stdreb27
Active Member
I'm not wanting to argue about the validity of global warming, but this article is very interesting when it comes to the use of bio-fuel and other such tom-foolery. And according to this author this guy is one of the bigger tree huggers in Great Britain.
Renowned Environmentalist Calls Biofuels ‘Crime Against Humanity’
By Noel Sheppard | November 6, 2007 - 19:49 ET
Another prestigious international figure spoke out against biofuels Tuesday actually calling their use and production a "crime against humanity."
Unfortunately, since this goes counter to solutions for manmade global warming espoused by folks like Al Gore, you likely didn't hear or read about it.
Though George Monbiot isn't a household name in the States, he is considered one of Britain's leading environmentalists, and is regularly quoted by warm-mongers to advance climate hysteria.
Yet, despite his irrational disdain for carbon dioxide, Monbiot has long campaigned against the use of biofuels, a position quite diametric to Gore and other noted American climate alarmists.
With that in mind, Tuesday's article in the British Guardian contained Monbiot's harshest criticisms to date for this supposedly eco-friendly source of energy that global warming obsessed media in America dare not share with the citizenry (emphasis added throughout):
It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.
Those familiar with Monbiot know that he has quite a flare for the dramatic:
The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.
In reality, Monbiot's explanation for this ignorance - governments yielding to pressure from the automobile lobby and big business for example - has little relevance in America, and is really just your garden variety environmentalist delusion.
After all, our unfortunate love affair with ethanol is almost exclusively a legislative overreaction to rising oil and gas prices, and the errant belief that biofuel was the panacea. Now that global warming alarmism has taken center stage thanks to Hurricane Katrina and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, nobody in Congress would dare step onto the floor of the Senate or the House of Representatives admitting that this was all a huge mistake.
Similarly, in other parts of the developed world foolishly beholden to the Kyoto Protocol, governments that have sold their souls to biofuels as part of the carbon dioxide solution can't go back on this now for fear of looking incompetent to their constituents.
Renowned Environmentalist Calls Biofuels ‘Crime Against Humanity’
By Noel Sheppard | November 6, 2007 - 19:49 ET
Another prestigious international figure spoke out against biofuels Tuesday actually calling their use and production a "crime against humanity."
Unfortunately, since this goes counter to solutions for manmade global warming espoused by folks like Al Gore, you likely didn't hear or read about it.
Though George Monbiot isn't a household name in the States, he is considered one of Britain's leading environmentalists, and is regularly quoted by warm-mongers to advance climate hysteria.
Yet, despite his irrational disdain for carbon dioxide, Monbiot has long campaigned against the use of biofuels, a position quite diametric to Gore and other noted American climate alarmists.
With that in mind, Tuesday's article in the British Guardian contained Monbiot's harshest criticisms to date for this supposedly eco-friendly source of energy that global warming obsessed media in America dare not share with the citizenry (emphasis added throughout):
It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.
Those familiar with Monbiot know that he has quite a flare for the dramatic:
The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.
In reality, Monbiot's explanation for this ignorance - governments yielding to pressure from the automobile lobby and big business for example - has little relevance in America, and is really just your garden variety environmentalist delusion.
After all, our unfortunate love affair with ethanol is almost exclusively a legislative overreaction to rising oil and gas prices, and the errant belief that biofuel was the panacea. Now that global warming alarmism has taken center stage thanks to Hurricane Katrina and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, nobody in Congress would dare step onto the floor of the Senate or the House of Representatives admitting that this was all a huge mistake.
Similarly, in other parts of the developed world foolishly beholden to the Kyoto Protocol, governments that have sold their souls to biofuels as part of the carbon dioxide solution can't go back on this now for fear of looking incompetent to their constituents.
