarbonization" proposals in the form of a comprehensive conservative strategy for addressing global environmental problems.

Listen to the whole thing!

Government-made Disasters

JOHN MANGUN of the Business Mirror has some interesting thoughts on governments, free markets, the biofuel and food security issues. (Via email)

GOVERNMENT MADE DISASTERS
By John Mangun

There is an ancient Hebrew adage found in the Book of Proverbs. “Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

A more modern translation of the ancient Hebrew would read, “First pride, then the crash; the bigger the ego, the harder the fall.”

For the last 30 years, governments around the world believed that the answers to basic human needs are fulfilled best only when under their legislative and administrative command. Governments have created laws and infrastructure to take more and more control over economies out of the hands of the people and have therefore subverted the free-market system.

Today, around the world, we are seeing the results and consequences of government pride and subsequent action to control the vastly complex organism called the economy.

From Europe and Africa, through Asia to the Americas, the world is facing a food crisis. No nation will be spared from the “unintended” consequences of many widespread bad government policies over several decades. Even China, while officially denying (as usual) any supply problems, is paying farmers substantial cash amounts to increase wheat and rice production.

Riots and near-riots occurred in several countries in the last few months, in as diverse places as India, Mexico, Egypt and Russia. Although public unrest over food shortages is not uncommon through history, the recent disturbances center primarily on the availability of subsidized food.

Perhaps the most indicative example of bad government policy happened in Egypt where literally thousands “torched buildings, looted shops and hurled bricks at the police who responded with tear gas Sunday” (Associated Press). Since the 1970s, the Egyptian government has subsidized bread prices, a loaf selling for the equivalent of 1 US cent or about 40 Philippine centavos. Bread that is not subsidized by the government sells for about 10 times higher.

Of course, this 30-year policy was designed to “help the poor.” Then again, all government interference in the free market is to help the poor. How much is Egypt spending each year on food subsidies to help the poor? Nearly $14 billion.

That means that the Egyptian government could give each year $700 cash to every adult and child living below the poverty line, almost doubling their average annual income. Something about teaching a man to fish and not simply giving him food for one day.

In 2006 I wrote a column entitled, “The ethanol-biofuel deception.” I received an e-mail from the director of the Agricultural and Development Economics Division (ESA), United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), kindly saying, “It’s the best piece I have read about biofuels and certainly the most sobering.”

National governments would not listen to the FAO’s concerns about food-supply disruption. Now, the United Nations is being forced to limit food-distribution programs because of the rising costs due in part to the shift from food production to biofuel-crop production.

On the subject of biofuel, although underreported in the local media, the Philippines is about to become a big importer of another commodity—ethanol. From Reuters: “The Philippines plans to import about 170 million liters of ethanol from Brazil and Thailand in 2009. The Philippine government had passed a Biofuel Act in 2007 that made it mandatory to mix 5 percent of ethanol in gasoline from February 2009. ‘It will translate into 200 million liters of ethanol a year,’ said Archie Amarra, executive director of Philippines Sugar Millers Association Inc. ‘Our production capacity is not much. . . we have one ethanol plant with capacity of 30 million liters per year.’”

Now here is the sentence that scares me; “‘The ethanol imports would be a temporary measure as the Philippines would boost capacity to meet its domestic needs within the next five years,’ Amarra said.”

The current world price of ethanol is about P20 a liter, meaning we will import about P3.5 billion worth of ethanol this year; and maybe this amount annually for the next five years.

Does that make sense? Perhaps the law should have been written to more slowly increase the amount of biofuel mix mandated to avoid having to spend billions to import ethanol. Doesn’t anyone in government that makes policy think about the future?

Sen. Mar Roxas II has called for a 10-year food-security plan. The senator proposes a “soup-to-nuts style,” meaning from seed distribution to market access. It sounds noble, but it may create an economic disaster for the Philippines.

When the biofuel bill was passed, did anyone know that the Philippines would spend P3.5 billion in 2009 to import ethanol? Were the future consequences ever discussed?

When the bill was passed, one congressman said the country would save about $300 million a year in foreign exchange. I wonder if that amount is before or after the $100 million we will spend on ethanol imports next year.

The nation does not need a 10-year plan. What we need is for policymakers to consider the results of their action three, five, 10 years in the future.

The road to hell is paved with green, err, good intentions.

Speaking of food, I was shopping in the Baguio city market. There's a new coffee available at both Garcia's and Umali's (deep in the back of the market area near the vegetable "bagsakan"--Sagada Black Roast (P270/kilo, unless you are a suki P230/kilo). There is also civet coffee at P6000.00 per kilo...but only the European tourists are suckers enough for forest cat sh*t coffee. Strawberries are plentiful, deep dark red and luscious (P80-140/kilo). Small pungent ginger is P100 for a ten kilo sack. Sayote tops, broccoli, carrots, and Nueva Viscaya citrus (dozens of varieties) are all widely available at good prices. Even the poor can live in abundance as long as they don't seek their salvation in Manila's slums or depend on the government for handouts...

The Biofools Behind Biofuels

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel says that he sees no reason to repeal or suspend the Biofuels Law he co-authored with Migz Zubiri (and the Sugar Baron lobby) last year. He advances the same basic reasons Migz and his friends at Greenpeace did in pushing the law:

(1) Biofuels are "green" or environment friendly, allegedly because they are "carbon neutral" -- taking up carbon dioxide while living and giving up the same when they are fed to the cars.

(2) Biofuels will help the Philippines achieve energy independence from imported fossil fuels.

(3) Biofuel production won't compete with food production because the government has already identified sizeable areas for additional rice planting.

They haven't been paying attention to the recent scientific research on this matter, they aren't listening to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or doing the simple arithmetic needed to see what a dangerous and possibly deluded idea biofuels actually are as a solution to the energy crisis and the sharp increase in global food prices.

Caveats:

(1) Scientists at Princeton University strenuously disagree with Nene and Migz in this recent Scientific American article, Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combatting Climate Change.

"Prior analyses made an accounting error," says one study's lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. "There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels.

By turning crops such as corn, sugarcane and palm oil into biofuels—whether ethanol, biodiesel, or something else—proponents hope to reap the benefits of the carbon soaked up as the plants grow to offset the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted when the resulting fuel is burned. But whether biofuels emit more or less CO₂ than gasoline depends on what the land they were grown on was previously used for, both studies show.

Tilman and his colleagues examined the overall CO₂ released when land use changes occur. Converting the grasslands of the U.S. to grow corn results in excess greenhouse gas emissions of 134 metric tons of CO₂ per hectare—a debt that would take 93 years to repay by replacing gasoline with corn-based ethanol. And converting jungles to palm plantations or tropical rainforest to soy fields would take centuries to pay back their carbon debts. "Any biofuel that causes land clearing is likely to increase global warming," says ecologist Joseph Fargione of The Nature Conservancy, lead author of the second study. "It takes decades to centuries to repay the carbon debt that is created from clearing land."

In other words, biofuels, better called agrofuels, won't be any cleaner to burn than fossil fuels like gasoline, from the point of view of climate change or global warming. They are likely to be worse, especially if they utilize so called wastelands and forests. The impact of converting such lands to agrofuel production is not GREEN at all.

(2) Slate Magazine asks Why Are Global Food Prices Soaring? Some good answers are coming from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, whose recent presentation on the global food pricing situation is sobering.

"In 2007, the FAO Food Price Index averaged 157, up 23 percent from 2006 and 34 percent from 2005. Except for sugar, prices of which declined sharply, international prices of other major food commodities rose significantly in 2007."

Surging oil prices have been the big factor, but so has the surge in biofuel production in traditional exporting countries. From Slate's The Explainer, "High oil prices have also created a secondary problem: The burgeoning interest in biofuels. In 2006, 14 percent of the total corn crop in the United States was converted into ethanol; by 2010, that figure will rise to 30 percent." The United States feeds the world, in more ways than one. So when Iowa farmers feeding the corn crop to the cars in the form of ethanol, expect the rest of the world to get the hungries, or pay more to eat.

The Biofuels Law of 2006 is bound to benefit only the Sugar Barons, whose lobby fulsomely supports Migz and Nene.

(3) Finally, it is hard to imagine how the biofuels idea could be of any significant benefit, given the limited land area this Archipelago of mostly mountains and sensitive wetlands possesses not already needed for present and future food requirements. I did the simple arithmetic for the biofools when they passed that law in 2006, based on yield information from the Washington Post's own computation of the possible impact on a continental nation like America.

Why Self Rated, Episodic Hunger Goes Up As Poverty Goes Down

It is a contradiction or paradox in the DATA that people would rather deny than try to understand which also puzzled me in my recent, independent analysis of the Social Weather Station published statistics on hunger and poverty in the Philippines.

First, everyone ought to admit that "poverty" as measured by both the National Statistics Coordination Board (NSCB) and the Social Weather Stations (SWS) has been on a long term downward trend during the last decade or so, a fact that ought to be credited to the US $12 billion annual repatriation of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) directly injected into family incomes, not trickled down, as people still fighting Ronald Reagan insist.





However there is also this data from the SWS on "self-rated hunger" which I have decomposed into what SWS calls "moderate hunger" and "severe hunger". The former refers to the percent of survey head of household respondents who claim to experience hunger "at least once" during the survey quarter -- which is what I call "episodic hunger". Each of the data points at left is actually an average for that year of four such data points. Those in "severe hunger" report not having food to eat most or all the time, what I call "chronic hunger." The hunger statistic that gets reported by SWS and the main stream media is the sum total of the episodic and chronic data points. I have split them out into the two additive components to show that they have behaved quite differently. Chronic hunger appears to change very little over the study period with only a weak downward trend. But episodic hunger is definitely on the upswing, even if self-rated poverty is trending downwards.

I wondered WHY because at first that would seem to be contradictory, paradoxical or otherwise counter-intuitive.

But we find a most plausible explanation of this phenomenon in the recent remarks of Great Britain's Chief Scientific Adviser, Prof. John Beddington, at Westminster:

Beddington said that in the short term, development and increasing wealth would add to the food crisis. "Once you move to [an income of] between £1 a day and £5 a day you get an increase in demand for meat and dairy products ... and that generates a demand for additional grain." Above £5 a day, people begin to demand processed and packaged food, which entails greater energy use. About 2.7bn people in the world live on less than £1 a day.

There would also be increases at the higher end of the wage scale, he said. At present there are 350m households on £8,000 a year. That is projected to increase to 2.1bn by 2030. "It's tremendous good news. You are seeing a genuine prediction from the World Bank that poverty alleviation is actually working."

I think this also exposes the real problem with "self-rated hunger" statistics being collected by the SWS and which usually end up as lurid headlines. The statistic on "moderate hunger" is not measuring the same thing as "chronic hunger" at all, but is actually tracking the effect of gradually improving incomes, which is that they are demanding more and better food!

Then of course there is the role that BIOFUELS are playing to exacerbate the ongoing crisis in the price of food globally. I hope Migz Zubiri is paying attention to this because his plan to help out the Sugar Barons by feeding the cars instead of the people is really backfiring badly. Biofuels--which properly should be called AGROFUELS--are not the panacea they've been portrayed to be. Not only do they take away from food production, they also are not even "carbon neutral" as previously claimed. Both the US and EU have foolishly bought into some snake oil here and they better pull back from the brink before it's too late. In 2007, the 35-40% spike in global food prices has been attributed to fossil fuel at near $100 a barrel, bad weather, and the fact that 14% of the entire US corn crop (40% of global production) bwas converted to ethanol under a program passed by the US Congress and signed by President Bush in 2006. Similar programs in the EU are being criticized for the same reason. The Philippines has even less reason to get on the biofuels bandwagon, given the truly limited land area available to agricultural food production anyway.

Hey Migz! Feed the Cars or Feed the People?

BIOFUELS were again being pushed in the Media today by Senator Migz Zubiri (who should really be out helping to arrest his benefactor in Maguindanao, the fugitive from Justice, Lintang Bedol). Now, I rarely agree with United Nations Rapporteurs especially on "human rights" and so-called "internationalized justice." But the call for a moratorium on biofuel production by Jean Zigler, UN Rapporteur on the right to food makes a good bit of sense to me, whereas Zubiri just reeks of the kind of Greenpeace politics that can only make the situation worse with pseudoscientific crapola.

For countries like the Philippines, with its puny 300,000 square kilometers of land area (compared to the US at 9.8 million sqkm and Brazil with 8.5 million sqkm), simple arithmetic compelled me to oppose Zubiri's snake oil called the Biofuels Act of 2006. It may be green and sexy to be for "renewable energy" -- which is the main selling point of the biofuels idea, it is in my opinion a bad choice for a country like the Philippines, where hunger is said to be at record levels. Whatever the true hunger statistics are, it simply makes no sense to be feeding the cars and not the people. Even though the UN's recommendation for moratorium targets biofuels made from food stocks like corn (for methanol) or coconut (to make cocodiesel), the effect of planting stinky non-food-stocks like jatropha reduces the land available for growing food.

Considering the serious turn in the price of oil this past week and the very dark energy picture worldwide, we certainly cannot afford the feel-good proposals of politicians like Migz Zubiri. His biofuels advocacy is not only shortsighted, he is only deceiving the people that we can somehow solve the energy crisis without a good deal of personal and universal sacrifice.

Because there are simply no immediate technological solutions, certainly not along the lines that Zubiri's friends in Greenpeace can turn from snake oil to fuel oil, I think that we should put the highest priority in laws as well as in practice to CONSERVATION. Some ideas:

(1) This Christmas season, the sale and use of Christmas lights ought to be outlawed or at least given the greatest possible emphasis for non-use except perhaps on Christmas and New Year's Eve, but not a month-long orgy of blinking waste. Cities, shopping malls and private homes need to set practical targets of reduction and carry them out with resolve.

(2) I am for matching the fluctuations in global oil prices with punitive EXCISE TAXES on gasoline in order to strictly limit demand and to encourage carpooling and the use of public transportation.

(3) Planned, rolling blackouts throughout the country ought to be considered before they become unavoidable.

(4) I would subsidize the replacement of all incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient fluorescents and even LED lights.

All in all, we simply have to conserve and suppress energy consumption and demand, becauses prices and supply are not going to be cooperating very much with our profligate lifestyle.

For the longer term, I think that other forms of renewable energy than biofuels need to be given high priority for research and evaluation. For example wind, solar and wave energy sources have to be developed and encouraged with tax and other financial support incentives.

I am also for re-commissioning the Bataan Nuclear Plant as proposed by a Japanese engineering outfit that has deemed the proposal viable.

Biofuels -- The New Snake Oil?

IOFUELS are suddenly big in the Philippines.

Congressman Juan Miguel Zubiri is running for the Senate under the Palace ticket. Styling himself as "the Green Candidate" Migs is pushing BIOFUELS, as an environmentally friendly solution to the Philippines' perrennial oil supply and price problems. During a recent Private Conversation with Boy Abunda on ANC, Rep. Zubiri was waxing eloquent, poetic, even fantastic about the potentials and possibilities of the Biofuels Act of 2006 recently signed by the President. He claims that biofuels are:

(1) the answer to persistent energy and environmental problems;
(2) that their development and production will lead to countryside development and decongestion of the cities; and
(3) eliminate the need for Filipino engineers and scientists to seek work abroad as OFWs "since they can work on biodiesel plants in Batangas."

All this, because the Biofuels Act provides for a mandatory blend of at least five percent bioethanol into vehicle fuel by 2008 and 10 percent by 2010?

But before you start planting sugar cane or jatropha in your backyard and jumping on the biofuels bandwagon, let's take a bit of a reality check...

The total land area of the Philippines is about 300,000 square kilometers, of which 19% is reported to be "arable land" or 60,000 square kilometers. In a sense this represents the maximum biofuels potential of the Philippines for a specific thing like ethanol from sugarcane. If you plant every square inch of land to sugarcane, you can calculate how much ethanol you can potentially make (assuming of course we are willing to give up growing our own rice, corn, and other crops for FOOD.)

Indeed, the Washington Post:(False Hope of Biofuels) did that calculation for the continental United States, which has a land area of 9.8 million square kilometers, based on the known yield of 350 gallons of ethanol per acre. Likewise, one can make the same calculation for Brazil whose land area is 8.5 million square kilometers.

Do the Math, Migs. You're full of BIOGAS man!

FOOD OR GAS? Of course the elephant in the biofuels bandwagon is what the environmentally correct but scientifically inept insist on ignoring. Here is how Polytechnic University of New York researchers put it in that Washinton Post article above--

Finally, considering projected population growth in the United States and the world, the humanitarian policy would be to maintain cropland for growing food -- not fuel. Every day more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds. The situation will only get worse. It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles. It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production. We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live.

This is another example of how environmental ideologists ignore simple science and bring about unforeseeable consequences, as in the amazing case of DDT, which was "demagogued out of use." Now we have a new snake oil being pushed in biofuels.