Save the Planet, Starve a Peasant

We have previously documented the false assumptions behind our government's ethanol mandates.

Corn-derived ethanol is a grossly inefficient source of energy, generating as much as 30% less per gallon; it is vastly wasteful of farmland, so much so that if 100% of American corn was turned into ethanol, it would still meet only 14% of our transportation needs; and recent studies indicate that, because of the energy requirements of fertilizer, refining, and transportation to the consumer, ethanol actually produces more carbon dioxide and pollution than the equivalent quantity of good old Saudi crude.

These inconvenient facts have not stopped Congress from not only subsidizing the production of ethanol, but in fact requiring it, even as European environmentalists are now protesting against the ethanol requirements they lately protested for.

It's no surprise the American taxpayer, driver, and diner is being fleeced; that's not new.  Yes, the environment is being needlessly worsened, but that too is the commonplace result of "pro-environment" government regulation.

What's amazing is that this stupid wrongheadedness and greed is now directly leading poor people starving.  That's right: our government's wrongheaded policies are causing an artificial and avoidable famine worldwide.

The problem is that American subsidies have created a tremendous incentive for corn to be poured, not into hungry bellies, but into thirsty gas tanks.  This has led to worldwide shortages; where once the U.S. was a major exporter of the crop, we now consume increasing amounts ourselves.  As Adam Smith would predict, this drives up the price.  The knock-on effects are traveling through the entire agricultural and grocery economy.

Corn commands an artificially high price, so farmers move to plant more of it and less of other crops.  This raises the price of whatever else they were previously growing.  Insofar as other foodstuffs are still slightly cheaper than corn, shoppers rush to the stores to stockpile, leading to shortages, especially in the case of products which keep well such as bulk rice.

What's more, meat animals are generally fed now-overpriced corn.  Briefly, this lowered meat prices as ranchers killed and sold animals they could no longer afford to feed; but once that glut passed through the system, meat prices rebounded and reached new heights.

This is bad enough for Americans, but we're not going to starve, although the Wall Street Journal (who ought to know) is recommending that we run, not walk, to the store with wheelbarrows to stock up.

Alas, the world's poor are in a far more parlous state with food riots now sparking in Afghanistan, Haiti, Mexico, and elsewhere around the globe.  Where once immigrants to the United States would send money home to their third-world-dwelling relations, they now send care packages of foodstuffs simply unavailable there.  In fact, no less than the Secretary-General of the United Nations has officially declared a global crisis.

In all the flailing and hyperventilating, one of the few sensible responses appeared in the New York Sun, as follows:

Food Crisis Starts Eclipsing Climate Change Worries

The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels...One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America's corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.

In other words, in the rush to "save the planet", we are starving human beings.  Which, environmentally speaking, makes perfect sense - after all, are we not daily hammered with the depredations caused by human activity?  Roads, buildings, farms, breathing - darn near everything we do contributes to global warming and all manner of other ills.  The recent rash of books and TV series showing what a gloriously wild place the planet would be if all the humans kindly vanished speaks to the root belief of many environmentalists that the real problem in the world today is too many people.

Would the world be a better place if a few billion people died off?  Well, yeah, in a lot of ways, it probably would; there'd certainly be a lot less pollution and prices of resources would go down with decreased demand.  But is that really the way we want to even look at things, much less the road we want to travel?  Those that do want this are monsters - and hypocrites too, if they're still alive themselves.

The right solution is to look for solutions.  Not ways to force people to cut back, but ways to produce more of what's needed.  That is the whole history of human progress and technological innovation, which has never yet let us down.

For that to happen, government needs to do what it is most qualified to do but rarely does: nothing at all.  The laws, subsidies, and incentives we have now have accomplished nothing good and a lot of bad.  It's time for these regulations to be totally ended and removed, so as to let American ingenuity have free reign to do what needs to be done.