New superpowers are competing for diminishing resources as Britain becomes a bit-player. The outcome could be deadly

I have long been saying that it was water not oil that really matters in the world.  If you have ever thought Tibet was about land you would be greatly mistaken, unless you were referring to the watershed from those mountains.  There will come a time in the not so distant future when oil hits $200 a barrel, or maybe even $150/barrel that Americans decide they have had enough and make the hard switch to biofuels.  I am not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I can put two and two together and many large corporations have been buying farm land for decades and losing money on it.  They wouldn’t do that if there wasnt a future profit motive to it.  That tells me others have seen a biofuel future too.

When America refuses to pay the burden of oil, it won’t take long before we are producing most of our own fuel, as we did more than a century ago.  Then let us ask what happens to the rest of the world.  The hardest hit will be developing countries that often rely on food subsidies from the US.  We will simply say, I am sorry there is no wheat or corn for you, because we moved our surplus production that you have relied on for decades into sorghum, switchgrass, and oilseed crops.  Don’t think for a moment that Americans aren’t going to feel that pinch too. Given our habits most Americans would rather have cheap fuel, then they would a sandwich especially when the cheap bread goes to five dollars a loaf.

In some respects $5/loaf will be good for the people.  years ago when government statistics were put together they gave a much higher weight to food prices when they decided what poor was.  For years now food has not kept up with the price of housing, which has over taken the American budget.  Of course this being the American government we are talking about, they are likely to decide that after decades of study and sitting around with their heads up their asses that the cost of housing really is what we should base poverty levels on.  Coincidence?  I very much doubt that, this is the US government we are talking about.

I know what some of you are thinking, so what if a bunch of people in Africa starve.  Well you should care, not just because they are human beings either.  Africa is not only a land of tribal peoples, but of great Muslim extremism.  if you think we have the Islamicists pissed at us for our involvement in those oil rich countries, think what happens when we tell the ones we have been feeding all these years to suddenly go fuck themselves.  Without water and without food, they have nothing to live for except to hurt us, and hurt us they will. They flock to terror training camps with not a holy crusade, but revenge in their hearts…

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Is there a solution to all of this?  Not an easy one, and not one that doesn’t mean changing our habits and demanding better fuel efficiency now, rather than cheaper fuel prices later.  We will never see dollar a gallon gas prices again, but I do believe it is possible to see twenty miles per dollar spent on fuel.