Popular culture appears to be slowly jumping on the green bandwagon, even as the necessity of personal sacrifice becomes unavoidably apparent. And I find myself in constant position of explaining the deeper implications to simple things. Such as, Just the other day I was talking with my youngest brother, who is seventeen years my junior.
The topic was biodiesel, and he was quick to explain to me that I shouldn't be considering biodiesel because using it is causing starvation in other countries. But, it's not really US citizens using biodiesel that is causing food shortages in particular. It's market pressure from many different angles that is making food increasingly expensive that is causing food shortages in other countries.
Buying a gallon of gasoline for $4.00 is doing just as much as buying a gallon of biodiesel made from corn in pushing up the cost of food in Egypt(for example). A willingness, or the force of social addiction, to pay such high prices for portable energy, has a ripple effect on the very foundations of the food market. Four dollar a gallon gas means the petroleum used for fertilizers that are the true power behind modern agriculture gets more expensive, so farmers have to raise the prices to cover their overhead. And what is worse is that there is a market ripple delay...
]]> Popular culture appears to be slowly jumping on the green bandwagon, even as the necessity of personal sacrifice becomes unavoidably apparent. And I find myself in constant position of explaining the deeper implications to simple things. Such as, Just the other day I was talking with my youngest brother, who is seventeen years my junior.
The topic was biodiesel, and he was quick to explain to me that I shouldn't be considering biodiesel because using it is causing starvation in other countries. But, it's not really US citizens using biodiesel that is causing food shortages in particular. It's market pressure from many different angles that is making food increasingly expensive that is causing food shortages in other countries.
Buying a gallon of gasoline for $4.00 is doing just as much as buying a gallon of biodiesel made from corn in pushing up the cost of food in Egypt(for example). A willingness, or the force of social addiction, to pay such high prices for portable energy, has a ripple effect on the very foundations of the food market. Four dollar a gallon gas means the petroleum used for fertilizers that are the true power behind modern agriculture gets more expensive, so farmers have to raise the prices to cover their overhead. And what is worse is that there is a market ripple delay...
For the price of food this year is based mainly on the cost of petroleum based fertilizers last year, and however much the cost of fertilizer was speculated to rise this year. And by all accounts, most markets did not correctly predict the rapid rise in the price of petroleum this year. So the while the grain prices this year are high, they may not be high enough to compensate the farmers for higher fertilizer prices for next years crop. So unless the current spike in prices rapidly reverses itself, many farmers across the globe will have to raise their prices even higher next year to cover the additional cost. That's not even counting further speculation of even higher prices, based on the failures to predict this years petroleum prices.
So just about anything you're willing to pay more for that depends on oil will further push the market into an exaggerated climb that will starve the poor of the world who can no longer afford the petroleum based staple food crops. Biodiesel does not deserve anymore attention for this problem than bottled water, gasoline, sneakers, SUV's, anything plastic or any other thing that depends on gasoline for it's production (which is just about everything in the United States and much of the world).
These are the first market fluctuations of “peak oil”, it can and most likely will get worse. Don't shift the blame to possible solutions, accept that our societies addiction to petroleum is the problem.
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