May 8 2007
Cost of the war
An photo-article at The Boston Globe looks at what else the money so far spent on the invasion of Iraq could have been used for…
According to the article, just ⅙ of the cost of the war would have been sufficient to convert every vehicle in the United States to run an ethanol.
It’s also quite telling that schools and building projects come first, that free petrol for every American comes before conversion to ethanol, and it’s not until the second-to-last entry that it is mentioned that the $456 billion so far expended in Iraq could have fed the entire population of the world for 5½ years.
Isn’t is deplorable beyond words that politics works such that enormous amounts can be easily signed-off for use on (reducing) the nation’s security, but that even a small fraction of the same amount can’t be allocated to saving the planet or its population?
5th June 2007 @ 2:00 pm
Stuart, I note that the link is to a page that points out that America could have converted all its cars to ethanol for less than the cost of the war in Iraq.
This does, however, ignore one very important point. Where are you going to get all that C2H2OH from? Bush seems intend on using ‘corn’ (what we would call maize). A recent article in New Scientist pointed to the work that indicated that this is not a carbon neutral approach because of the processing required, giving at best a 40-50% reduction in CO2.
However, the far bigger problem is the distortion of the corn market that is likely to occur if this development takes place. The price of corn on the open market will be distorted by people buying up what was formerly a foodstuff in order to distill it and then put it in their fuel tanks. Initially the World Bank will highlight this as a great opportunity for farmers in the third world. They will offer loans for farmers to buy pesticides and herbicides (mostly from western companies) to grow crops and millions of hectares will be turned over to produce this material. Then so much will be produced around the world that the market will collapse.
Americans will still get charged the same amount for the fuel, but the petrochemical companies will get bigger profits. The farmers won’t be able to make enough money to pay back the loans *and* feed their families, and because they have put over all their land to production of this material they will end up eating surplus, and now worthless corn to avoid starvation (assuming that they haven’t had to sell every last scrap of it to try and pay back loans).
This is *slightly* better than what has happened with tobacco (they can’t even eat the stuff!) or shrimp farming (the deterioration of the environment because of the indiscriminate use of poisonous chemicals has destroyed the ‘other’ fishing industries). But the differences are marginal. Another case was the explosive growth of coffee production (a lot of it comes from Vietnam now). More information on how these things twist the economics of the poor can be found in books like ‘I.O.U.: The Debt Crisis and why we have to solve it’ and ‘Not On The Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate’, both of which are available from Amazon.