Comments on: We’re all going to starve!

By: john b

john b — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:41:45 +0000

@8, no, I’m looking at the *actual* make-up of *actual* groups that are *actually* shaping the plans for a low-carbon world.

By: tomsmith

tomsmith — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:23:07 +0000

The largest current threat to agricultural production in the EU is the change in pesticide legislation due to come into effect in 2010.

The current risk-based approvals system will be replaced by one based on hazard. You can read about it here:

http://www.nfuonline.com/x33775.xml

By: David Gillies

David Gillies — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:55:29 +0000

john b: you are guilty of the fallacy of the appeal to consequences: that the outcome of wholesale adoption of fluorescent Greenery would be catastrophe and thus it will not be adopted. Such an approach not merely denies the fact of the Holomodor and the Great Leap Forward, but denies their possibility. Humans are perfectly capable of behaviour that leads to mass starvation, and knowledge of this does not necessarily lead to its rejection (q.v. Zimbabwe, right now).

By: john b

john b — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:15:24 +0000

@Tim, true, but one of the things that’s clear about the response to AGW (both Copenhagen and elsewhere) is that the nightmare scenario of the deep-greens getting anything like what they want is a million miles off the cards. They get to march around being silly; meanwhile, the actual carbon reduction arrangements are discussed by governments, businesses, banks and economists.

Tim adds: Wish I was as sanguine. I can already see idiocy of the deep green kind. Aviation, for example, must reduce emissions. But this is nonsense. We don’t care which emissions are reduced, just that many are. It could be (I think probably will be but that’s another matter) that aviation are the emissions upon which we place the highest value. So that we might well want them to *increase* even while we reduce emissions from other activities.

But we get the Green idea that everyone must cut all their emissions, every sector must share the pain. And yes, this is how things are being done now in the UK. A complete ignoring (even ignorance) of the fact that a reduction in emissions in total does not mean a reduction in emissions from every sector.

By: john b

john b — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:13:02 +0000

@5, yes, but he’s an evidence-based one like me and (at least for the purposes of argument) Tim, not a watermelon-ideology one like the anti-nuke anti-fertiliser vegan loonies.

By: dearieme

dearieme — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:13:31 +0000

Actually, Goldacre is a Global Warmmonger, so he’d not be much good on that topic.

By: john b

john b — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:42:12 +0000

Isn’t the crux of the story this unsourced, and rather insane, assertion: “Some 3% of the world’s energy is used in the manufacture of fertilisers and in a post-Copenhagen world, dominated by renewable energy, such carbon consumption is likely to be prohibited“.

Given that “avoiding mass starvation” is one of the few goals that everyone at Copenhagen, from John Monckton through to Swampy, prioritises above any of the ideological ones, why the flaming hell would anyone draw the author’s conclusion that such carbon consumption is likely to be prohibited? It won’t be, and so nobody will starve.

And Robin McKie shouldn’t be science editor for a (vaguely) respectable newspaper – time to shut it down and put Ben Goldacre in charge of science coverage across the group

Tim adds: The undercurrent here is that there are indeed those green groups who insist that we have to stop industrial agriculture. You normally see them in the peak oil banfests. “Fertiliser comes from oiol so we have to stop using it”. I reckon that’s where this has come from. Organis farming and nightsoil enthusiasts.

By: Brian, follower of Deornoth

Brian, follower of Deornoth — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:50:31 +0000

I could easily afford a quite large increase in the cost of food…if, of course, I didn’t have to pay any tax.

By: David Gillies

David Gillies — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:48:31 +0000

The price of food could quintuple and I’d still be well-fed (getting enough calories in me to maintain my weight is such a nugatory portion of my household budget that I disregard it in forward planning.) Quintupling food costs would, all else being equal, probably kill my cleaning lady and her daughter (of course I would not permit that to happen.) But it’s an example of how ‘Green’ measures are horribly regressive. Lysenkoism killed millions. The latter-day equivalents are just as dangerous. Eco-fascists have blood on their hands. It won’t be the plump, pink Scandinavian do-gooders who pay the price for a retreat from agricultural productivity. It will be the brown and black and poor and desperate, and above all their children (for if there is one thing we know it is that adequate nutrition during childhood is absolutely crucial to future development.)

I think there’s a powerful case to be made that one of the most effective methods of ensuring future human happiness would be to make an eco-warrior’s head blow up like a firecracker in a can of tomato soup with a well-placed fifty-calibre shot to the forehead. These psychos are hell-bent on outdoing the worst doctrinaire excesses of Mao, and that put paid to fifty million people at the least.

By: FaustiesBlog

FaustiesBlog — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:51:02 +0000

The EU’s food mountain could ease any perceived food shortage – but of course, the French won’t like that, wedded as they are to the discredited CAP.

Interestingly, India has found that Coca Cola is the most cost-effective pesticide. Just imagine what it does to humans!