Repeal "Biofuels" Requirements

Jim Sensenbrenner should consider this carefully--it's pointed out by Nick and The Warrior, and it's of substantial interest.

Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.

The article mentions wheat, rice, cassava, and corn.

Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

(An elegant turn of phrase, that.)

If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find they cause more warming than petroleum

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%.

...which increase would be a good thing, were the product to be used to alleviate hunger.

The cynic might congratulate the Population Control bunch (Rockefeller, et al) for their brilliant triumph--in order to "save the world," they have arranged for the starvation of a hundred million people (give or take a couple.)

All it took was three elements: the Big Lie that 'global warming' is caused largely by man burning petroleum; the Big Lie that burning food as fuel would cure this; and the Big Regulation preventing nuclear and drilling for petroleum reserves within/offshore the USA.