Dear Option H,
Some anonymous stinky-butt posted a comment linking me to this article from The Telegraph. Entitled "Global warming rage lets global hunger grow" is perhaps a mistake. I feel "Global irresponsibility," "World blunders yet again," "Global hunger growing at exponential rates" could have all been slightly more appropriate.
Quick Disclaimer: I DO NOT AGREE WITH EVERYTHING WRITTEN IN THIS ARTICLE
Moving on...biofuels were thought to be the end all to the oil dependency of the United States. Consequently, the government encouraged farmers to transform their arable land which might have been used to grow a slew of other crops into land for corn production. Through massive subsidies the USA aims to divert 45% of its grain output to ethanol by 2015 -- it has already reached an alarming 18%. Canada, Argentina, and several Eastern European countries are aiming to follow suit.
Why is this bad? Well it can be summed up in this quote: "The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching political and moral limits."
According to the UN, it takes around 232 Kg (~550 lbs) to fill one 50L tank with ethanol. A quick search on Google revealed that there are around 250 million cars in the US alone. Doing some quick math its going to take about 62 500 000 000 Kg of corn to fuel the entirety of the USA. Even 50% of that number is monumental. Not to point out the blatantly obvious, but that's a lot of corn. And a lot of corn translates into millions of hectares of land -- which leads to the first controversy surrounding ethanol. As mentioned above a huge amount of land worldwide is being transformed into corn fields. With wheat and/or rice as the central staple in the majority of the world's citizenry, a turn-over from wheat/rice to corn production is having a devastating effect on the mouths of many populations. Bangladesh, Haiti, India, Cameroon and the Philippines are only a few of the countries that are facing severe food crises in which 60-50% of a person's income goes towards putting food on the table.
Thomas Malthus once said, "The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased." I believe is right in thinking that our reason has been distorted, and perhaps 6.5 billion people are being checked as the carrying-capacity of the world reaches its tipping point.
PS. Tune in next week for Part II.
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