A cover story in The Economist, entitled, The coming food catastrophe, compiled sobering facts regarding worldwide food production and distribution. The story described how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an attack on the food-bowl of Europe. As this dreadful war drags on, the predictions of this story, written over two years ago, manifest themselves today.
Good farmland is increasingly being used to grow plants for fuel, not food, and destroyed by covering vast tracts with imported glass panels to collect solar power, and access tracks for wind turbines draped across the country regardless of the loss of native habitat and its destruction of fauna and flora. We have yet to see the full extent of new transmission lines and their service roads to collect power from widely dispersed, dilute sources.
According to reliable estimates, global food demand will rise 50 per cent by 2050, yet land available for growing food is increasingly being sterilised or locked away by foolish government decree. Apart from spurious land ownership claims, this decree is driven by the latest and greatest extraordinary popular delusion that achieving Net Zero carbon emission targets can control the surface temperature of Planet Earth to within 1 and 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times for the coming one hundred years.
The Net Zero fantasy is reminiscent of other examples of foolish governmental overreach. For example, in the 19th Century, the British Corn Laws – tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food – had driven up the price of corn (wheat, oats, barley, and rye), and poor people who could not afford their daily bread had to resort to potatoes. In 1840, ‘Famine was rife, and everywhere the gaze met gaunt, haggard men, shrivelled women and emaciated children.’ Then in 1845, blight destroyed the Irish potato crop and the situation became desperate.
But a vigorous group of men had been promoting the idea of removing government controls on prices with reduced taxes on trade. They were the Anti Corn Law League. This League persuaded the government in 1846 to abandon the effective price controls on the staple food, ‘corn’, and to adopt the principles of free trade. This involved dropping the ‘protective’ taxes on most of the 1,200 listed items and to reform the Navigation Acts to allow foreign vessels to compete with British merchant ships. Foreign food became available at prices people could afford and the nation thrived for the next few generations. Through these major tax reductions on production, Britain again picked up steam.
When it is considered that Planet Earth is a patchwork of weather patterns – it may be flooding in the United Kingdom and parched in Pakistan, raining in Spain and overcast in Argentina, snowing in Sweden and balmy in the Bahamas – the benefits of free trade across the world become quickly apparent. But crops must be produced before they can be traded, and agricultural land available for food production is being increasingly sterilised in the mania to achieve the fabled nirvana of ‘Net Zero’.
The Economist article, mentioned above, also disclosed that about 10 per cent of all grains are used to make biofuel, and 18 per cent of vegetable oils go to biodiesel. These are costly and inefficient fuels that rely on fossil fuels in their production. Of the liquid biofuels, ethanol rates poorly. A leading Australian polymath, David Archibald, notes:
…having only 65 per cent of the energy density of petrol, pure petrol will take a vehicle 50 per cent farther than the amount of ethanol that takes up the same space in the fuel tank. Ethanol also has an enormous affinity for water, which it absorbs from the air above the fuel in the tank. Once the ethanol has become super-saturated with water, the ethanol-plus-water mix separates from the petrol at the bottom of the tank and can cause engine trouble.
A study published in early 2022, Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard, found:
Even without considering likely international land use effects, we find that the production of corn-based ethanol in the United States has failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets and negatively affected water quality, the area of land used for conservation, and other ecosystem processes. Our findings suggest that profound advances in technology and policy are still needed to achieve the intended environmental benefits of biofuel production and use.
Mandating the use of allegedly sustainable fuels are driving up the cost of transport at an unsustainable rate. A report recently indicated that from 1 January 2025 ‘more than 350 airports in Europe and Britain require the fuel supply to include at least 2 per cent of sustainable aviation fuel, which is about twice the price of regular jet fuel’. And why? Because overseas committee decisions made by ill-advised delegates are pushing a political agenda and imposing fanciful Net Zero targets regardless of consequential costs, and despite indisputable scientific evidence that human recycling of carbon dioxide is not causing the planet to warm.
Made from atmospheric carbon dioxide and millions of years of solar energy, fossil fuels are deposited in such abundance, that before humanity uses a fraction of these, new and better ways of harnessing the power of the atom will undoubtedly be discovered. As carbon dioxide levels over six times higher than at present did not cause runaway warming, why should it do so now? Over millennia, the trace gas essential to life on Earth has been drained from the atmosphere and now is at historically low levels. By using the high energy-density power of fossil fuels and returning the plant nutrient, life-sustaining carbon dioxide back from whence it came is surely a win-win for humanity and the planet. Scientists like Dr Patrick Moore, former President of Greenpeace Canada, Professor William Happer of Princeton University, and Professor Ian Plimer, suggest that we need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not less as demanded by the Net Zero advocates. Australian scientist, Ian McNaughton, has also authored an excellent paper breaking the link between carbon dioxide and documented temperature levels.
The world’s biggest battery in the pipeline covers and sterilises a swathe of arable land, and will store energy claimed to power about 57,000 homes, but for how long? And then the battery runs flat. A 350-megawatt coal-fired power generator continuously produces in one day, approximately the same amount of power as the world’s largest battery can store. But the coal-fired generator does not run flat, it keeps going day in, day out, rain, hail, or shine. Why persist in the myth that human-made batteries can replace incomprehensibly vast natural batteries of condensed, solidified sunlight – called coal?
Another threat to industry and commerce is mandatory emissions reporting. The Australian Sustainability Reporting Standard AASB S2 Climate-related Disclosures applies to annual reporting after January 1, 2025. It states:
This Standard requires an entity to disclose information about climate-related risks and opportunities that could reasonably be expected to affect the entity’s cash flows, its access to finance or cost of capital over the short, medium, or long term. For the purposes of this Standard, these risks and opportunities are collectively referred to as ‘climate-related risks and opportunities that could reasonably be expected to affect the entity’s prospects.
That is like accounting for the very air we breathe, yet those who live off complexity thrive on this leap into unimaginable complexity, a world of auditing the unauditable, accounting the unaccountable, and sacrificing productivity on the altar of ideology. Moreover, the generic term ‘emissions’ conflates bad emissions (particulates, toxic gases) with good emissions that are the essence of life on earth (neither water vapour, the principal greenhouse gas, nor carbon dioxide, now at historically low levels, are toxic). Adding mandatory requirements for ‘sustainability’ reporting to already over-complex financial reporting will destroy a legion of companies already struggling with ways to cope with skyrocketing energy costs and unpredictability in the mad rush to embrace unreliable energy sources.
The message is clear: farms are for producing food, fossils are for the fuel needed to produce our food.
