Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2010

China’s petroleum producers make more sense than the US government

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:01

Not everybody has bought into the “ethanol as a clean alternative to petroleum” bullshit: China’s petroleum producers are asking the Chinese government to stop subsidizing the corn-to-ethanol project (similar to the US government’s subsidy program).

[. . .] to enjoy the subsidy of 1880 Yuan per ton of alcoholic gasoline for vehicles and the tax-exemption policy for the corn-to-ethanol project, some plants in China began a wave of buying corn, causing the severe shortage of corn for animal feed and the rapid increase of corn prices.

“In the first half year of this year, China imported 78 million tons of corn, mainly due to the higher domestic corn price than overseas. In July, the average corn price in northeast China was 1845 Yuan per ton, rising by 15.7% year on year” said Zhang Jianbo, a market analyst with Distribution Productivity Promotion Center of China Commerce…

Of course the US has also been criticized for this insane subsidy of corn ethanol as well and blamed for dramatic price increases in corn based products in Mexico, and South/Central America.

The bottom line is corn ethanol makes no economic sense, never did, and when the total environmental impact end-to-end from dirt farm to tailpipe is considered, its even worse than ordinary gasoline. Its always been a lose/lose proposition all the way around, and many of the environmental groups have started to cool on their enthusiasm for it as the real cost/impacts manifested themselves.

Even if you’re not a whole-hearted “green”, this kind of market-rigging by government intervention should be greeted with derision: it’s not “green” to consume more resources to produce a less energy-intensive end-product and pretend it’s a viable substitute. This is another case where the government would produce better environmental results by burning the dollar bills rather than using them to subsidize corn production for ethanol.

July 9, 2010

Matt Ridley on the onrush of DOOM!

Filed under: Environment, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’

And as we all know, it all came true . . .

Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.

June 16, 2010

Air pollution: unseen (and statistically unlikely) killer

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Air pollution is bad, and the computer models used to determine how bad it is show that more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!

Air pollution cuts a deadly but invisible swath through Canada. We know this because the Canadian Medical Association says there were 21,000 deaths from exposure to air-borne pollutants in 2008. Of these, 2,682 Canadians were instantly struck down by the acute effects of pollution. By 2031, 710,000 people will have been slain by this unseen killer.

The evidence on this epic death toll is chillingly precise. According to the Ontario Medical Association, exactly 348 people died from air pollution in Waterloo Region in 2008. In Hamilton, 445 lives were cut short. And Manitoulin Island tragically lost 14 residents due to pollutants that year.

In Toronto, the Big Smoke of Canada, the figures are appropriately larger. Calculations by Toronto Public Health claim air pollution kills 1,700 people annually and sends 6,000 to the hospital. Ten percent of all non-trauma deaths in Toronto are directly attributed to air pollution.

Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. Oh, and wait . . . neither of us knew it because it’s junk scientific bullshit:

Consider what happens when you take Toronto’s computer model and use it to determine the death toll in previous eras, when the air was far more polluted than today. For example, average sulfur dioxide levels in downtown Toronto were more than 100 parts per billion in the mid-1960s. It’s now less than 10 ppb. No surprise then, that the death toll was much greater in the bad old days. Across the 1960s, half of all non-trauma deaths were the direct result of air pollution, according to Toronto’s model. And in February 1965, more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!

In other words, air pollution killed more people inside the computer model than actually died of all causes in the real world. How’s that for deadly?

I can confidently assure any modern day pollution-panicked worrier that things were much, much worse in the 1960s and 70s: the air was much more difficult to breathe in downtown Toronto, the water was disgustingly polluted, and (we were assured) things could only get worse in our little slice of environmental hell. The air is far less polluted now than at any time in my life, the lakes are largely recovered from the worst environmental damage we inflicted on them.

December 21, 2009

Persuasion having failed, they now turn to emotional blackmail

Filed under: Education, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

Frank Furedi looks at how modern educators have adopted the methods of Soviet-era authorities to try to turn children into a home-based fifth column:

There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour.

When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.

If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

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