It is said that we are in the middle of a world food crisis. Bullshit, we are in the middle of a population crisis. For centuries we have bred to the point of instability and we are now finally feeling the crunch of scarce resources. The caring part of my humanity feels for people who will starve, but part of me wants to jump up and down point fingers and say, “I told you so!”
There are also those who want to blame the food shortage on the growth of the US biofuel industry, but to that I can only scratch my head and ask who put them up to saying it. The fact is right now most land used for biofuel farming would sit idle if it wasn’t used for those crops. For those who complain that while we can’t do anything about this years biofuel crops, but we can in the future crops, you need to stop and think about the consequences of delaying biofuel production.
The longer we wait to start making the switch from oil to biofuels the worse the situation becomes. It has been suggested that it will take one barrel of oil to create one foot of biofuel infrastructure. That cost right now is near $120 a barrel. What will the cost of laying one foot of biofuel infrastructure when oil is $200 a barrel and up. For the record we will need more than a quarter million miles of biofuel infrastructure for the US and Canada alone. We eventually have to make the switch and we new that when oil was only $45 a barrel. How long do we have to delay before we are really in a world of shit?
Feel and pity the people who will starve because of this crisis, but never forget that the problem lies not in too few resources, which we can’t change, but in the amount of people we have who need them. That one can be changed as can the attitudes about it.
