a sentence from the article:

"Eliminating trade barriers and programs that set aside agriculture resources is one way that developed countries could help equip developing countries for the rising food prices."

Do readers have thoughts to expand on what that means?

Have never been in agreement that biofuels would be the answer to our needs as it would cause more problems than it would solve. Development of wind, solar and wave power is the way to go; but nnnoooooooooo, we have to spend it on a war to grab more oil.
Food production will invariably be affected by global warming as will our whole biosphere.

Better get used to change kiddies.

This sounds like a deliberate attempt to starve the world into submission. Why are we growing corn for 'biofuels' when there are 2 billion people on the planet living on less than $1 a day, with 25,000 children dying of starvation DAILY?! That is simply ridiculous and yet again, another waste of resources and an endangerment of peoples' lives. Trust me, we will feel it in the US as well.. there are enough 'food insecure' Americans who will suffer a similar fate as those in the so-called Third World. And considering the track record of America's social spending, these people will be left to die just like the other 2 billions.

this is why bio-fuels are not the best alternative to oil...as it will eat up land,that could feed people.the golf courses of hawaii have replaced pineapples..pineapples taste better and are more nutritious than golfballs.land is better used for food than fuel,viva la winds,rains,tides and the glorious sun,as they remain the best alternatives,to oil !!

As usual, FAILURE to mention the fact that the only biofuel which does NOT contribute to global warming, does NOT deplete the soil or foods, REPLACES petroleum 100%, etc ... is INDUSTRIAL HEMP. Until the Left SHUTS THE DRUG WAR DOWN instead of continuing to support it, the Left will continue to LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE !!!!!

Mother Corn has been feeding our children since dream time. Mother Corn will abandon us if we insult Her by feeding our animals and machines with Her bounty. Skip the meat and eat your veggies!

The use of croplands for making fuel for vehicles is no different than throwing people in ovens or starving them to death in concentration camps and the punishment will be the same for those A-holes who participate in such abominable practices. And those scumbags who would profit by such evil means will not have to wait so long for their punishment. These are not the days of old when crimes could be forgotten or obscured, and the new Revolution will use every facility within it's nature to punish those who would accrue an unjust profit by fecklessly contributing to the miserable death of many.

Daniel David - "Eliminating trade barriers and programs..."

That sounds like someone pushing more NAFTAs.

kilgore trout - it's always a pleasure when a Kurt Vonnegut character visits. I'm currently rereading "Jailbird"

Zimbabwe has recently announced the building of a huge bio plant, using jatropha, to meet their energy needs.
Of course, jatropha takes years to mature and produce oily seeds, but in the meantime they will have a wonderfully pristine and unused processing facility to show off.

As bad as things are here, it's worse in Zimbabwe.

Turn lawns into gardens: make it a law.

Bio-fuels feed several addictions: individual carbon-based travel (cars, planes, trucks, SUVs, ) and carbon-based electric generation (so the wealthy populations can play with their electronic toys).

Bio-fuels also underpin the wealthy population's using nature as a playground; and even if bio-fuels are not used, nature is altered to be used for mass entertainment.

"Turn lawns into gardens: make it a law."

"Make it a law", or a variation thereof, like "There ought to be a law" .... that, as I see it, is one of the things wrong with the world---giving more power to government, when on the whole, most of the world's problems can be traced to bad governments. I'd rather trust to people working out solutions themselves, without either government supervision or government regulation.

The environmental and economic impact of the rising cost of food is enormous:

ENVIRONMENTAL:
British research recently concluded that burning biofuels contributes more to climate change than burningt petroleum.
Can anybody expand on this?

ECONOMIC:
Just as Enron and other megacorps cooked their books, the US Gov. cooks the books on inflation data by excluding food costs (and energy costs)when calculating the rate of inflation and the consumer price index. This has been a primary driver in keeping US wages in a downward spiral since 1973 and caused the current mortgage meltdown by understating inflation to keep interest rates low.

And Congress just passed the Peru free trade agreement, with more to come. I never thought I would be in agreement about anything with The John Birch Society, but... live and learn. That is, some of us do, others keep right on full speed ahead toward that cliff. Unfortunately, most of them are our leaders.

It is scary that when China's president says he wants more chinese to drink milk and overnight the price of milk goes up.

But I dont think things will change unless you get violent protests from poorer countries. A Diet for a Small Planet advocated eating less meat so the water and food could go to people instead of livestock(another reason the amazon is being cut down).
But rich countries wont give it up easily.

I read a story once in a Vegan Magazine called the Hunger for Knowledge about people sending up rockets to find life on other planets. But they ran out of fuel so they started growing crops to fuel the rockets. By the time they found an alien and it visited earth, the first and only question they had for the alien was, "are you edible?"

It was a joke. Never thought growing crops for biofuels instead of food would be real.

Seems to me 90%plus of world problems can be directly traced to overpopulation. Too many people for too few resources. When are we going to be mindful that birth control/family planning/reproductive control access is the thing that's going to save the planet, if it's not too late? It's not politically correct to state or supported by the Bush administration, but it's true.

Overpopulation? People (particularly religious zealots) love having children because that's what they were created to do - populate the earth. You're gonna have a hard time razing that crew.

I saw a tie-died hippy holding a Ron Paul sign the other day and it made me lose my (corn) lunch... Who will put the priorities of feeding the world and saving the environment into play??? Is Kucinich the only one?

The question about birth control and population is a question of whether people think with global interests in mind, or just the interests of their local family and clan.

When you think of the global situation, it makes sense to limit births.

If you think of just your family and clan, you actually want to have more children. This gives you a larger next generation to work for the good of your family. It gives you some survival room when things get tough and children die along the way. If you view competition as the way of the world, having a large family gives your clan an advantage against the other human beings you are fighting against for survival.

To me, this is the big picture. We've had people like Jesus and others trying to tell us for millennium that loving each other and treating everyone like your brother was the way to survive. Do that, and we can create paradise here on earth.

On the other hand, staying with a dog-eat-dog world of competition for survival means we all end up living in a hell on earth. What's best for just your clan leads to a world with too many people overall. All-in-all, we are all probably worse off when everyone takes the option that seems best for them.

Maxpayne says:

"Until the Left SHUTS THE DRUG WAR DOWN instead of continuing to support it"...

NEWSFLASH! Ron Paul is the ONLY candidate talking about stopping the War on Drugs!!

The War on Drugs will NEVER be ended by a Democrat. Deal with it.

You want to see hemp grown AGAIN (check references to George Washington growing hemp...heck there's even comments about hemp in Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"!), then don't bother voting for any Democrat except perhaps Dennis Kucinich.

I still like the idea of a Kucinich/Paul Independent ticket.

Whatever.

We always had a swell acre plus organic garden and orchard. This year, we didn't harvest enough from it to serve three decent meals.___ NO BEES, honey or any other types. NONE. No inscets either. A beautiful garden with thousands of wild flowers and nice green vegetable leaves and tree leaves, __ with no veggies or fruit.

I can get imported cans of veggies at a dollar store for a dollar, sometimes the tops of the cans swell up, but open a good can and it's half full of water and SOGGY, sad appearing green beans, lima beans, beets, tomatoes or carrots. ___ Or, I can buy a can with an American brand name at a Safeway and it costs $1.80, then discover it's also imported, and is half full of water and soggy vegetables.

"Houston___ We have a problem."

Why do people on the left spend most their time hating people like Ron Paul who largely agree with them?

Sure, there are differences. But people like Ron Paul are fighting against exactly the same corporate machine we are fighting against. So this constant effort to keep us all separate and disunified always just amazes me. Its like people enjoy being defeated.

How about we recognize that others are fighting against the same enemies that we are? And that this fight is important to all of us? Later, after we've re-established a free country with free and fair elections I'd be happy to debate the Libertarians about the differences between my more greenish-anarchist philosophy and their Libertarian philosophy.

But to me, those differences today pale in comparision to the fight we have on our hands to take our current government of the corporation, for the corporation, and by the corporation back into the America of a land where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

So, this constant strain of attack against Ron Paul just amazes me.

I don't think Ron Paul will get the Rethug nomination. But if he did, I'd vote for him over Hillary in a general election in a heartbeat.

And what I really, really, like to see is some sort of unified Paul-McKinney opposition campaign against both corporate parties in the general election.

As long as we stay divided as an opposition, the corporate parties will stay in power. Why do we insist on hating our natural allies?

BTW, Hemp for biofuel still has exactly this same problem as described in the article.

You take land that could be producing food, and you divert it into producing fuel. Exactly which crop is grown for fuel doesn't change the fact that you are telling people to starve to fuel the SUVs.

Ps ... I assume Kucinich is too wedded to his pro-corporate Democratic party to leave and run as an independent. And even though I like Dennis, I still like Cynthia McKinney better. Sometimes you just gotta fight, and Cynthia's a fighter.

But maybe that's just because I used to live in GA and work on her campaigns.

I thank those posters who have written about population and its (direct) relationship to many problems, including the amount/cost of food.
I am constantly amazed at what a controversial topic this is. The problem resides in the philosphy that people should be able to procreate whenever/wherever they choose. (Now I KNOW there are countries where women's reporductive habits are NOT in their control- Yet another huge issue). In the U.S. we have hundreds of thousands of women every year having children they cannot fiscally take care of--- Imagine if this didn't happen here. There are also parts of the planet that are simply not able to sustain human life (without the importing of most staple items).
When do we as a local and global population start examining what it means to be responsible?

Ron Paul wants to privatize everything. If that doesn't serve corporate interests, I am not sure what does! And he is very much Pro Life. We need not take any more steps backwords.

I agree with you, WhatToDo. Ron Paul's negatives outweigh his positives, however attractive they are.

Do the maths...it's depressing but we must to get our thick heads straightened out.

Rough facts here...

America consumes roughly 1.4 billion litres of petrol a day, therefore America consumes 511 billion litres of petrol a year. Worldwide you can roughly double that number.

1 acre of bio-fuel crops equates to roughly 3800 litres of ethanol.

1 acre of land can create food for 1.5 people in a year (as per US RDA's). Reality check here...6.6 billion people live on Earth.

Ethanol contains 70% of the energy of petrol, therefore, 1.4 litres of ethanol = 1 litre of petrol.

Let's say there are about 4 billion acres of useable farmland on Earth today.

So...

511 billion of litres of petrol = how many acres?
-------------------------------------
(3800 litres of ethanol per acre x 1.4)

Equals....

96,052,631 acres of bio-crops to fuel America for a year. (150,000 square miles!)

And there is...

434 million acres of crop land in America today.

Thats a lot of corn eh?

Imagine, 1/4 of America is a corn crop that you can't eat! Now imagine this ratio beyond America's borders!

Scary how little the average person really knows about the validity of bio-fuel vs fossil fuel huh?

So what was the point anyways? Well,

A) Move closer to work and the services you need, put your car keys away and use the legs that God gave you instead, use that acre of land you call a lawn to grow some veggies.

or option 2..

B) Keep filling your SUV and prepare for war. Support mass kill offs world wide in order to support your wasteful ways.

Simple choices eh?

[Bill Hicks]:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you.

"I'd rather trust to people working out solutions themselves, without either government supervision or government regulation."

So, when a big corporation poisions your air and water sells you unhealthy food, and employs people in dangerous workplaces, how, exactly will you "work out this solution among yourselves"?

Well, you might:

1. Form a neighborhood comittee and equip it with guns, handcuffs, a paddy wagon, jails, judges, prisons, etc...

2. With the advice of various knowllegble people, ome up with a list of standards that any corporation in your neighborhood must meet.

3. If the corporation doesn't meet the minimum standards, pay it a visit with the above comittee and force it at gunpoint and threat of imprisonment, or extortion of money, to quit harming the people in your neighborhood and start meeting the standards developed in step 2.

Well, if you do all these things, haven't you just formed a government?

We have 50 million acres of switch grass that the U.S. pays farmers to grow to preserve the soil. It is continues to grow for 10 years before replanting, it is a native species requiring little water nor nutrients and all you have to do is mow it, gasify it and synthesize fuel from it to get more than 1/3 of our gasoline needs with NO use of food crops.

Our progeny are our immortality. Think about that for a few minutes if you don't understand. Deciding to not have progeny is to destroy one's genetic line, to make it extinct. People deciding to do this are brave souls. Of course, most people don't think about the enormity of such a decision.

Within our extended family of 5, we have produced only 3 to carry on our genetic line, instead of tha average 11-12. This was done with some active decision making, not entirely by chance.

Unfortunately, the reproductive sex act is very enjoyable and perceived as having no cost. Its true costs are seldom discussed and almost never taught in schools, aside from STD issues and the "problem" of teen pregnancy (which implies it's fine to get pregnant after high school). It's instructive to review the position of the US government versus China's one child policy to see that USG promotes overpopulation.

I love to see an article about food prices climbing and no end in sight, or almost any other subject, from the high cost of fuel to the housing market become a political forum, pro and con for a presidential candidate. Where are those who will soon write the word IMPEACH ? ___ At least the last five letters in that word spell something to chew on.

Hey, here one came up about screwing the gals while I was editing. Now that's a subject I can dig into.

All of you railing AGAINST biofuels have fallen for the bait.

I agree biodiesel is encouraging the destruction of mother earth's lungs in the Amazon. We need to stop that right now.

But you CANNOT lump Ethanol and Biodiesel together, they are completely different from one another

Before any of you spout out more poison about food VS fuel, etc. - you had better read "Alcohol Can Be A Gas" by David Blume. (www.alcoholcanbeagas.com)

Myth #1: It Takes More Energy to ­Produce Ethanol than You Get from It!

Most ethanol research over the past 25 years has been on the topic of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). Public discussion has been dominated by the American Petroleum Institute's aggressive distribution of the work of Cornell professor David Pimentel and his numerous, deeply flawed studies. Pimentel stands virtually alone in portraying alcohol as having a negative EROEI—producing less energy than is used in its production.

In fact, it's oil that has a negative EROEI. Because oil is both the raw material and the energy source for production of gasoline, it comes out to about 20% negative. That's just common sense; some of the oil is itself used up in the process of refining and delivering it (from the Persian Gulf, a distance of 11,000 miles in tanker travel).

The most exhaustive study on ethanol's EROEI, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo, shows an alcohol energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of input—and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the ore to make the steel for tractors.

But perhaps more important than EROEI is the energy return on fossil fuel input. Using this criterion, the energy returned from alcohol fuel per fossil energy input is much higher. In a system that supplies almost all of its energy from biomass, the ratio of return could be positive by hundreds to one.
Myth #2: There Isn't Enough Land to Grow Crops for Both Food and Fuel!

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. has 434,164,946 acres of "cropland"—land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion (monoculture). This is the prime, level, and generally deep agricultural soil. In addition to cropland, the U.S. has 939,279,056 acres of "farmland." This land is also good for agriculture, but it's not as level and the soil not as deep. Additionally, there is a vast amount of acreage—swamps, arid or sloped land, even rivers, oceans, and ponds—that the USDA doesn't count as cropland or farmland, but which is still suitable for growing specialized energy crops.

Of its nearly half a billion acres of prime cropland, the U.S. uses only 72.1 million acres for corn in an average year. The land used for corn takes up only 16.6% of our prime cropland, and only 7.45% of our total agricultural land.

Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today's levels. Corn could easily produce this level—and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this. Plus, of course, the potential alcohol production from cellulose could dwarf all other crops.
Myth #3: Ethanol's an Ecological ­Nightmare!

You'd be hard-pressed to find another route that so elegantly ties the solutions to the problems as does growing our own energy. Far from destroying the land and ecology, a permaculture ethanol solution will vastly improve soil fertility each year.

The real ecological nightmare is industrial agriculture. Switching to organic-style crop rotation will cut energy use on farms by a third or more: no more petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Fertilizer needs can be served either by applying the byproducts left over from the alcohol manufacturing process directly to the soil, or by first running the byproducts through animals as feed.
Myth #4: It's Food Versus Fuel—We Should Be Growing Crops for Starving Masses, Not Cars!

Humankind has barely begun to work on designing farming as a method of harvesting solar energy for multiple uses. Given the massive potential for polyculture yields, monoculture-study dismissals of ethanol production seem silly when viewed from economic, energetic, or ecological perspectives.

Because the U.S. grows a lot of it, corn has become the primary crop used in making ­ethanol here. This is supposedly ­controversial, since corn is identified as a staple food in poverty-stricken parts of the world. But 87% of the U.S. corn crop is fed to animals. In most years, the U.S. sends close to 20% of its corn to other countries. While it is assumed that these exports could feed most of the hungry in the world, the corn is actually sold to wealthy nations to fatten their livestock. Plus, virtually no impoverished nation will accept our corn, even when it is offered as charity, due to its being genetically modified and therefore unfit for human consumption.

Also, fermenting the corn to alcohol results in more meat than if you fed the corn directly to the cattle. We can actually increase the meat supply by first processing corn into alcohol, which only takes 28% of the starch, leaving all the protein and fat, creating a higher-quality animal feed than the original corn.
Myth #5: Big Corporations Get All Those Ethanol Subsidies, and
Taxpayers Get Nothing in Return!

Between 1968 and 2000, oil companies received subsidies of $149.6 billion, compared to ethanol's paltry $116.6 million. The subsidies alcohol did receive have worked extremely well in bringing maturity to the industry. Farmer-owned cooperatives now produce the majority of alcohol fuel in the U.S. Farmer-owners pay themselves premium prices for their corn and then pay themselves a dividend on the alcohol profit.

The increased economic activity derived from alcohol fuel production has turned out to be crucial to the survival of non-corporate farmers, and the amounts of money they spend in their communities on goods and services and taxes for schools have been much higher in areas with an ethanol plant. Plus, between $3 and $6 in tax receipts are generated for every dollar of ethanol subsidy. The rate of return can be much higher in rural communities, where re-spending within the community produces a multiplier factor of up to 22 times for each
alcohol fuel subsidy dollar.

Myth #6: Ethanol Doesn't ­Improve Global Warming! In Fact, It ­Pollutes the Air!

Alcohol fuel has been added to gasoline to reduce virtually every class of air pollution. Adding as little as 5–10% alcohol can reduce carbon monoxide from gasoline exhaust dramatically. When using pure alcohol, the reductions in all three of the major pollutants—carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and ­hydrocarbons—are so great that, in many cases, the remaining emissions are unmeasurably small. Reductions of more than 90% over gasoline emissions in all categories have been routinely documented for straight alcohol fuel.

It is true that when certain chemicals are included in gasoline, addition of alcohol at 2–20% of the blend can cause a reaction that makes these chemicals more volatile and evaporative. But it's not the ethanol that's the problem; it's the gasoline.

Alcohol carries none of the heavy metals and sulfuric acid that gasoline and diesel exhausts do. And straight ethanol's evaporative emissions are dramatically lower than gasoline's, no more toxic than what you'd find in the air of your local bar.

As for global warming, the production and use of alcohol neither reduces nor increases the atmosphere's CO2. In a properly designed system, the amount of CO2 and water emitted during fermentation and from exhaust is precisely the amount of both chemicals that the next year's crop of fuel plants needs to make the same amount of fuel once again.

Alcohol fuel production actually lets us reduce carbon dioxide emissions, since the growing of plants ties up many times more carbon dioxide than is created in the production and use of the alcohol. Converting from a hydrocarbon to a ­carbohydrate economy could quickly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I write about this more at www.lawnstogardens.com - come on over and learn.

When they began pushing bio-fuels, one of my main concerns was that that would lead to hunger. Then I read an article on the new biofuel movement. It pointed out that the equipment used to heat and distill the bio-fuel put four times as much carbon into the atmosphere as the bio-fuel was supposed to eliminate.

The article also pointed out that the coal and oil industry was pouring huge amounts of money into investing in bio-fuels, because they would benefit at both ends. They were buying croplands, etc., as well as tooling up with bio-fuel distilleries. (Coal and oil fired, of course)

So, as usual, greed wins and the people starve while the rich drive their hummers. (I wish I had bookmarked that article when I read it)

And in response to Karlof1:

In Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution, he explores the possibility (which, the more I though of it seemed almost a certainty) that the purpose of alternative sexual practices — other than vaginal intercourse — was to serve as birth control. Our prehistoric kin were not idiots; they knew how babies were made. When food got tight they'd just _do it_ in a way that wouldn't cause pregnancy.

When agriculture came along it enabled wealth to be concentrated. It only made sense that the rulers, who needed more workers to work the fields and feed their armies, would ban those alternative sexual practices.

You and I are monkeys that seek health and the preservation of life. We like food. Sleep. Money and the things money can buy. Life after death (for believers). The well being of our children. A feeling of importance. And sexual gratification.

No matter what your religion or sense of values, it feels good when your netherbits get tickled. I feel this is relevant to Peak Oil in that we are at the peak of population, right before some nasty things start happening as modern thinking meets the 4th Law of Thermodynamics.

While there is nothing sexy about entropy, we should keep that in mind the world now has a virtual sex machine called the Internet. Sex crimes decrease since people can find whatever they are looking for online (A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes).

Normal people, either as couples or singles, seek sexual experiences from the magical sex box. It's world wide, from India to Iraq to wherever. I'll bet there are Taliban fighters whacking off in Wi-Fi enabled caves somewhere.

The point is that we are at the point with peak oil where the Zero Sum game starts to have definite losers. Right now it is starting in the poorest countries, and people are dying. Food prices will only continue to rise, and if the Ice Shelf slips into the ocean we are all fucked, no matter how many carbon credits you buy.

As long as we continue to breed and developing countries try to keep up with the Joneses (the West), we will continue to witness a decline in living conditions. As long as we continue to be prudish and deny that we are sexual monkeys, there will be fighting over the remaining bananas.

You may think I'm trying to be funny. I'm not. As the economic collapse speeds up and more people are in their own personal dire straights, they will be freaked out and depressed. Attitude is key now as things get bad.

I believe we are entering a period of time when an intervention is needed and social programs will become overwhelmed. This Thanksgiving, food banks reported huge drops in inventory and the ability to help feed people.

Hungry, desperate people are no joke. But somehow through despair, sex always breaks through, and no matter what you have been told, God won't get mad if you take care of your needs. Do whatever you have to do to keep up a good attitude and stay positive.

It's about to become a very rough ride. Time to fire up the moonshine!

It's apparently legal to grow hemp in Canada. Does anyone know how much acreage is devoted to growing hemp in Canada and for what it is used? I know some of it is turned into fiber. It's a travesty beyond words to not grow hemp in the US, as it has thousands of uses...the antiquated law is ridiculous. Believe me, if anyone wants to get high, they won't smoke industrial hemp. Isn't grass the first or second ranked cash crop in this country? Who is fooling who? Beside all that, hemp oil and seed is outrageously nutritious as a food source.

karlof1 December 6th, 2007 3:02 pm "Our progeny are our immortality ... Deciding to not have progeny is to destroy one's genetic line, to make it extinct."

So? The problem with one's genetic line becoming extinct is what exactly? Please tell me precisely what that problem is.

As with any major problem such as population control the answer usually lies with more education. Unfortunately, good sound sex education is still taboo or against somebody or others beliefs. Abstinance is a joke, a feel good concept for people unwilling to face reality. Abstinance does not take into consideration that hormones rage and common sense and committments to abstinance turn to mush especially in the youth who would do much better with decent sex education. I have read that the U.S. does not offer assistance with contraception to countries who do not adhere to the absinance programs. How sad is that?

I don't support using food for fuel, but I do support eco-eating (www.brook.com/veg) for a healthier, happier, more peaceful, more just, and more sustainable world.

According to the USDA, the lower 48 US states is 38% forest land (750m acres), 38% livestock rangeland (750m acres), and 17% cropland (350m acres). This 17% in crop land may be split out to 15% (300m acres) in livestock feed and 2% (50m acres) in plant food for human consumption.

Livestock also consumes huge amounts of energy and water, and produces a lot of methane. Americans really load up at every meal with meat, dairy and eggs. If all Americans went vegan, we could probably feed ourselves on 5% of our land area. And at least half of that area could be our suburban lawns, and sunroom attachments to our houses for winter gardens and tropicals. Not that Americans are going vegan any time soon, but it's good to know what land use is essential and what's not.

If only the leftist will take a clear look at the food production situation today, the leftist will see the capitalist's biofuels push as a progression of plunder, the overall progression and the capitalist dogma behind it being the fundamental problem, not the individual steps. After biofuels, the capitalist will lurch off into yet another destructive plundering, so it's best to focus on the root of the problem and that is the intent that drives the grotesque machine - the capitalist's culture of greed - to maximize economic activity, instead of the responsible, logical, and just goal to maximize efficiencies and value in markets.

TruOrange--Did I say it is a problem? No, I commended people who decide to do so. In most places in the world, progeny equates to social security as culture in those societies deems it progeny's responsibility to care for its progenitor's in old age. Thus progeny is of great value economically. In what remains of my extended family, I am the caretaker, but have a very easy job because of pensions and social security. Yes, I'm quite lucky.

From a genetic POV, the "problem" would be that of a reduced gene pool. A Statist would say not providing a replacement for myself hurts the state's viability as tax revenues and GDP would decrease, that I would cause a burden for those remaining because taxes would have to increase. Those Abrahamic religion followers would say I'm going against God's dicta and deserve to rot in hell.

But self-extinction and imposed extinction are not the same. Proper family planning is a way to avoid the need to choose self-extinction. Unfortunately, such planning runs into the objectors noted above and more. Personally, I would be quite content with a one-child policy becoming the norm here in the US, but I'm not holding my breath.

I salute all those who took the risk to not procreate, an act in the US which is very counter-culture because it stands against "Tradition."

Maybe when beef is $80/pound, like it is in Japan, because all our food crops are being turned into fuels to keep running our cars and trucks and SUVs, then maybe the American public will rethink our relationship to the environment and to the rest of th world.

....Nah!

The crux of the problem with biofuels is that topsoil, unless you are speaking in geological time, is not exactly renewable. It's too precious a resource to waste on energy when wind, solar, geothermal and hydrogen offer basically unlimited/undiminishing sources.

Hello Pojer,

Thank you for the enlightening post on the relationships among sexual practices, population, and Peak Oil. Wasn't it Buckminster Fuller who said that as society evolves the prevalence of homosexuality will increase? To think of "alternative" sexual practices as being behaviors shaped by issues of survival is a healing one for me, especially so given the poisoned and cloistered framing of the debate in the MSM.

I wholeheartedly agree that "some nasty things [will] start happening as modern thinking meets the 4th Law of Thermodynamics."

This should SHUT DOWN any misunderstanding of hemp.

KEM PATRICK

'houston - we have a problem'
roger that kem - over and out.

Be Subversive. Buy Local Food!

Hemp: There were 48,000 acres of HEMP grown in Canada in 2006.

Hemp is also grown for food, a super-food, containing all essential amino acids & essential fatty acids and much more. Protein and oil.

Buy Local. Don't buy food unless its grown in your bioregion!

"Turn lawns into gardens: make it a law."
Actualy, in most citys around here (Los Angeles)
It is a law.
ANY change to "your" property that negitivly efects your
neigbors "Property values" is illigal, in the sence that "Code Inforcement" WILL find your garden and start leagal action against the property "owner", starting with fines that can be garnished from any bank acount knowen by the City or County.
Food comes from licenced "SuperMarkets", frute products carry expencive plastic stickers with government permit numbers.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060507071109/www.tao.ca/~kev/

"Surging demand for feed, food, and fuel have recently led to drastic price increases, which are not likely to fall in the foreseeable future," von Braun said. But "climate change will also have a negative impact on food production."

If you ever hope to retire, put your money in commodities.

Privatize We the People. Incorporate us before other corporations steal our public lands and treasure and enslave us.

An economist reminded me that the CPI does NOT include food or energy; no wonder it can be said that inflation is not a concern.

Hunger is also a growing concern; if we each reduced our animal and meat consumption and overall consumption for that matter, lived simply so others may simply live, we could reach the tipping point and set a different example than the one now that is not sustainable.

Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together and we should respond from that awareness.