Are Biofuels A Crime Against Humanity?

That's what Jean Ziegler thinks. He's a professor at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne over in Europe. And he's the UN's Special Big Shot on the Right to Food. His job is to screech when he sees human rights violations in the area of food production. He's expected to figure out how to solve the problem if he can. And he's not paid. I don't know, maybe he gets great perks, or maybe he cares.

UN Watch, the watchdog organization created by the American Jewish Committee, doesn't like him much. They call him a "certified apologist to dictators." But I have to think any guy who says things like, "I vowed never again, not even by chance, to side with the hangmen." and "Every child who dies of hunger in today's world has been murdered" is on my side in the war of the rich against the poor. So I take him seriously.

He says, if I understand him rightly, that the goals of biofuel production are fine - "more jobs, a cleaner environment and greater independence from the whims of the oil market", but the benefits will come at a terrible price. He says, "the effect of transforming hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of maize, of wheat, of beans, of palm oil, into agricultural fuel is absolutely catastrophic for the hungry people." He also said that the rise in demand for grain has led to the world price of wheat doubling in one year. The price of corn has quadrupled. The world's poor don't have money to buy at those prices.

Ziegler's calling for a moratorium on biofuel production for five years to research ways to turn agricultural waste and arid land crops that are no good for food into biofuel. Until then - hey, sell your car! Why not? Lets get radical here.

You don't like that idea? I don't either. But what are we going to do? Are you really okay with your travel freedom being based on the death of even one little kid?

What if we gave up a little bit of that freedom for five years? We could revive gas rationing. It worked in World War II. We could still use our cars for shopping and errands we needed to do. Then maybe car pooling to work would finally take off. It's time to think out of the box. I think we need to get radical here.

In Zieglers' words, "It's a crime against humanity to devote agricultural land to biofuel production...We have to stop this growing catastrophe: the massacre (by) hunger in the world."

Photo credit: Plan 59

Thoughts While Procrastinating

Did you ever notice vehicles that burn the most gas and put the most carbon emissions into the air have the most environmental-sounding names? Like, "C'mon men! Get into my new Toyota Tundra pickup (EPA: 14-18 MPG) and Bill's new GMC Yukon SUV (EPA: 11-14 MPG) and let's go melt some polar ice! Damn those polar bears!"

Hey Guys, Who's Got The Biggest One?

Have you ever noticed how, if you want to get people excited about something, you have to be sure to choose the right words? For instance, guys are rarely interested in real small things. I have no idea why. But, say, some guys are out deer-hunting. The guy who shoots the biggest buck with the biggest rack of antlers gets more points than the guy who shoots the littlest baby fawn. Even though both guys were a hundred yards away firing through high-powered telescopic sights.

Guys are so weird I can even imagine some standing around a garage bragging about how much money they spend on gas for their giant SUV every month. But I can't imagine any guy standing around bragging about how he's saving energy by taking the bus.

"Hey everybody, have some more chicken!" - that works. "Hey everybody, cut back on that chicken!" never works unless guys see the sense of it at their gut level. "Hey fellas, look at this cute-as-a-bug little hybrid! Buy it and you'll have the littlest gas bill in your crowd!" is not going to appeal.

I saw on BBC News that the Live Earth rock show was "the least-watched show on mainstream US television on Saturday night." It was beaten by a re-run of Monsters Inc., a nonpreachy animated film about the dangers of xenophobia.

Of course I'm only a talking pig and I don't understand real red-blooded guys any more than you do (red blooded guys don't read The Pondering Pig for goodness sake) , but my guess is that you'll never get real men to fight global warming until you show them it involves chopping things down, shooting things and skinning them and roasting them for dinner and then getting on their dirt bikes to ride off for beers somewhere. And forget about convincing them it's really cool to unplug their battery chargers when they're finished charging up their electrolaser attack weapons. At least until they've bought into the quest.

This is not putting guys down, by the way. That's how God wired us. And it's made humans the world's most successful competitor. But male wiring has caused problems along the line - like road rage and war. It's like the world's first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote way back in the 1700s: "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." And unfortunately, that often translates as "I'll be happy when I have the biggest, meanest, most gas-guzzling pick-up truck on the street."

Al Gore made a big ripple with his movie An Inconvenient Truth. But it was all logical, irrefutable augments and really intended for thinking people - for the tribal leaders, you might say. Maybe Al could get together with Pixar Studios and come up with a completely different way to inspire normal guys to warm up to global warming. You know, propaganda - like the great Hollywood director Frank Capra did during WWII, making films that mobilized an entire nation because they could suddenly see the threat real clear.

Apparently, watching Madonna pole dance on the Live Earth show just couldn't compete.

Photo credit: www.MySitka.Com

The Pondering Pig Fights Global Warming

I watched the Live Earth concert Saturday night. It was great to see all those big names taking a stand against global warming. Madonna sang a song called "I'm Gonna Hang Right Up On You, Mr. CO₂ Emitter!" and it was really good. I just didn't understand why her dancers all wanted to have cunnilingus with her right then. It was probably symbolic. Then all these other big stars I never heard of started cranking up their Marshall amplifier stacks and I could see how mad they were about people using so much electricity and all the stage lights started flashing on and off! It was exciting and probably saved even more energy.

The Live Earth announcers had a lot of great tips too. Like be sure to unplug your battery charger when you're not using it. And change all the light bulbs in your house to fluorescent energy-saving ones cause the mercury in them really doesn't amount to much and the EPA is going to figure out how to recycle them very soon.

So I've already started. I want to feel good about myself, don't you? Like yesterday at the drug store I told the clerk, "Hey, don't put that aspirin in a plastic bag! I'll just stick it in my pocket here! I'm going green!" Man, he was impressed. And besides, I've been feeling a little funny about driving up and down the freeway all day in my giant SUV with the air-conditioner blasting away. But can I help it if I'm a really big pig? And to know I was fighting global warming when I stuck that aspirin in my pocket made me feel a lot better. Next I'm going to try printing on both sides of my computer paper!

Oh, here's another thing that will help you feel better if you fly a lot. A lot of people say you should cut back because jets emit about a zillion times more CO₂ every time they take off than a giant SUV does in a year. So take the bus. But you know what I figured out? Say a jet takes off with only ten people in it. You divide the total emission by ten and you find that each passenger just raised the temperature of Utah by three degrees. Just one passenger and there's ten of them! But say that DC-10 is full! 380 passengers! Now you divide the CO₂ emission by 380 and look - these guys probably actually reduced CO₂ emission by flying. Or pretty close anyway. So I figure we need to fill up those planes! Stop global warming! Fly more often!

Stay tuned for more great energy-saving tips from the Pondering Pig.