A number of people responded to my recent article on declinism by pointing out that my timing couldn’t have been worse (for my argument), given skyrocketing food prices. After all, didn’t I write that, over the past hundred years, “…Life expectancy rose while infant mortality dropped; the air quality of our cities improved, our food got cheaper and more nutritious…”
A number of people responded to my recent article on declinism by pointing out that my timing couldn’t have been worse (for my argument), given skyrocketing food prices. After all, didn’t I write that, over the past hundred years, “…Life expectancy rose while infant mortality dropped; the air quality of our cities improved, our food got cheaper and more nutritious…”
Don’t I look like an idiot?
Well, not. There are a number of reasons why food prices are increasing, one of which is both inevitable and good (China getting richer and eating more meat), one of which is hopefully temporary (drought). Yes, the drought may have something to do with global warming, but the drought is far from the most important contributing factor to high food prices.
The culprit, more than anything else, is the biofuels/ethanol craze, which is driven entirely by a farm lobby capitalising on global-warming-driven declinist hysteria. Given BOTH increasing food prices AND climate change, biofuels is probably the single stupidest policy we could be implenting.
Once again,declinists are helping cause the very problems they are hoping to solve.