Warmenists vs The Poor, III

I thought I remembered this story from the London Times awhile back. It seems that if you're rich enough, you can assuage your guilt over your carbon crimes by sending a poor Indian peasant from the 21st Century back to the tecnhnology of the Bronze Age.

As the Times story (from 2007) puts it:
"Somewhere in the Indian countryside, a farmer is about to repay Mr Cameron’s debt to the planet. Climate Care’s latest enterprise is to provide “treadle pumps” to poor rural families so they can get water on to their land without using diesel power. The pumps are worked by stepping on pedals. If a peasant treads for two hours a day, it will take at least three years to offset the CO2 from Mr Cameron’s return flight to India"

So once that treadle pump is in place, who you do think is going to provide the muscle power? No, not Big Al Gore, although he could use the exercise. It will be the children who will in all liklihood be taken out of school to do the work.

Climate Care, an arm of JP Morgan's environmental markets group is the benevolent gang behind the scheme to let Third World peasants do the heavy lifting so green robed hypocrites can keep flying around to conferences.

Warmenists vs. The Poor, II

As I noted yesterday, the direct diversion of food crops into biofuel production and the change in cultivation from plants for food to plants for fuel will inevitably decrease the amount of food available in the market, raise prices and push the marginal poor right over into starvation. This Wall Street Journal story from Japan is an apt example. The farmer is being subsidized to grow a variety of rice suitable for conversion into ethanol instead of the food rice he used to grow. This wouldn't happen without subsidies. I don't know how ecofanatics sleep at night. Maybe they'll send some starvation offsets to Manila or Jakarta.

Warmenists vs. The Poor Part I

As anyone in an undergraduate economics class could tell you the fuel market and food markets were essentially separate. Rises in oil price had only an indirect marginal effect on the price of food through fuel and fertilizer costs. Climate fanatics however have suceeded in linking the two directly by enlisting Big Agriculture and Big Government in forcing biofuel mandates on the world. Not only are food crops like palm oil and soybeans now diverted directly to fuel production, agricultural land is diverted to the production of fuel crops rather than food crops. If you're growing corn for ethanol, you plant high sugar varieties, if you're growing for food, you want high protein. Less wheat, more corn, and so on. None of this could have happened without the perverse incentives of government subsidies. Congratulations for joining at the hip two groups who couldn't care less about the poor--climate fundmentalists and agribusiness.
When even the BBC gets it, it should be obvious to everyone.