Globla Warming Fiasco Cooling Down!
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine this week announced that 31,072 U.S. scientists signed a petition stating that
“… There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate…”
This includes the eminent theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson who is among the many distinguished signatories. For you Sci-Fi and Physics fans, he is the guy that came up with the Dyson Sphere! Pretty cool aye?
On a personal note, Dyson happens to be one of my few heroes.
Moving on, add this to the fact that the Global Temperature actually dropped by 1 Degree last year and you have a major fiasco brewing and a lot of chickens coming home to roost.
Considering the whole ill founded and unproven Global Warming farce caused a landslide of ignorant, knee jerk legislation that is now responsible for about 20% or 75cent per gallon of the higher gas prices every time you fill up your tank and about 40% of the now higher food prices you pay every single time you buy food.
But hopefully this will soon come to an end.
But then again we are talking about Politicians actually doing the right and smart thing for us as US citizens and for the world for that matter, so I would not bet on it.
The recent veto of the disastrous Farm Bill by Bush may help a little.
From an investment standpoint you should note that while the Congress and Senate preach support of alternative fuels and support Corn Ethanol which costs $1.25 to produce $1.00 worth of Ethanol, (hey I never said it made sense) the bill also still supports the tariff ( tax you pay) on Ethanol made from Sugar Cane from Brazil (which actually does make sense and per acre is 8 times more efficient than Corn) making it more expensive.
Even so, I would hesitate to put a single dime into Corn Based Ethanol Ventures as the subsidies that make them viable may be withdrawn and this dumb idea could be plowed underground again where it should be.
Cheers,
Andrew Anderson
for I Am An Investor.com
June 24th, 2008 at 4:48 am
This report from the Economist explains how ethanol subsidies are effecting world food prices in an incredible way. The most profound section is shown below.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420
This year the overall decline in stockpiles of all cereals will be about 53m tonnes—a very rough indication of by how much demand is outstripping supply. The increase in the amount of American maize going just to ethanol is about 30m tonnes. In other words, the demands of America’s ethanol programme alone account for over half the world’s unmet need for cereals. Without that programme, food prices would not be rising anything like as quickly as they have been. According to the World Bank, the grain needed to fill up an SUV would feed a person for a year.
America’s ethanol programme is a product of government subsidies. There are more than 200 different kinds, as well as a 54 cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That keeps out greener Brazilian ethanol, which is made from sugar rather than maize. Federal subsidies alone cost $7 billion a year (equal to around $1.90 a gallon).