Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Food To Burn

Which is a more pressing threat, world hunger or global warming? I recently lived in Illinois where the move toward Ethanol was heralded as a wonderful thing. Illinois is a state with lots of agriculture and they would profit from anything that would drive up the price of corn. There was no mention of the downside.

Since then the cost of food has been rising steadily. I heard yesterday that food costs are up 17%. Since the fanfare about the wonder of Ethanol I have learned that burning it causes more pollution than burning gasoline. We have been trying to drill for oil in Anwar for 20 years and haven't allowed another oil refinery to be built in this country in 30 years. Perhaps we should do something about those two causes for high oil prices before we take a chance of starving a small percentage of the world population to make ourselves feel good because we are using less oil.

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