Posted on 04/11/2008 9:51:22 PM PDT by La Enchiladita
Energy: The world's poor are learning what happens when government subsidizes the burning of food. It's time to end this madness and let the market decide if any biofuels make sense.
For most Americans, the rising prices at the supermarket are definitely an annoyance, but hardly a threat to life and health. It's a different story in countries like Haiti, where food inflation has led to real hunger and, last week, to riots.
News reports say the poorest Haitians are trying to get by on cookies made with dirt, vegetable oil and salt. Food riots also have roiled Egypt and led to a general strike in Burkina Faso in West Africa. The high cost of corn, wheat, soybeans and other basics of the world's diet could soon start bringing down governments.
It already has set back the fight to reduce global poverty. World Bank Chairman Robert Zoellick estimates that "the effect of this food crisis on poverty reduction worldwide is on the order of seven lost years."
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
The question is not seriously considered by anyone who’s studied population trends over the last 20 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Forecast_of_world_population
One can object to contraception, as I do, but the consequences of it are increasingly global. The populations which are still expanding at preindustrial rates are too small to undermine a stabilisation around 9.5 billion in 2050.
Bump for later reading.
As I said, we don’t know the number yet.
But what if the numbers said your local community/county could only support 75% of who are there now?
Who do you kill?
I’m just asking questions.
If we agree that the Earth cannot support an infinite number of humans, how do we address the issue?
My point is that if we chose to not think about it, there is only one end, an end predicted by chaos theory, a cataclysmic decline in the population.
It certainly is true that the rates in the industrial countries are much closer to ZPG rates.
NO it is caused by the millions of suckers this moron has bamboozled.
No support and Gore is relegated to the scrap heap of history.
That was the question I asked you but I didn't get an answer to it.
But do you get the feeling that these apparent mathematical analyzes have a pretty poor record of pinpointing that elusive tipping point is, andhave a pretty poor record of predicting anything or providing enlightenment when you look back on them?
Maybe, just maybe, the organism/ecosystem model we apply to rats just doesn't fit right when talking about populations of people. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! "Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store. "Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!"
Maybe some variables are missing. Maybe lots of variables are missing. Maybe people sitting around with computers predicting cataclysm as soon as certain data points they've identified are met, aren't much different than the guy that gives away his stuff and goes up on a hill to wait for the end.
No. You immediately jumped to the “who are you gonna kill” idea.
And the fact that I’m just asking questions, (in fact the questions I’m asking are “What questions do we need to ask”), while you seem to act as though if you or your family were threatened with starvation or freezing or whatever then you would just lay back and die, that seems to me a little dishonest.
See what I’m saying? There are NO WAYS you can even ASK THE QUESTIONS without it becoming so emotional and self righteous that we end up just ignoring them.
I’m gonna withdraw from this thread.
Did someone piss on your dinner. Grow a set or shut up.
djf (post 15),
Global warming is the question to the liberal answer of higher fuel costs, expensive alternative energy schemes, etc.
It’s such a good question that they cannot let it go. Their answer(s) have been prepared for at least a generation, and Al Gore supplied the Global Warming BS. It’s too perfect to allow rational thought to intervene. Flashback 20,000 years ago when half-mile high glaciers were receding (melting) from New York in the east, to Washington in the west. Was that anthropogenic global warming? Man discovered fire, and maybe that’s what brought about the end of the Ice Age. Earth has continued to warm ever since. This whole Global Warming bruhaha is a disgusting stain on the state of science in the beginning of the 21st century. Future generations will judge us harshly on our sciencio-politico-religio-liberalio-fascio-BS.
Amen. B/c the higher the standard of living the fewer children people have. No, not out of greed but simply b/c there's no need to have child after child after child after child in the hope that at least a few of them will survive to support you in your old age...which in some of these countries is about 46.
McRINO was ahead of the curve. Scrap subsidies. Who’da thunk it? /s
why should the US...
sell corn to our enemies,
for less than its burn value?
the corn is not eaten by humans, btw
A shocking percentage of Americans are ignorant of the distinction between dent corn and sweet corn.
Having said that, dent corn does have some human food uses—corn meal, for instance, so Mexican kvetching about tortilla prices does have some basis in fact.
Perhaps we should start hoarding popcorn?
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