The Pessimist

CALGARY – Sometimes, even pessimists find themselves admitting their predictions have been too sanguine. Four years ago, Dennis Avery warned that, as Western governments fell head over heels for biofuels, passing laws forcing consumers to buy them, “U.S. farmers, who should be exporting food to densely populated Asian countries with rising incomes, will instead turn their corn into ethanol . . . without benefit to the environment.”

I love it when I’m right. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be a lot of comfort as we race toward apocalypse.

America has managed to turn its addiction to cheap energy into a multi-layer transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. American farmers, wealthy capitalists all despite their cries to the contrary, are the most heavily subsidized farmers in the world. While preaching free trade to the third world, American politicians buy votes in rural america with bags of taxpayer dollars. The bio-fuel boondoggle was a great way to keep the gravy rolling in, since it was exempt from WTO subidy rules (not that they adhered to those anyway) and they could pretend to be green.

But the arithmetic doesn’t add. Fossil fuels were laid down around 100 million years ago, it’s finite and it will run out sooner or later. Oil is millions of years worth of banked solar energy, which we have managed to exhaust in just a few hundred years. We can’t meet this demand with current crop production - one year’s solar energy. But if we could, would it be a good idea? It isn’t if you also want to eat.

With just a bit of tinkering around the periphery, the nominal amount of biofuel production is already affecting food prices. Food riots are already in the news. The world’s poor eat grain. The world’s rich eat animals that eat grain. Global warming is turning the productive grain-belt lands around the world into deserts. And the green revolution (using fertilizer, pesticides and mass production) relies on oil.

Do you see the problem? I’m not sure you do yet. Did you think the food riots in Haiti looked scary? Imagine that on a scale of billions of people with an inadequate or unaffordable diet.

ThePessimist sees a dystopia where the rich will have to eat the poor.