Food prices have been in the headlines lately, with more than enough stories blaming the crop shortages on climate change. That’s what the German greens would like to have us believe.
Today, with huge swaths of land being covered and devoured by industrial-scale biofuels agriculture and food prices rapidly climbing to politically dangerous levels, the greens are now calling for an end to biofuels. This marks a course reversal for the greens, though they refuse to admit it. Indeed, just a few years ago, the greens ignored all the warnings and were big proponents of biofuels: They played the key role in mandating the disastrous biofuels debacle in Germany.
Jan Fleischhauer of Der Spiegel recently wrote:
Anyone expecting an apology from the responsible persons, or at least an admission they had gotten carried away by their eco-optimism, does not know the greens very well. Even the hardest of realities are no match against the green conscience.”
Fleischhauer reminds us how in November, 2005, German Green party boss, then Minister of Environment, Jürgen Trittin said:
Fields will become the oil wells of the 21st century, the farmer will become an energy businessman.”
In the same year, green Minister of Agriculture Renate Künast boldly proclaimed:
We want to clear the way for farmers for biofuels, and to accelerate their introduction to the market.”
This, of course, was done through massive subsidies and mandating Germany’s E10 ethanol fuel.
Bärbel Höhn, a green leader of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populated state, went so far, Fleischhauer writes, to declare “bioenergy as a national security issue” because oil is a raw material that wars have been fought over time and again, and thus she ranked the promotion of bioenergy as having crucial importance for German society. It was: “World peace through German biogas,” Fleischhauer writes, sarcastically.
Today no greens want to be reminded of their enthusiastic support for burning food in gas tanks while the world’s poor go hungry.
Renate Künast (far right)
Renate Künast recently told an audience of millions, with a straight face, on Germany’s ARD public television: “We were always against E10”. (E10 is now on the verge of being eliminated after years of failure).
Now that the greens have changed their minds and suddenly “have always been” against agrofuels, they need to come up with an alternative. No problem, Bärbel Höhn has a new solution: Fuel from wild herbs! Fleischhauer writes:
‘Fields of flowers instead of corn’, is the new slogan. Let’s hope this does not again turn into yet another state reform program. Otherwise picking dandelions will be fined soon – for violating the energy security of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
The greens have run out of ideas.
Also read:
Renate Künast “We were always against E10″.
“We were always at war with Oceania.”
BUT given the scandalous history of Der Spiegel’s relentless fueling of every enviro hysteria ever invented it appears ridiculous that such an article appears in that ridiculous Hamburg rag.
Gotta rework that sentence… looks like I got caught in a loop of “appears” and “ridiculous” 🙂
Oh I see. Fleischhauer is that convert to conservatism who sticks out like a sour thumb at Der Spiegel, but is for some unknown reason tolerated by them.
Every flock needs “black sheep”
Dirk: It gets better. Read the preface to Fleischhauer’s last book, Der Schwarze Kanal (Amazon’s “Look Inside” covers that, I see), and see who hired him for the Spiegel column – Jakob “My Name Is Legion” Augstein.
Cue [rolling eyes].
(P.S.: Elmer FUDD, of course. Blame it on the wascally wabbit. And the Green mantra of “après nous le déluge”.)
Forget E10. Go for homeopathic propulsion with D10^-100
The beauty of that is that they’ll only need one Daisy to satisfy the country’s entire transport fuel needs for a century.
‘Fields of flowers instead of corn’, is the new slogan.
You’ve got to be kidding! We tried “flower power” here in the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_power
But what about the fluffy bunnies? Are they going to convert them into biofuel, too? (…with some nice sauce, at 200°C for 120 mins…) Though I suspect Künast & Co. might end up lookig like Elmer Fludd if they tried.
When Jonathan Swift wanted to protest against the poverty and exploitation of the Irish in the 19720, he pointed out that “people” were the only riches in the country and propsed that the Irish sell their babies for food, in “A Modest Proposal”, his most trenchant satire.
With the German Greens, one does not have to do such a thing for them: they can manage quite well by themselves.
Ten agencies, including the World Bank and World Food Program, last June called on governments to scrap biofuel support, saying biofuels force up food prices.
I think greens secretly LIKE the idea that people will have to make a choice between food and fuel. It leads to fulfilment of another fantasy that there will be no need or use for fuel in their utopia.
Don’t they realize that live will become nasty, brutish, and short, and that no perfectly same person will want to murder every last one of them?
No, they don’t. The two greenest persons I know personally are a professional gardener/landscaper and a hobby gardener who grows her own vegetables and basically would be a good farmer but is an unhappy city dweller instead, going on the nerves of us other city dwellers by telling us that supermarket produce is all but poisoned.
Both of them are absolutely convinced that we’re going to hell in a handcart with our technical civilization and need to stop trading, that each of us should grow their own food and that that would be much HEALTHIER than what we do now.
Both own cars, travel a lot more than me, and enjoy every spoil technical civilization has to offer. I hate to say it, because it’s a tired old word, but they’re as hypocritical as they come, and both never noticed that.