Global Food Reserve Needed to Stabilize Prices, Researchers Say
By Rudy Ruitenberg | Bloomberg | March 29, 2010
A global crop reserve system is needed to reduce price volatility, curb speculation and prevent a food crisis, said researchers from Germany and France.
Centralized global stocks could bring “peace and quiet” to world food markets, said Joachim von Braun, director of Germany’s Center for Development Research, at a conference on agriculture research in Montpellier, France, yesterday.
World food prices started rising in 2007 and climbed to a record in June 2008. Surging prices of wheat, rice and corn sparked riots from Haiti to Ivory Coast. Von Braun said IFPRI research has shown fund investment in agricultural commodity futures added to price volatility.
“The world is no more food secure today than three years ago, when the world food-price crisis hit,” said von Braun, a University of Bonn professor and former head of the Washington- based International Food Policy Research Institute. We need “an efficient, global, coordinated reserve policy which brings peace and quiet to the world food market,” von Braun said.
A global reserve would make it “difficult to manipulate the market,” said Marion Guillou, the head of France’s Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, at the conference.
Von Braun said a food-stabilization system should consist of three parts, including a physical stock managed by the World Food Programme that would allow the agency to respond to a humanitarian crisis more speedily, as well as a reserve based on countries setting aside some of their stocks.
“In a price spike situation, this group could decide, like the International Energy Agency, to release from stock,” von Braun said. “Not a general stabilization fund, but a price- spike stabilization mechanism.”
The third instrument would be a virtual financial fund that could counter speculators by taking positions in the agricultural futures market, he said.
“We have good analysis that speculation played in role in 2007 and 2008,” von Braun said. “Speculation did matter and it did amplify, that debate can be put to rest. These spikes are not a nuisance, they kill. They’ve killed thousands of people.”
–Editor: Will Kennedy, Doug Lytle.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stuart Wallace in London at swallace6@bloomberg.net.
The homeless pay the price
Sasha Abramsky | guardian.co.uk | 20 March 2010
Recently, I wrote about public education in crisis. But two other vital public services are also being hit hard by budget cuts: mental health care and assistance to the homeless.
Education is at least partly buttressed by the fact that almost everybody supports the idea of public schools. Cuts generally provoke an outcry, and politicians often pledge to do their best to restore funding as soon as the economy improves. Mental health and homelessness services, by contrast, are in some ways more vulnerable over the long-run: the constituencies they serve tend to be perceived by much of the public as nuisances at best, as societal menaces at worst; services to these groups tend to be costly; and the success rates (illnesses controlled, homeless folks moved into permanent housing) are, while a whole lot better than nothing, sometimes mediocre.
And so, as local and state government budget crunches worsen, it’s no surprise many of these services are on the chopping block.
The Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that Connecticut’s governor has proposed suspending all state-funded homeless services for the rest of the fiscal year; California has eliminated funding for domestic violence shelters; Massachusetts has reduced spending on geriatric mental health services; Ohio has, according to the CBPP report “eliminated virtually all state funding for mental health treatment for individuals who are not eligible for the state’s Medicaid programme”; while Virginia has reduced the amount it pays hospitals to treat people with mental health or substance abuse issues and slashed its grants to local mental health service providers.
In fact, search online for mental health cuts by state, and it rapidly becomes clear that across America the already-fragile community mental health service infrastructure is being battered.
The impacts are by no means abstract. Community mental health clinics provide not just medicines and counselling services, but an array of other support: they help the mentally ill find housing and jobs; and they work with them to navigate complex government bureaucracies and access benefits. They provide friendship to people who are frequently lonely, depressed and marginalised from the broader community. Cuts to the mental health infrastructure in Kansas have resulted in a documented increase in calls to suicide hotlines and rising numbers of people being admitted to psychiatric hospitals in a psychotic state. Communities like Santa Barbara, California, have seen homelessness spike at least in part because broke local mental health services are having to turn sick men and women away.
And, once homeless, the mentally ill – as well as the non-mentally ill homeless – face a similar scramble for scarce resources. Tens of millions of dollars have been removed from city shelters in Washington DC, the nation’s capital. As winter set in last November in Minnesota, one of the coldest states in America, thousands of low-income families lost emergency financial assistance to help pay rent to avoid being evicted. The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates more than 700 homeless Americans die of hypothermia each year – and with homeless services being slashed, that number will likely increase in the years to come.
Meanwhile, New York City is considering closing the largest homeless drop-in centre in Manhattan. Activists worry that homeless residents with drug addictions, HIV, tuberculosis, or mental illnesses will find it harder to access treatment if they aren’t in stable housing situations. And that, ultimately, could trigger a broader public health problem.
In cities, counties, and states across America, homeless and mental health services are being eviscerated. As a result, programmes that have been carefully built up over decades are going to close. With them will go the expertise of trained staff; the accumulated experience of caseworkers who have gotten to know the needs and behaviours of individual clients, and who might have spent years getting those individuals to trust them enough to let them provide help; and the fragile bonds, the sense of belonging, that in some instances are the only things keeping a person on the edge from spiralling into more serious illness and more intractable long-term homelessness.
There are no easy answers here: too many branches of government have simply run out of cash and of quick-fix solutions. Without more support for these programmes from the federal government, or local ballot measures that earmark funds for particular social services, it’s inevitable that many of them will be cut in the next few years.
But, at the very least, this merits a frank conversation, an acknowledgment that the risks associated with dismantling this infrastructure are huge: tear down services to these groups during the down times and there is just no guarantee that a political consensus will emerge at the back end of the fiscal crisis to restore such services. After all, homeless people or the seriously mentally ill don’t tend to have much of a political voice. Their needs are, too often, seen as irrelevant.
The undermining of these vital social services will have an impact that long outlives the current economic crisis. Nothing would more forcefully illustrate the phrase “private affluence and public squalor“, coined by progressive economist John Kenneth Galbraith, than a booming America, its landscape littered by ever more homeless encampments, ever greater numbers of untreated mentally ill people and, in consequence, a growing sense that, for the affluent majority, public spaces are unsafe and unseemly. That happened in Victorian England; it occurred again in both America and the UK in the 1980s. It would be a great tragedy to let the 2010s and 2020s witness a repeat performance.
More Maize Ethanol May Boost Greenhouse Gas Emissions
American Institute of Biological Sciences | March 2010
In the March 2010 issue of BioScience, researchers present a sophisticated new analysis of the effects of boosting use of maize-derived ethanol on greenhouse gas emissions. The study, conducted by Thomas W. Hertel of Purdue University and five co-authors, focuses on how mandated increases in production of the biofuel in the United States will trigger land-use changes domestically and elsewhere. In response to the increased demand for maize, farmers convert additional land to crops, and this conversion can boost carbon dioxide emissions.
The analysis combines ecological data with a global economic commodity and trade model to project the effects of US maize ethanol production on carbon dioxide emissions resulting from land-use changes in 18 regions across the globe. The researchers’ main conclusion is stark: These indirect, market-mediated effects on greenhouse gas emissions “are enough to cancel out the benefits the corn ethanol has on global warming.”
The indirect effects of increasing production of maize ethanol were first addressed in 2008 by Timothy Searchinger and his coauthors, who presented a simpler calculation in Science. Searchinger concluded that burning maize ethanol led to greenhouse gas emissions twice as large as if gasoline had been burned instead. The question assumed global importance because the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act mandates a steep increase in US production of biofuels over the next dozen years, and certifications about life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are needed for some of this increase. In addition, the California Air Resources Board’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard requires including estimates of the effects of indirect land-use change on greenhouse gas emissions. The board’s approach is based on the work reported in BioScience.
Hertel and colleagues’ analysis incorporates some effects that could lessen the impact of land-use conversion, but their bottom line, though only one-quarter as large as the earlier estimate of Searchinger and his coauthors, still indicates that the maize ethanol now being produced in the United States will not significantly reduce total greenhouse gas emissions, compared with burning gasoline. The authors acknowledge that some game-changing technical or economic development could render their estimates moot, but sensitivity analyses undertaken in their study suggest that the findings are quite robust.
Read the full article (PDF)
The Irony of Iowa’s Ethanol Exemption
Even Iowans Don’t Want to Put It in Their Tanks
By Robert Bryce | March 5, 2010
Oh the irony. This morning, the Des Moines Register is reporting on the death of a piece of legislation known as SF 2359. The bill would have required that all gasoline sold in Iowa contain at least 10% ethanol. But Iowa legislators couldn’t garner enough political support for the bill.
You read it right. Iowa, the biggest ethanol-producing state in the US, doesn’t have a requirement that forces consumers to buy ethanol-blended gasoline. The result: only about 73% of the gasoline sold in the state contains ethanol. And according to a story written by Dan Piller, a reporter at the Des Moines Register, the Iowa legislature couldn’t pass SF 2359 because it was “opposed by a coalition that included fuel retailers and marketers and truckers.”
Iowa has about 3.3 billion gallons of ethanol production capacity, that’s more than twice the capacity of the next-biggest producer, Nebraska. Iowa’s ethanol industry and farm lobby plays an outsized role in US politics. Every four years, presidential candidates must make the haj to Iowa and bow down before the ethanol industry while proclaiming their loving support for corn ethanol. The 2008 election provided hard proof of the importance of the Iowa ethanol industry. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain – avid critics of ethanol before they began their campaigns for the White House – became ethanol evangelists when they started visiting Iowa.
For decades, US taxpayers and consumers have been paying for the subsidies and mandates that are designed solely for the benefit of the corn ethanol scammers, but Iowans have not shared equally in the pain. About 28 states and the District of Columbia have mandates on ethanol-blended gasoline. And earlier this year, top Iowa legislators believed they would be able to add Iowa’s name to that list. Jack Kibbie, a Democrat from Emmetsburg, who serves as the president of the Iowa Senate had a wonderful quote in Wallaces Farmer:
We hear from critics here in Iowa that a mandatory blend of E10 won’t work, that it will mess up engines on motorboats and lawnmowers…Baloney. With all the lakes and boats they have in Minnesota, many more than in Iowa, they’re doing just fine with their E10 mandate. Remember, this bill we want to pass, Senate File 2359, calls for a 10% blend of ethanol in gasoline for highway use for motor vehicles. It has provisions to provide non-ethanol gasoline for antique vehicles, motorboats, lawnmowers and other small engines.
But earlier this week, Kibbie was forced to admit that his bill was dead. And his explanation was revealing: “People don’t like mandates,” he said, “and of course the petroleum marketers didn’t like it.” So Kibbie and his fellow Democrats decided not to subject the bill to a full debate before the Iowa legislature.
At the very same time that the ethanol lobby is pushing the Obama administration to break the “blend wall,” which prohibits gasoline retailers from selling fuel containing more than 10% ethanol, the Iowa legislature can’t even pass a measure that would require Iowans to buy gasoline containing 10% ethanol. Indeed, the ethanol industry wants federal regulators to allow fuel retailers to sell gasoline that has been adulterated with up to 15% ethanol. And they need that regulatory relief because fat federal subsidies led to too much investment in ethanol production capacity. According to Ethanol Producer Magazine, 19 ethanol plants with a capacity of 884 million gallons per year are now sitting idle. And another 7 plants with 484 million gallons of production capacity are under construction. Meanwhile about 192 plants are operating with total capacity of 12.7 billion gallons per year.
The punchline here is obvious: Iowa, a state that has about 25% of all the ethanol production capacity in the US, doesn’t require its citizens to buy ethanol-blended gasoline. And the Iowa legislature can’t pass a bill to change that because, as Kibbie said, “people don’t like mandates.”
Oh the irony.
Robert Bryce’s fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, will be published in April.
Tom Friedman’s Peak Confusion
Twisted Energy Politics
By ROBERT BRYCE | February 16, 2010
When it comes to energy issues, Thomas Friedman simply doesn’t care about the facts.
That reality was made apparent, once again, in Friedman’s column in the February 10 issue of the New York Times. In an otherwise mostly sensible article, written from Yemen, where Friedman was talking about the need for proper educational opportunity in the Arabic and Islamic worlds, Friedman concluded that the US will have to maintain a strong military presence in the region in order to counter al-Qaeda. But he continues, we also must “help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.”
Friedman has been bashing the Saudis for so long, it’s hardly worth recounting the many instances where he does so. But the fact that Friedman once again trots out the tired cliché of our “addiction to oil” and that he then immediately ties that issue to the Saudis shows that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Rather than stick to the facts, he retreats to a mindless slogan that contributes nothing to the need for a broader discussion of energy policy and the reality of the global marketplace.
The US could quit buying oil tomorrow, all oil, and it won’t put the Saudis out of business. According to the EIA, in 2008, the Saudis exported an average of 8.4 million barrels of oil per day. Of that quantity, the US accounted for about 1.5 million barrels per day.
Thus, even if the US somehow managed to segregate Saudi crude from its other oil imports, and also prevented the Saudis from selling that 1.5 million barrels per day somewhere else, Saudi Arabia would still be selling about 7 million barrels of oil on the global market. Needless to say, that 7 million barrels per day will bring the kingdom a fair bit of revenue.
Of course, Wednesday’s column isn’t the first time Friedman has shown that he cares more about polemics than facts. In August 2008, he held up Denmark as an energy model that should be copied by the US. In the wake of the 1973 Oil Embargo, Friedman claims that Denmark “responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent.” Friedman went on to lament America’s situation, writing that if “only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Friedman clearly loves the idea of energy independence, but the data shows that Denmark is not energy independent – it’s not even close. The Danes import all of their coal. I repeat, Denmark imports all of its coal. Furthermore, those coal imports – and coal consumption – show little sign of declining even though Denmark’s wind power production capacity has increased rapidly over the past few years. And Denmark is even more dependent on coal than the US! (1)
Nor did Friedman bother to mention that thanks to the Danish government’s exorbitant taxes, the Danes now have some of the world’s most expensive electricity and most expensive motor fuel.
In 2006, the Energy Information Administration looked at residential electricity rates in 65 countries and found that Denmark’s rates were the highest, by far, at some $0.32 per kilowatt-hour. That was about 25% higher than the electricity costs in the Netherlands, which had the next-highest rates in the survey, at $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. And that’s not a new phenomenon. From 1999 through 2006, Denmark had either the highest – or the next-highest – electricity rates of the countries surveyed by the EIA. (In 1999 and 2000, Japan’s electricity rates were slightly higher than those in Denmark.) Furthermore, Denmark electricity rates are the highest in Europe – and no other country comes close. (2)
In 2008, electricity rates were even higher, with Danish residential customers were paying $0.38 per kilowatt-hour – or nearly four times as much as US residential customers who were paying about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. And the Danes were paying more than twice as much as their counterparts in nuclear-heavy France, where residential electricity costs were $0.17 per kilowatt-hour.
While Danish homeowners are getting spanked by expensive electricity, Danish motorists are getting absolutely mugged at the service station. In late 2008, Danish drivers were paying $1.54 per liter for gasoline, while drivers in the U.K. were paying $1.44 and US motorists were paying $0.56. According to GTZ, an agency of the German government, only a handful of countries have more expensive fuel than Denmark, a list that includes Italy, Norway, Turkey and Germany.
Unfortunately, Friedman’s polemics on energy are nothing new. Back in 2006, Friedman published a column in the Times saying that the U.S. should build a wall around itself. “Build a virtual wall. End our oil addiction.” Getting rid of our need for oil will, he wrote, “protect us from the worst in the Arab-Muslim world….These regimes will never reform as long as they enjoy windfall oil profits.” The solution, he declared is for America to build “a wall of energy independence” around itself. Doing so, “will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda.”
Remember that this is the same Friedman, who, in his 2005 best-selling book, The World is Flat, declared that the world was increasingly globalized and the implications of that were obvious. In this new “flat” world, money, jobs, and opportunity, Friedman said, will “go to the countries with the best infrastructure, the best education system that produces the most educated work force, the most investor-friendly laws, and the best environment. (3)
Hmmm. So doesn’t that also mean that in our new “flat” world, that energy will be exported by the countries that have the best infrastructure for providing that energy to the world market?
Friedman’s problem is that he wants it both ways: he espouses the merits and potential of the new flat world, while also insisting that the US should withdraw into energy isolationism, and thereby surrender any participation in the world’s single biggest industry, the global energy sector. The irreconcilable contradictions in Friedman’s arguments are easily seen in the penultimate paragraph in The World is Flat where he claims that the “two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism – excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security – and excessive fears of competing in a world…that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world.”
So, to summarize Friedman’s world view, he wants a “wall of energy independence” around America while simultaneously warning Americans that the two greatest dangers are a) walling “ourselves in” and b) walling “ourselves off.”
Friedman sees a flat world where walls are dangerous because they will isolate the US from other countries. But when it comes to energy, walls are good because they isolate the US from other countries. Oh, and along the way, we need to bankrupt the Saudis, because, well, they might give money to people who don’t think like we do.
Is anyone else here confused?
Robert Bryce’s fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, will be published in April.
Notes.
(1) BP Statistical Review of World Energy. In 2007, Denmark got 26% of its primary energy from coal while the US got 24.3%.
(2) Eurostat data. Available: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-QA-08-045/EN/KS-QA-08-045-EN.PDF.
Also: http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/industrie-energie/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2007/2007-2187-wm.htm
(3) Yale Global Online, “’Wake Up and Face the Flat Earth’ – Thomas L. Friedman,” April 18, 2005. Available: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5581
Russia finds ‘strategic oil deposit’ in East Siberia
January 29, 2010
MOSCOW, RUSSIA: Russian oil producer Rosneft uncovered a giant oil field in East Siberia with more than 1 billion barrels of oil, the Russian natural resources minister said. Russian Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev said Rosneft made an “important” oil discovery in the Irkutsk Oblast near Mongolia, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti reports.
“We can report today that we have opened the Sevastyanovo oil field, with reserves of over 1.1 billion barrels,” he said. “This is a strategic deposit.” Trutnev said the amount of natural resources recovered from Russia in 2009 exceeded national expectations.
Russia extracted roughly 3.6 billion barrels of oil in 2009. Discoveries for 2009 eclipsed 4.5 billion barrels.The Sevastyanovo oil field is located in Irkutsk Oblast near the route for the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline that links to Asian markets.
Trutnev made the announcement during a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
(EUNewsNet.com and OfficialWire) – Source
Venezuela, Eni Invest $18 Billion to Pump, Refine Oil
By Steven Bodzin
Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — Eni SpA, Italy’s biggest oil company, and Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the South American country’s state-owned oil company, agreed to develop almost $18 billion worth of projects to pump and refine oil in Venezuela.
The companies’ joint venture will start producing crude in the Orinoco Belt in central Venezuela, Oil and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said today on state television, at a ceremony attended by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Eni Chief Executive Officer Paolo Scaroni.
The venture expects to pump 240,000 barrels a day after spending $8.3 billion to develop the Junin 5 block, Ramirez said. First oil will be pumped in 2013, Eni said today on its Web site. It will reach full production in 2016, Scaroni said.
“That gigantic oil reserve — it could not be exploited by Venezuela alone,” Chavez said, referring to the roughly 235 billion barrels of reserves in the Orinoco Belt. “Foreign investment is absolutely necessary.”
Rome-based Eni is seeking oil projects abroad to maintain output. Venezuela, to make up for declining production in its aging Lake Maracaibo fields, is inviting foreign companies to become minority partners in the Orinoco.
Eni also plans to build a $9.3 billion, 350,000 barrel-a- day refinery to convert crude oil from the existing Petromonagas project in the Orinoco into higher-value products, Ramirez said.
Eni will pay a $646 million signing fee, the company said on its Web site. It will pay $300 million when the development joint venture is formed and the remainder will be paid later.
International Arbitration
Eni will hold 40 percent of the venture. PDVSA, as the state company is known, will own the rest.
Eni was granted access to the Orinoco after dropping an international arbitration case against Venezuela in 2008 over an oil field nationalization.
U.S. oil companies Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips continue to pursue arbitration against Venezuela for seizing operations of Orinoco Belt projects that began in the 1990s.
Venezuela expects to complete joint venture agreements with Chinese and Russian companies “soon” and to complete bidding for three projects in the Carabobo blocks, Ramirez said.
Eni also signed a memorandum of understanding to build a 1- gigawatt power plant to be powered by natural gas from the Delta Caribe Oriental offshore fields, Ramirez said, without giving a potential price tag.
To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Bodzin in Caracas at sbodzin@bloomberg.net.
Obama Administration Orders World Bank To Keep Third World In Poverty
More starvation and death guaranteed by blocking poorer countries from building coal-fired power plants
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
January 26, 2010
Under the provably fraudulent and completely corrupted justification of fighting global warming, the Obama administration has ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met.
Even amidst the explosive revelations of the United Nations IPCC issuing reports on the Himalayan Glaciers and the Amazon rainforest littered with incorrect data, the U.S. government has “Stepped up pressure on the World Bank not to fund coal-fired power plants in developing countries,” reports the Times of India.
The order was made by U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank Whitney Debevoise, who represents the United States in considering all loans, investments, country assistance strategies, budgets, audits and business plans of the World Bank Group entities.
By preventing poor nations from becoming self-sufficient in blocking them from producing their own energy, the Obama administration is ensuring that millions more will die from starvation and lack of access to hospitals and medical treatment.
Not only does strangling the energy supply to poorer countries prevent adequate food distribution and lead to more starvation, but hospitals and health clinics in the third world are barely even able to operate as a result of the World Bank and other global bodies ordering them to be dependent on renewable energy supplies that are totally insufficient.
A prime example appeared in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which highlighted how a Kenyan health clinic could not operate a medical refrigerator as well as the lights at the same time because the facility was restricted to just two solar panels.
“There’s somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop,” said author and economist James Shikwati. “I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry … We are being told, ‘Don’t touch your resources. Don’t touch your oil. Don’t touch your coal.’ That is suicide.”
The program labels the idea of restricting the world’s poorest people to alternative energy sources as “the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign.”
As we have previously highlighted, the implementation of policies arising out of fraudulent fearmongering and biased studies on global warming is already devastating the third world, with a doubling in food prices causing mass starvation and death.
Poor people around the world, “Are being killed in large numbers by starvation as a result of (climate change) policy,” climate skeptic Lord Monckton told the Alex Jones Show last month, due to huge areas of agricultural land being turned over to the growth of biofuels.
“Take Haiti where they live on mud pie with real mud costing 3 cents each….that’s what they’re living or rather what they’re dying on,” said Monckton, relating how when he gave a speech on this subject, a lady in the front row burst into tears and told him, “I’ve just come back from Haiti – now because of the doubling in world food prices, they can’t even afford the price of a mud pie and they’re dying of starvation all over the place.”
As a National Geographic Report confirmed, “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”
In April 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted that biofuels were a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices that have led to riots in countries such as Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines, and even Italy.
“We estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” he stated.
Even if we are to accept that fact that overpopulation will be a continuing problem in the third world, the very means by which poorer countries would naturally lower their birth rates, by being allowed to develop their infrastructure, is being blocked by global institutions who craft policies designed to keep the third world in squalor and poverty.
This goes to the very heart of what the real agenda behind the global warming movement really is – a Malthusian drive to keep the slaves oppressed and prevent the most desperate people on the planet from pulling themselves out of destitution and despair.
Featured Video
US IRAN TALKS: Who Are the Crazy Ones Here? /Lt Col Daniel Davis
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Wartime internment camps in Australia
National Archives of Australia
World War I
During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.
Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.
Records of World War I internment camps
World War II
During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.
Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Diplomats slam US negotiators’ performance in Iran talks
- Trump Refuses Exit Ramp, War with Iran will Continue
- Trump Says US Naval Blockade in Strait of Hormuz Will Begin Shortly
- US, Iran end 21-hour talks without agreement
- US IRAN TALKS: Who Are the Crazy Ones Here? /Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Talks with the US end without a deal over excessive US demands: Iran
- Feeling Better, Getting Worse: How Psychiatric Drugs Create the Illusion They Cure
- ‘Nobody Told Me’: Former Mental Health Patient Calls Out Dangerous Side Effects of Psychiatric Drugs
- Dr. Abu-Sitta: Beirut ‘felt like a day in Shifa Hospital’
- Iran Has Won the War, It Will Be Up to the US to Secure the Peace: Mohammad Marandi
- If Americans Knew
- US-Iran ceasefire negotiations make zero progress – Daily Update
- Pro-Israel ‘Thinktanks’ and Individuals who Influence U.S. Foreign Policy
- Mearsheimer reveals how Israel dictates US policies on Iran, Gaza – video
- After killing 350+, Israel still has a “score to settle” with Lebanon before ceasefire – Daily Update
- Military aid to Israel emerges as the latest political litmus test for Democrats
- The only Palestinian children’s rights organization closes following years-long Israeli campaign against it
- ‘I Can’t Forget the Smell’: Lebanese Reel After Israel Kills Over 300 in Single Day
- DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel
- TCN: Is Israel Blackmailing President Trump?
- Israel killed at least 303 Lebanese yesterday – who were they? Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
Aletho News 