Law of Unintended Consequences Or Just Old Eugenics?

They're going to starve the children and kill all of the old people!

Not the Rethuglians, though. al-Gore, along with his cadre of schmuck scientists and hysterical psychophants.

UN chief calls for review of biofuels policy

• Ban Ki-moon speaks out amid global food shortage
  
• 33 countries facing unrest as families go hungry
  

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has called for a comprehensive review of the policy on biofuels as a crisis in global food prices — partly caused by the increasing use of crops for energy generation — threatens to trigger global instability.

"We need to be concerned about the possibility of taking land or replacing arable land because of these biofuels," Ban told the Guardian in Bucharest while attending this week's Nato summit. But he added: "While I am very much conscious and aware of these problems, at the same time you need to constantly look at having creative sources of energy, including biofuels. Therefore, at this time, just criticising biofuel may not be a good solution. I would urge we need to address these issues in a comprehensive manner."

How about a simple, straightforward German analysis? No sense in wasting any more time.

Climate change has been a priority for Ban since he took over from Kofi Annan, and he has embraced the potential of biofuels, derived from plants, as a long-term substitute for fossil fuels. But as food prices have soared — driven by rising demand, high fuel costs, and climate change — the cultivation of biofuels has come under fire for diverting fertile land from food production.

Some of the loudest criticism has come from within UN food agencies, which are struggling to keep up with commodity prices. Last month the World Food Programme issued an emergency $500m appeal to donors to help it meet its existing commitments to the world's hungry.

WFP officials say 33 countries in Asia and Africa face political instability as the urban poor struggle to feed their families.

There are also mounting concerns over the benefits of biofuels to the environment. They generally burn cleaner than fossil fuels, but fuels such as grain-based ethanol are energy-intensive to produce, and tropical rainforests have been cleared to produce palm oil for use as a fuel.

The role of biofuels is under review in Britain pending an inquiry into the indirect impact of their cultivation by the Renewable Fuels Agency.

How about considering these reviews? No sense in wasting any more time — or money.

Against this backdrop some senior UN officials are pushing for a change of policy, and attack Ban in private. "Ban is just out of touch," one said. " He doesn't know what is really going on in our agencies."

Ya nitwit! Why do think the movers and shakers nominated him?

The UN's own special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called biofuels "a crime against humanity", and called for a five-year moratorium.

Let's see if anyone in The Hague has balls enough to at least investigate al-Gore for crimes against humanity. Profiting from the misery he's visiting upon the Third World and urban poor, it's not as if he can't afford a lawyer.

Better yet, just sue the bastard.

Ban rejected that proposal. "At this time I wouldn't make any definitive judgment or definitive plans, in particular vis-à-vis these biofuels," he said. "I know there are some concerns raised by certain quarters about biofuels. But biofuels are a renewable source of energy when we are experiencing extreme difficulties [with] resources."

But Ban conceded that there was a food supply problem and said the primary Millenium Development Goal of halving global hunger by 2015 looked harder to reach than ever. "This steeply rising food price is a new phenomenon," he said. "We have only seven years left to meet the target of 2015. This is very serious."

It was all forseeable, asshat. It's called supply and demand.

He said he was overseeing a multi-agency investigation of the issue involving the UN Energy Programme, the UN Development Programme, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the World Food Programme. "They are all working on this issue," the secretary-general said.

So were the UN's Oil for Food folks.

Via The Guardian.

When asked if man was ruining Earth, Czech President Vaclav Klaus replied, "Perhaps only Mr. Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing.... For example, we know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one side and the wealth and technological prowess on the other side. It's clear that the poorer the society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa. It's also true that there exist social systems that are damaging Nature — by eliminating private ownership and similar things — much more than the freer societies. These tendencies become important in the long run. They unambiguously imply that today, on February 8th, 2007, Nature is protected uncomparably more than on February 8th ten years ago or fifty years ago or one hundred years ago."

Ouch. ;-)

Global Warming and Eugenics

Just throwing this one out there. Could lead to some fiery debate, no doubt.

"Global Warming" had a precursor in capturing the hearts and minds of the world. Michael Crichton, in his novel "State of Fear," brilliantly juxtaposes the world's current political embrace of "global warming" with the popular embrace of the "science" of eugenics a century ago. For nearly 50 years, from the late 1800s through the first half of the 20th century, there grew a common political acceptance by the world's thinkers, political leaders and media elite that the "science" of eugenics was settled science. There were a few lonely voices trying to be heard in the wilderness in opposition to this bogus science, but they were ridiculed or ignored.

Believers in eugenics argued that we could improve the human race by controlling reproduction. The most respected scientists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other bastions of intellectual rigor retreated to a complex on Long Island named Cold Spring Harbor. Their support came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman fortune working with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and other agencies.

The "science" was not lacking important public supporters. Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson were enthusiastic believers. The theory won approval of Supreme Court justices, leaders in higher education and Nobel Prize winners. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was one of the most vocal adherents. She established the first "birth control" clinic in 1916.

Read it all.

UPDATE: Yawn. Today's Reuters drivel. No holiday for the hysterics.