While the weather in the UK has been, with barely a break, a miserable wet time resembling one of those bits of the Old Testament where God gets a bit pissed off with His Creation, it has been stinking hot in some other countries, notably the wheat-growing parts of the US. Hence, all kinds of grim predictions of shortages, and ensuing higher prices for bread and other foods, as reported by Reuters.
But there is another factor besides the weather – deliberate government policy concerning biofuels. Here is blogger Bishop Hill on the matter:
“I’m sure that people who can no longer afford a loaf of bread will be much reassured by the fact that the UK government is discussing flexing their biofuels mandates.”
Of course, the idea that misguided environmental ideas might make poor people even poorer is a notion that does not fit with the conventional narrative from our political class. I doubt that our own benighted Prime Minister, David Cameron, gives this much thought, or if he does, evades the implications thereof. One of the biggest scandals of our time, in my view, is not private banks cooking up “LIBOR”, or MPs fiddling their expenses, but the fact that a mistaken or overwrought theory about climate change was used to justify loading extra costs on the global economy and those least able to bear it.
Of course, there’s the small matter with biofuels – and a projected increase in reliance on them – that a bad harvest would also result in a shortage of stuff to put in our fuel tanks.
So, if the price of bread is going to go up, and the same root cause also results in the price of the means of getting the grain to make that bread to where it needs to be, goes up, that’ll mean even more people going hungry…
Refiners are already being fined for not meeting the earlier EPA prescribed percentage inclusion of a biofuel that has yet to be produced in any available quantity.
I believe it is designated “cellulosic biofuel.”
They ain’t nary a drop to be had; But EPA still require refiners to add a (now reduced) percentage.
Cost of fines is included in the cost of fuels.
Causing people pain is not a fault to a true believer when he’s saving the environment, it’s a critical component of the program.
Economic disruptions, and the difficulties they cause the ordinary citizen, are designed in.
In the old testament, prophets appear when the people of Israel are suffering some calamity, and admonish the sinners to repent, or continue suffering god’s wrath because of their transgressions.
In the modern environmental religion, the earth may have replaced the deity, but the prophets still love to point their fingers at the unworthy and demand repentence.
Basic human impulses never disappear, they just change out of their hair shirts and into expensive suits.
I’m fully in agreement with the sceptical view that CAGW does not exist (ie such AGW as there is does not reach anywhere near catastrophic proportions); thus I am also fully of the view that governmental rigging of the world to meet a non-existent need is folly of the very first order.
However, on this occasion, I’d like to view things from a different perspective: that of supply and demand.
Currently, there is a lot of complaint from dairy farmers, eg here, that they cannot produce at the price on offer. From this, I deduce that there is over-supply.
We also have a price increase for grain, such that there is insufficient cheap food for the poorer segment of society. From this, I deduce there is under-supply: even under-supply contributed to by less than wise government legislation on CAGW.
Perhaps a number of dairy farmers should flip to growing grain. This as partial or total use of the land available to them. Even though I am not a farmer, I strongly suspect that much land currently used as pasture is sufficiently good for cereal crops, to make viable such a move. But they had better plan cautiously: for a drop in grain prices, and price sales on growing grain to feed people rather than to fuel road vehicles.
And, of course, government would do much better to lay off biasing markets, seeing as it gets it wrong so often. In fact, if crop production is inadequate, more CO2 and more warmth are almost certainly what we need (to go with the agricultural water that is not currently in short supply in the UK).
Best regards
I suspect that it is far easier said than done: it seems to me that it would involve such far-reaching structural changes of these businesses, that it may not be worth the relatively short while that political whims tend to live.
Alisa is correct. Switching from growing (say) soybeans to wheat may be a relatively simple matter from a technical perspective, but changing from raising livestock to growing crops is not. And there are a surprising number of federal regulations which make even the switch from one crop to another problematic.
But the basic reason for corn shortages isn’t biofuels (although that certainly doesn’t help, and a lot of people have been complaining about it for some time), but rather the drought. The US midwest is experiencing the worst drought since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Interesting, is it not, that the worst droughts in our history have occurred during the worst economic times? Coincidence? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.