Unintended Consequences
When decisions are made and actions taken there are always consequences. Bad decisions make for ill-considered and ultimately harmful consequences. When we're blindsided by a sense of urgency that creates a type of hysteria that in turn impairs the thinking process, we make real problems for ourselves. Problems that have to be faced, to be resolved. And actions taken to turn back the results of 'unintended consequences'.One of those unintended consequences can be seen taking shape in today's world with commodity prices going sky-high for corn. Although we seldom give it much thought, corn and its byproducts are a much-used commodity. Apart from providing a good portion of the world with meal and flour and fresh corn, its extracts such as corn starch and corn syrup are basic ingredients in a good many consumer products.
Corn is also fed to cattle, to ensure livestock come to market sleek and healthy and ready for all those eager consumers who cannot consider the good things in life complete without meat on the table. Think of the food value of corn-fed poultry. Yet the great thinkers among us, faced with a growing natural catastrophe where weather patterns have changed and climate has altered and the hitherto-natural flow of temperature, winds and oceans have all been affected.
The very atmosphere in which our earth is contained has changed, thanks at least in some part to the activities of mankind busy altering the environment that holds us all. Fossil fuels have contributed greatly to the degradation of our environment, chemical fertilizers have done their part, and industrial smokestacks have added their contributions as the search for national wealth and trade goes on at ever greater speed.
Because the fuels we use to provide energy to warm and cool our homes and factories and buildings of business enterprise, along with the fossil fuels consumed by motorized vehicles of every description have contributed so greatly to the general detriment of every little thing on earth, we realize our activities have presented us with a huge problem; how to continue achieving the enterprising growth in national GDP and living standards?
We're additionally faced with the knowledge of a dwindling stock of fossil fuels; and the carbon particulates that have created great environmental problems through the burning of coal, oil and gas present us with a conundrum. What other fuels can possibly be used to replace or augment traditional fossil fuels? Water-generated, wind-generated, nuclear-generated, sun-generated, we've tried them all.
And now we've turned our beady eyes on biofuels. Not so bad perhaps the utilization of spent and dirty oils used for cooking, cleansed of their particulates and re-used as fuel. But biofuels taken from sugarcane and corn? They burn as detrimentally to the environment, causing just as much degradation as traditional fossil fuels. And they represent food for all living creatures.
Is this a reasonable exchange...to turn arable land over to the growth of agricultural crops to be used as fuel to operate motor vehicles?
Corn-based ethanol and oilseeds to be turned into biofuels are already having a considerable impact on the world economy. And we're in the process of charging up at an enormous rate to double, triple, quadruple the availability of crops for biofuel production. The inflation rates in most countries of the world are now being impacted because of rising prices for agricultural prices once stable, and food-directed.
Now cereal- and bread-manufacturers, dairy producers and more are realizing a significant increase in raw prices and their finished edible goods are reflecting those price rises. Consumers are not amused. "Nothing affects consumer inflation expectations more than food", according to Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research in New York.
Globally there has been an unprecedented surge in demand which has translated in a whopping 23% rise in food prices, as recorded by the International Monetary Fund throughout the last eighteen months. The situation can only become worse.
More than a trifling alteration in our realization of the value we place on food, seeking to deliberately and with (little) aforethought to exchange that value to the need to conserve food stocks in a world that will require more, not less food resources with growing populations in China and India.
Yet we have made the decision that we will exchange the value of food for that of an energy source. Gaawd!
Labels: Environment, Technology, Viewpoint
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 21, 2007
<< Home