Who Needs Food When You Can Drive?

When Time magazine admits there's a problem with a liberal scheme, you know it's in trouble. Sure it's beneficial for diesel mechanics that we have hippies driving around the US in biofuel busses. And I've got nothing against well to do liberals indulging their inner-smug, but really, food is for eating.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International....

And btw, it's not just corn that goes up in price when crops are diverted to biofuels. When grains go up in price, farm animals, which feed on that grain, go up in price too. Last year I noticed a frozen goose in my local supermarket that sat in the freezer from before Thanksgiving until after Christmas. I figured it would go on sale but if it did I missed it. Why did it sit so long? It was marked at $47. For a goose. What? Maybe an 8 pound goose. Thanks a lot hippies.