Fill-up your tank ONCE or feed a child for a year?
This entry was posted on 10/28/2007 11:57 PM and is filed under Tax Shifting,Wasted resources,Energy Conservation,OIL,Biofuels,Action.
(Follow-up to
It's time to stop the madness)
Four facts: 1 - "it takes 510 pounds of corn to produce 13 gallons of ethanol. That much corn could feed a child in Zambia or Mexico for a year...." Jean Ziegler, United Nations' independent expert on the right to food in an
AP/CBS article on October 26, 2007.
2 - "Ten years after the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, which promised to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015, there were more hungry people in the developing countries today – 820 million – than there were in 1996..." Director-General Jacques Diouf - The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in an October 2006 article on the annual FAO report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, or SOFI.
3 - "Hunger and malnutrition are the underlying cause of more than half of all child deaths, killing nearly 6 million children each year...." SOFI, 2005 (page 2).
4 - "Estimates say that right now there are 852 million hungry people on our planet. But, who can conceive of a number that enormous? We can say it is one out of six people on earth. We can remind you that the population of the earth is expected to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years and that the great majority of the increase will be in areas with the least likelihood of being able to provide food." The International Alliance Against HungerMore excerpts from the AP/CBS article on October 26, 2007,
U.N. Expert: Biofuels A "Crime":
- "A U.N. expert on Friday called the growing practice of converting food crops into biofuel 'a crime against humanity,' saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry. Jean Ziegler, ...., called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production to halt what he called a growing 'catastrophe' for the poor."
- "'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.' The world price of wheat doubled in one year and the price of corn quadrupled, leaving poor countries, especially in Africa, unable to pay for the imported food needed to feed their people, he said. And poor people in those countries are unable to pay the soaring prices for the food that does come in, he added." ~ ~ ~It's bad enough that people are starving to death around the world.
Now, per Jean Ziegler - U.N food expert, U.S. laws we've enacted (see below) to keep us driving our (often oversized) vehicles will cause "millions of poor people to go hungry."
Section 1501. Renewable Content of Gasoline (Renewable Fuels Standard). This section establishes a program requiring gasoline sold in the United States to be mixed with increasing amounts of renewable fuel (usually ethanol) on an annual average basis. In 2006, 4 billion gallons of renewable fuels are to be mixed with gasoline, and this requirement increases annually to 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2012.
Keep in mind that the corn needed to produce 13 gallons of ethanol would feed a child for one year and that the law copied above calls for billions of gallons.
For more information on ethanol see With ethanol we're feeding the pig.
What to do?
Enact a phased-in, federal tax shift from income to non-renewable energy. This will provide an incentive for conservation and stimulate the U.S. renewable energy industry.
P.S. - want to see a powerful (and good) movie related to this? Rent The Girl in the Cafe (2005)
