Adding To The Concert Of Alarms: Water Consumption And Food Wastage

Nuclear meltdown, acid rain, ocean acidification, sea level rise, famine, obesity, drought, megastorms, floods, extreme weather, rain-forest destruction, species extinction…

These are just some of the bogus scares the UN and activists use to keep the masses in a state of panic. The more, the better. Hardly a day goes by without the media fretting about at least one or more of the above. And the list just keeps growing.

In the headlines over the last few days in Germany and Europe are two new topics: Water shortage and food-wastage.

New Crisis No. 1: Global water shortage

One we hear a lot about is the growing water consumption crisis, which Die Welt reports on here. Though it’s not new, the tone is getting ever shriller. Billions are now threatened. According to Die Welt:

‘The demand for water is increasing just at a time when climate change is threatening its availability,’ says the latest UN World Water Report.”

More than 20,000 experts from over 100 countries have gathered in Marseilles for a week-long conference on potable water. Is it really necessary to have 20,000 experts just to talk about water? Obviously there are lots of people who can’t find regular worthwhile jobs.

Not surprisingly, one of the big culprits threatening the water supply is meat production, so they tell us. According to Die Welt:

Foremost the manufacture of animal feed is, according to the data, very water intensive. Up to 15 thousand litres of water are needed to produce a sole kilogram of meat. Globally about 70 percent of fresh water is consumed for the manufacture of food.”

Note how all of this points to one direction: regulating human food consumption. And note how it fits in nicely with the scheme of eco-eugenicist Matthew Liao who proposes genetically engineering people to shrink them down in size. The UN creates the bogus crisis in order to legitimize the grand experiment.

The 700-page UN report called “Managing water under uncertainty and risk” was released at the start of the Marseilles conference amid much media buzz. H2O certificate trading anyone?

New Crisis No. 2: Naughty Germans throw away too much food!

The latest crisis in Germany is food wastage. According to the TAZ:

A German citizen throws away 81.6 kilograms of food every year. This is what a study from the University of Stuttgart shows. Federal Minister of Agriculture Ilse Aigner (CSU) will present it Tuesday, reports Die Welt.”

For Aigner, Germans throwing away so much food simply takes the cake! Such waste can no longer be tolerated. So what does she propose to do about it? Aigner plans a campaign to educate the public so that they learn that the best-before-date printed on food labels does not necessarily mean the food is no longer fit for consumption once it expires. Never mind if the milk smells a little sour or if the bread is a little moldy – just eat it!

TAZ writes that the campaign:

…will prevent food being thrown into the garbage even though it can still be eaten.”

Minister Aigner clearly has nothing to do. So she decides to pester the private consumers and up-bring them on food and how to eat…real government intrusion…the nanny state getting ready to spoon-feed its citizens.

What business does the government have here? Once people buy food at the supermarket, it becomes their own private property. And what they do with it is nobody else’s business. What’s next? Bureaucrats rummaging though your rubbish looking for food scraps? The TAZ writes:

The authors of the study say that about two thirds of the food that is thrown out could be avoided. Every year about 11 million tonnes of food ends up in the garbage. 61 comes from private households, 17 Prozent from institutions like restaurants, schools and cafeterias, 17% from industry. The remaining 5% from retailers.”

What’s the underlying message behind the food wastage crisis? They are trying to tell us that food is too cheap! Get ready for higher food prices – especially meat.

 

18 responses to “Adding To The Concert Of Alarms: Water Consumption And Food Wastage”

  1. benpal

    “More than 20,000 experts from over 100 countries have gathered in Marseille “. Isn’t it reassuring that we* can still shamelessly produce CO2, despite climate change?

    *we = some

    1. DirkH

      20,000 … sure sounds like the Climate Change locusts are foraging at the water conference now … expect colorful protests by the QUANGOs, GONGOs and BONGOs (bureaucracy organized non-governmental orgs) outside the conference halls. Avoid Marseille if you can; the city will be totally clogged.

  2. TheJollyGreenMan

    Gleick has been very active lobbying that the state should take control of all the water resources in California. He believes that central planning is needed and that in any case people wash and shower too often. Having a global audience to lobby for central control of resources is every scientists wet dream.

    In any case, in the Der Spiegel article it is mentioned that in Germany the per capita consumption of fresh water is decreasing every year for the past twenty years. Is it the German intention of becoming the stinkiest lot in Europe and usurp the Scots from that dubious honour?

    1. Bernd Felsche

      I suspect that the consumption of water is reducing because they’re buying it bottled. 😉 There’s a national aversion to drinking tap water. But instead of drinking local beer, Germans instead pay a premium for bottled water.

      Water is a completely renewable resource. Vast areas of Australia, larger than Germany, are currently flooded by rains that the fear-mongers predicted would never be seen again. Climate variability was well understood a century ago, when people of the now-“developed” didn’t mostly live an airconditioned, comfortable life.

      http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/people_places/caergwrle/mycountry/index.html
      Second stanza:
      ————-
      I love a sunburnt country,
      A land of sweeping plains
      Of ragged mountain ranges
      Of droughts and flooding rains.
      I love her far horizons
      I love her jewel-sea,
      Her beauty and her terror —
      The wide brown land for me!
      ————-

      On Food Waste:
      Politicians such as Aigner don’t seem to realize that nobody likes to throw away food. At least not the people who have to work hard to put food on the table.

      Politicians impose lots of laws that prevent people from consuming food that is safe to eat; in part because they don’t trust the vast majority to handle the food properly simply because there are a few idiots who don’t care or don’t understand how to handle food correctly. In Australia, restaurants can not longer offer a “doggie bag” for the uneaten portions of food on one’s own plate.

      Instead of ensuring that public education includes personal and food hygiene practices, it’s easier for governments to ban the doggie bag. Parents are nowadays largely “excused” from any educational functions. It won’t be long before the government employs armies of professional potty-trainers because parents are seen as inept. (Nor allowed to be anything but.)

    2. Paddy

      Implementation of Gleick’s proposal is unlikely. Water rights are private property. To acquire those rights CA would to use eminent domain authority and pay just compensation for each privately owned water interest. CA is bankrupt and drowning in debt and unfunded obligations and has a credit rating about the same as Greece.

  3. John Silver

    ‘The demand for water is increasing just at a time when climate change is threatening its availability,’

    If the globe is warming where does the increased evaporation go? To space or to hell?

  4. DirkH

    People like Gleick use the situation of depleting aquifers as a classic “tragedy of the
    commons” argument. So it’s no wonder that the Malthusians flock to the water crisis now.

    There is an interesting chapter in The Skeptical Environmentalist about the “water crisis”. Most of this crisis comes through free water for irrigation; if farmers had to pay a market price for that water, they’d stop wasting it, is Lomborg’s argument.

    Nullius In Verba has expressed it very well here:
    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/07/06/in-the-climate-debate-the-misunderstanding-is-mutual/#comment-106840
    29. Nullius in Verba Says:
    July 6th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
    “if “limits to growth” is too new and radical, consider the tragedy of the commons, which has been known about for years”
    Tragedy of the commons isn’t due to a failure of free markets, but a lack of free markets. It was caused by giving a
    costly resource away for free – charitably justified on the basis that it enabled those without land to keep animals
    and so survive; you could even think of it as an early form of welfare. It was solved by taking the land into ownership
    and selling the grazing rights for a market price.

  5. Nonoy Oplas

    “Water shortage”, my golly. Thousands of people in the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, India, China, etc. were killed because of too much water, too much rain, too much flood.

  6. John F. Hultquist

    Earth does have much missing water. Consider the rain and flood for which Noah built an ark and took on animals two by two. There are many other similar events from other cultures – so it must be true. I don’t know where it came from but when it drained away – where did it go? A search for it is needed and, if found, we might also find the “missing” heat. Yes, I’m going back to my room now.

    1. DirkH

      The Noah story could relate to the breaching of the barrier of the once dry Black Sea.

      Other such stories could stem from Bond Event Zero (I think that’s the name), when the area of today’s North Sea between Germany and Britain flooded. The area was inhabitated by stone age settlers. Sea level rose quickly by about 100m.

      Todays “sea level rise” is far, far slower.

      1. Ulrich Elkmann

        Immanuel Velikovsky.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision
        (Caution: tin foil hat area, the closed ward on the next floor; Hansen & Co. are still free to go into town.)

      2. DirkH

        Sorry, it’s not a Bond event, what I was referring to is called Meltwater Pulse 1A:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A

  7. julie

    We currently have authorities in Sydney (city) looking through our rubbish bins to investigate what we throw out. I think it is something to do with recycling as we have been chastised over the last few years for our reckless use of garbage bins which, apparently, means their is no land left to put the garbage in.
    Some councils further west have cut services to fortnightly and told residents to keep garbage in their fridges!
    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/save_the_planet_store_your_garbage_in_your_fridge/desc/

  8. julie

    Forgot to say we have always had the ‘save water’ thing but that’s only sensible here when drought is so much a part of our history.
    Having briefly visited Germany years ago and seen the Rhine Falls (my husband and I were transfixed by the sheer volume of water which we don’t see in Oz) I can’t imagine Germany needing to save water.

    1. DirkH

      It’s a mass psychosis, that’s all.

  9. John F. Hultquist

    julie,

    Here we are told to recycle, including glass. First it had to be split into clear and colored. Not now. They found it cost more to handle it than they could sell it for. So then they decided to haul it to a landfill, bust it into bits, and cover the rest of the waste with it. I don’t know if they do that, but so they claim.

  10. archaeopteryx

    Now the OECD joined the ranks of the disaster purveyors. They discovered that a lot of people may die by 2050 due to …air pollution. The fine print mentions China and India (India has been targetted by the wind lobby recently).

    I saw it here: http://www.neurope.eu/article/oecd-reveals-further-urban-air-pollution-threat. The page, when I saw it, promoted investments in Brazil forestry. Invest in forests, plant windmills and thou shall save thy soul.

    I can think of many causes of death by 2050. Old age (the horror!), drug resistant bugs, WW4 (assuming the Cold War was #3), boredom due to catastrophology, meteor showers, frozen (or baked) innards… Have people lost it? Or are these signs of Global (mental and financial) Depression?

    What exactly DOES the OECD do for a living?

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