[Rhodes22-list] Got Rice?

[Brad Haslett]

There's no hoarding of rice in the Haslett/Shen household regardless of
whether Costco or Sam's is rationing the stuff.  We live right next door to
Arkansas and last time I looked, there was still a gazillion acres of rice
under cultivation.  The Arkansas rice farmers went to great lengths about
ten years ago to display two fifty-pound bags of rice at a trade show in
Japan.  Guess what?  It's white and tastes just like Japanese rice!  Here's
the latest from Steyn on the eco-scam and the rising food prices we're
un-necessarily suffering from.  Brad

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Saturday, April 26, 2008
Mark Steyn: Feed your Prius, starve a peasant [image: MARK STEYN]MARK STEYN
 Syndicated columnist
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Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of U.S.
Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has
been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very
pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all
over the TV sofas, talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he
regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On
Global Warming."

Where to begin? For the past 10 years, we all have, in fact, been not
warming but slightly cooling, which is why the ecowarriors have adopted the
all-purpose bogeyman of "climate change." But let's take it that the editors
of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one,
when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately 1 degree.
That's the "war": 1 degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a 1-degree increase isn't exactly Pearl
Harbor. But Gen. Stengel wants us to engage in pre-emptive war. The editors
of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say,
Iran's nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion
to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let's cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees
than we did 100 or 200 years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any
more trees, and I'd have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my
copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so
long ago in St. Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter
driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker "TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A
BUSH." Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch
of Route 7 there's nothing to see, north, south, east or west, but maple,
hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It's on every measure other than tree
cover that Vermont's kaput.

So where exactly do Time magazine's generals want to plant their tree?
Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It's all these Third World
types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the
sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography,
the tree is Old Glory, and it's a flag of eco-colonialism.

And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, Prime Minister
Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office April 12. Insofar as history
will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head
of government to fall victim to "global warming" – or, at any rate, the "war
on global warming" that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people
have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40
percent since last summer and, as columnist Deroy Murdock reported, some
citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and
(mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty and affordable? Well, one out
of three ain't bad.

Unlike "global warming," food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from
Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and
even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of
the "wartime measures" they've been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent
of petrol and diesel must come from "biofuels" by 2010, rising to 10 percent
by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy
by mandating a fivefold increase in "biofuels" production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free
market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary
of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel
production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its
value as food, why be surprised that you've suddenly got less to eat? Or, to
be more precise, it's not "you" who's got less to eat but those starving
peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over
with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right?
Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first
place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely
cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at
Princeton calculate that, to date, the "carbon debt" created by the biofuels
arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first
victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In
order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for
no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On
April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper,
editorialized:

"The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world's
environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of
it?"

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of
listening to fellows like you. Here's the self-same Independent in November
2005:

"At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change
are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley,
reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is
drawing up plans to impose a 'biofuel obligation' on oil companies ... .
This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British
petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol."

Etc. It's not the environmental movement's chickenfeedhawks who'll have to
reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where
to place the blame – on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders
and weather-vane politicians who insist that the "science" is "settled" and
that those who question whether there's any crisis are (in the designation
of the strikingly nonemaciated Al Gore) "denialists."

All three presidential candidates have drunk the environmental kool-ethanol
and are committed to Big Government solutions. But, as the Independent's
whiplash-inducing U-turn confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such
obligation to consistency. Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn't be
surprised to find that gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine, and
it's just sliced your finger off.

Whether there's very slight global cooling or very slight global warming,
there's no need for a "war" on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of
eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian
solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for
Time's tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving
peasants on the far horizon.

(c)*MARK STEYN*