When Paul Krugman reinforces Maxed Out Mama's worries, we are facing a serious problem. First, M_O_M with some comments on the current escalating crisis in the price of grain, all in the guise of good intentions:
The lower end of the US population is being hit too. The ethanol push is going to create a situation in which more food is imported into the US to feed its population. This makes no damned sense - it is sinister environmentalism. Oh, perhaps it makes sense if you believe, as so many of the talking heads like Ted Turner do, that the best thing to do for the environment is to kill off a large number of human beings. The view of human beings as pollution has been current among the raving intelligentsia of pseudo-environmentalist movement, but naturally it is not shared by the human beings who are hungry now.
Following policies that directly take the food out of people's mouths is a policy of economic warfare. It is not environmentalism.
And, more, from today's post:
I think that there are two problems with supply. One is that it is just not growing like it used to, and another is that there has been a replacement effect as high grain prices took over. For trade, the export crops are being limited and obviously people are angling to get what is out there, so that drives up prices as well.
The rapidly developing economies of the third world are colliding with limitations on resources, exacerbated by both reactionary trade policies and liberal "feel good" prescriptions (eagerly leveraged by large corporations which love government subsidies, ie corn based ethanol.) The result is that people who have only come lately to modernity are facing significant reversals in their standard of living and the poor are facing the prospect of hunger. Needless to say, this is a dangerous and unstable situation. Krugman agrees:
These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people.
I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.
There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.
How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.
Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels.
Actually, it is not just corn based ethanol that has been demonized. Via the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, oil has been demonized. The implications of this are dramatic. The West, under the sway of radical environmentalists and a lazy and ill informed MSM, has determined that CO2 will destroy the earth and the newest and worst sin is to use too much oil without giving Al Gore some of your money for indulgences, pardon me, "offsets." As a result we are precluded from drilling for new sources of oil and continually increase our dependence on some of the worst nations in the world.
This morning, on NPR, I heard yet another story about the danger of AGW and the burgeoning market in Carbon trading in which young bright 20-somethings are making lots of money as middlemen. Despite the fact that there has been no warming in 10 years, AGW lives on in the minds of many people who matter, bringing us such foolishness as corn based ethanol and Carbon trading. There are a great many reasons to conserve energy and minimize one's pollution footprint, but policies based on AGW have the capacity to do tremendous damage to the most vulnerable and that is what we are seeing already in the food price escalation.
This is a prescription, populations under tremendous pressure, for societal regression. When societies regress, complexity is lost and simple solutions, including finding simple scapegoats, ensue. Civil disorder is a constant threat when people feel desperate. The traditional response by rulers to such despair has been to find an enemy to attack. War has been a well traveled path for humans under such pressure from time immemorial. The problem with such a prescription is that war has become far too deadly and dangerous to tolerate.
On a related note, (related to oil, via those who have it and their cousins) if you read only one article today, make it Stanley Kurtz's I and My Brother Against My Cousin, his review of Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, By Philip Carl Salzman. (Admission: I have the book but have not yet begun to read it.) Salzman, an Anthropologist, has managed to preserve important anthropological knowledge that was hidden during the reign of the worst of the multiculturalists, the knowledge that Arab societies remain organized along tribal lines. Kurtz reports his most dispiriting conclusion:
The most disturbing lesson of all is that, in the absence of fundamental cultural change, the feud between the Muslim world and the West is unlikely ever to end. Tribal feuds simmer on and off for generations, with negotiated settlements effecting only temporary respites. Among the tribes of Waziristan, the saying goes: "I took my revenge early. I waited only 100 years." The Western liberal template takes an experience of peace under the lawful authority of a state as the normal human condition. In this view, when peaceful equilibrium is disturbed, reasonable men reason together to restore normalcy.
In the tribal template, however, low-level endemic feuding in conditions of controlled anarchy is the norm. Mediation by a neutral party can sometimes create a temporary respite if violence spins out of control. Yet the underlying conflict, especially if it is between distantly related or entirely unrelated groups, is seldom finally settled. It is instead prosecuted aggressively in strict accordance with cold-blooded balance-of-power calculations. From Karim's palm trunks to the war on terror, the liberal "come let us reason together" model has little currency in Arab tribal culture.
In addition, Richard Landes comments on the Kurtz review and adds some important points about the Honor-Shame dimension of tribal society that help to further clarify some of the issues between the West and the Muslim world.
Modernity has been extremely stressful for the Arab world, which is so ill-suited to adaptation to a changing environment. Add in scarcity of resources, and global food inflation, and we are all in for a bumpy ride.
The Bakken Formation can not start producing quickly enough. We need the breathing room that only more oil can afford in the dangerous interval between the present and an approaching future where alternative sources of energy will come on line in adequate quantities to effect our energy economy.
Recent Comments