Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket

We already know about the situation in Haiti, now we have Egypt.

"This is the world's big story," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute.[/]

SOURCE

Looks like the hippies are wrong, biodiesal is EViL!!!!!!@!1 Well, if you care about starving people, which non-hippies don't.

Biodiesel is not a useful technology, at this point. Cars are the problem. Our insistence on having personal transport is starving other people. Even if we avoid looking at the moral issue, this will come back to bite us.

We need personal transport.

But we don't need SUVs.

True, we need transport that is economical, and efficient. smaller cars would be fine if they had governors that kept them under 70.

You should look at higher fuel taxes. That provides a direct driver for fuel-efficient engines. (Works in Europe and Japan, hmm?)

But that's a bit of a blind alley. Public transport is more efficient, once you convince people to use it. (Which might require armed security, at least to begin with.)

Public Transportation only works in large cities . . . and there is a huge amount of the country that simply doesn't have the population density to make public transportation a feasible reality. We tried it in my town of 30,000 and it bombed out completely. They didn't make enough money to keep the two buses working.

But we can bike

VROOM, VROOM!!!!

We have public transportation here, its very inconvenient unless your a senoir then they will pick you up and drop you off if you call. In rural areas public transportation doesn't work very well. There are places here where the only service to a house is electric and phone. That means no gas, water, sewage, cable tv, high speed internet, or garbage. Many homes are still heated with wood. These people also need pick-up trucks, or SUVs to make it through. Small 4x4 cars arn't designed to handle that kind of driving daily and tend to fall apart.
There is no real answer to the problem. I've read into alternitive fuels alot. I even have blue prints to run a car off wood. The best solution i have seen is a true electric car, and building coal power plants that capture Co2.

Well, we could do away with the Urban SUVs . . . the ones that have never seen an unpaved road. That would be a start.

Why there's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona fide, six-car monorail!

Oh never mind, it's more of a Shelbeyville idea.

I could very well be wrong, and this will definitely illustrate my ignorance on the matter, BUT I'm not sure Americans who don't have access to gas, water, sewage, cable, and internet are a significant factor in the overall usage of gasoline in this country. The focus needs to be on heavily populated areas where the primary (as far as I know) usage of gasoline is concentrated. Mass transportation can work for these areas with the requisite security of course.

That seems to be a bad thing...

Just cull them out instead of using them to feed hungry people. About on the level of paying farmers to not grow crops.

Fuck

Exactly...

It seems that biofuels (mostly ethanol) are contributing to this somewhat, along with "bad weather, historically high prices for oil and transportation, [and] increased demand for meat and dairy products in the richer Asian countries." In fact "[t]he UN special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler, has said biofuels are "a crime against humanity" because they raise global food prices."

UN addresses food production, poverty and rising prices

Hopefully some ultra-smart researcher finds a way to perfect making cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel from algae, and does it quickly.

It probably did not help the world that instead of trying to help promote agriculture in poor countries, we simply made it cheaper to expost food to places where people were hungry thus destroying their farming infrastructure.....

Indeed.

Eleven billion dollars is more than the annual GDP of quite a lot of countries (source: CIA Factbook). Including this one, among others.

Edit: Just to be clear here, the EU is just as guilty.

Who isn't guilty of the bio fuel rush? The US and EU are begging for it, South America and Southeast Asia are stripping rain forests are a horrifying rate, and who knows what else is being done in the name of "fuel alternatives?" Biofuels are just another cash hog, dot.com bubble, whatever you want to call it, and its been blown out of proportion.