The biofuel schemes have already inflated world food prices. Shortages and famines will increase

Burning Food

Nothing illustrates the anti-human ethos of the Greens better than their support for “biofuels”.

That trendy name cannot hide the fact that encouraging and mandating the burning of food for motor fuel creates nothing but negatives for the environment and for human welfare, but will have no effect on climate.

The biofuel scheme relies on taxpayer subsidies and legislated market-sharing. It wastes land, fuel, fertiliser, water and financial resources to produce ethanol from sterile monocultures of corn, soya beans, palm oil and sugar cane. Most of the land used was cultivation that once produced food. Some is stolen from peasant landowners or obtained by ploughing natural grasslands or clearing virgin forests. The distilling process produces good alcohol but an inferior motor spirit that can damage some engines and has only 70% of the energy of petrol and diesel.

The biofuel schemes have already inflated world food prices. Shortages and famines will increase. This food-burning policy is taking us back to the hungry years before tractors, harvesters, trucks and diesel fuel when teams of draft horses, working bullocks, stock horses and farm labourers consumed 80% of farm output. Some may like to return to those bucolic days, but then most city populations would not find food on their supermarket shelves. In trendy green jargon, big cities would be “unsustainable”.

Here is a new slogan which is kind to humans AND the environment:
“Don’t Burn Food for Fuel”.

Viv Forbes Viv Forbes Most recent columns Viv Forbes, Chairman,The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer. Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects. Viv can be reached at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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