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356 comments on DrumBeat: March 26, 2008
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356 comments on DrumBeat: March 26, 2008
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Yes, that image is likely to become a classic.
Especially when food price escalations become really painful.
I wonder how the wealthy, whose whole lifestyles often revolve around wasteful practices, will cope when conspicuous displays of consumption are about as socially acceptable as shitting on the sidewalk? I am talking about a entire class of people whose lives center around etiquette... how to eat an artichoke, proper placement of silverware, and always saying please and thank-you.
And what of Bubba with his dually pick-up ?
Alan
It'll rust in his front yard, once he stops being able to afford the gas for it.
Perhaps Bubba can keep it running by converting corpses to biodiesel. Dead obese Americans are currently an underutilized resource. This may change...
When the paper money has no value, "please and thank you" may actually be all that's left.
Good point. Even after the revolution, or whatever, we don't want to become barbarians.
In the meantime, the hypocrisy is sickening. It reminds of an incident from long, long ago. I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and in a big European store in Ibadan. Outside there were beggars with withered legs, sitting on skate-board like devices, pleading "dash me master, dash me" (give money). Surrounding the store was an endless vista of tin-roofed mud huts. Inside there was a matronly British woman asking for donations to a group devoted a preventing cruelty to animals. (To be fair, none of escape this hypocrisy.)
The largest animal rights organization in Sweden "Djurens rätt" had "Animal rights in war zones" as a theme in their latest newspaper no 1 / 2008.
I have read the other day that the EU environmental commisioner defended the 10% biofuels targert and denied that it was causing food prices to rocket. That guy is totally stupid or totally corrupt. As an EU commisioner he is probably both.
In order for the United States to reach the grain ethanol cap scheduled for 2016 might require 40% of the 2007 size United States grain harvest.
Europe is likely to have similar problems as the ethanol yield of a bushel of grain is low and 10% of Europes transport fuels is very high.
Global warming is causing Himalaya glacial melt and might shrink rivers in India and China exacerbating the needs of their growing populations.
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update71.htm
Using all the grain in the United States each year to make ethanol might satisfy 12 percent of our oil needs, but would create a hell of a food shortage. As if food and gas prices were not bad enough; they might easily get worse unless some sort of change is wrought.
Using the entire corn and wheat harvests (14 billion bushels) to make ethanol would yield about 38 billion gallons of ethanol (2.7 gallons per bushel). The United States used more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. One barrel = 42 gallons. U.S. oil usage was more than 840 million gallons of oil per day; that is about 307 billion gallons of oil per year.