Environmentalism and Consumerism

So far, it's been a happy marriage:

Biofuel: Starving the World's Poor Since 2007

I don't have many original thoughts to share regarding the headline, so please read what David Warren has to say on the subject:

A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results.
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"Biofuel" is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale.

Any attempt to use corn to replace or even supplement our supply of petroleum is misguided at best. Proponents hope to capture in our crops amounts of energy rivaling the amount pumped cheaply from the ground in the form of petroleum. The problem is that the amount of energy we get from petroleum is much greater (a gallon of gas contains about 31,000 Calories) than the amount of energy we get from food.*

There is simply no hope of finding enough excess energy in our food supply to shift significantly into our petroleum consumption. We've been trying anyway, and (partially) as a result food prices are climbing worldwide, with results that may prove to be nothing short of devastating.

Biofuels are not a new source of energy. They merely reallocate an old, more valuable source of energy. This is completely backwards, yet it continues to be trumpeted as great progress.

To replace our oil consumption, sources of energy that don't originate in oil must be developed. Nuclear power generates energy from mass (E = mc squared, remember), and we have mass in abundance. The sun radiates more energy to us than we would know what to do with if we could only capture it efficiently. Heck, below the earth's surface geothermal forces move entire continents.

We would be much, much better served in learning to better harvest sources like these, none of which need appreciably emit carbon, if that's what you're worried about. Considering petroleum isn't actually running out at present, there is no need to panic. In likelihood we have a few decades to work things out.

And yes, it would make a lot of sense to stop using oil where we don't need to.

There is much to say on this topic, but for now I'll leave it at this: biofuel is the kind of solution that makes your problem worse, like taking a habanero pepper for heartburn. Except instead of getting indigestion, you make basic nourishment considerably more difficult for billions of people to obtain.

A grave, grave error that should be reversed immediately.

*It's true that to grow our food supply we depend on large amounts of fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. This means it makes even less sense to try to convert crops into fuel, since the way we do things now we are converting fuel into crops to begin with.