My question is, where is the downside to this so-called crisis?
Actually, the answer to this question is complex and vital to the future of humanity and to the earth itself.
The green revolution discovered a way to lessen our dependence of fossil fuels by turning to biofuels. The only problem is that whereas biofuels aren't pumped from deep underground and transformed into fuel, plastics, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and many other products, they do transform edible food into fuel--primarily for automobiles. This means that food prices have risen dramatically because of a diminished supply. And of course the first to feel the effects of high food prices are the poor of the world, who aren't as concerned with filling their gas tanks with non-polluting biofuel since these people generally don't own cars.
Hungry people have always been the most frightening to governments because when people are hungry, they have nothing left to lose, so rioting and looting become more possible and government stability is in danger.
This is why the U.N. is currently meeting in Rome this week where General Secretary Ban Ki-moon stated that the organization needs an additional $15-$20 billion each year to combat hunger around the world.
My first response is...$15-$20 billion? To feed the entire world? While this amount seems wholly inadequate, I'll leave it to the experts to determine how much it will take to help. But consider this: George Bush and the United States Congress has spent over $525 billion just on the Iraq War in a little over 5 years.
Political expert, Robert Sheer said this recently in an op-ed piece, "The Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget - or covert - operations."
Not that we would have ever expected this "compassionate conservative" President to spend Americans' hard earned tax money on feeding hundreds of millions of brown, black and yellow people, but come on? There had to have been some people-oriented programs he would have been willing to pay for instead of a "War on Terror", had that not so conveniently allowed him to megalomanically become The War President--something I'm sure he enjoyed waving under his daddy's nose in a very self-satisfied Freudian way. Of course everything then went so horribly wrong. But that is another long sad story.
I guess what is incredible to me still, almost 60 years after President General Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the burgeoning Military-Industrial Complex, is that we don't even question $725 billion A YEAR for the military portion of the federal budget.
Robert Sheer's article tells how the extremely costly weapons systems the military keeps wanting--and getting--have a life of their own and there is no desire by the military, the Congress or the President to stop that insane spending nearly 20 years after our cold-war enemy collapsed.
The bigger question in all this is obviously, what about the hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world? When I was born the world population was around 2.5 billion. Today it is 6.6 billion. While technology has done wonders to increase the food supply over the past 60 years, other issues like genetically-modified (GM) foods and patented seeds are causing problems in areas where farmers once relied on their own seed stock to replant each year. Now companies like Monsanto are actually suing farmers around the world who actually have seed from neighboring Monsanto seeded fields blow over to their fields.
Elsewhere farmers have been coerced into buy into the new GM seeds on the promise that their yields will be increased dramatically and the selling of their surplus will easily help them afford the yearly costs of the patented seed. Unfortunately, in many areas, the sales pitch was more hype then truth and many farmers, especially in India, have become so desperate because of their inability to afford the yearly expense that they resolved the issue the only way they felt they could--by committing suicide.
I started this off by asking what the downside was of the rapid increase in gasoline and fuel prices. From a very ethnocentric, Western point of view, I see no downside. Pollution, traffic congestion, accident rates, the numbers of wasteful oversize vehicles will all decrease and perhaps global warming will abate a bit.
On a world-wide scale, obviously there are some serious repercussions that must be met. Somehow if the amounts mentioned of $15-$20 billion a year will really reach the hundreds of millions that we know are hungry in this world, it truly is a drop in the bucket for America; not to mention the other wealthy nations of the world.
In any case, we are perhaps seeing the last gasps of a world that was based on fossil fuels--and good riddance! Whether the consumer-driven societies of the world can refocus is difficult to say. My feeling is that they won't do it willingly. They will have be forced to accept the difficult cultural changes a new economy would be based on.
But we've learned that just switching from fossil fuels to biofuels isn't the way to do it. Replacing one set of serious consequences to another set is simply a desperate attempt NOT to have to sacrifice the consumer addictions we oh-so love.
Solving these and other pressing issues involve serious and intelligent ideas. The world has always relied on the United States to provide many of these ideas. Sadly, for the last eight years there have not only been a surfeit of ideas coming from our leaders, but they have actually worked against solving many of these problems because of an overriding belief that the free market will solve them--or because an irrational use of the contradictory statements in the Bible pointed them this way or that depending on what the issue was. In any case, the answers they championed were generally the least "Christian" choices they could make.
Fortunately for the world, this stubborn reliance on dogmatism should end in January regardless of who wins. I hope that we can begin to heal the wounds of the last eight years and begin to work realistically towards a future that takes all of Nature into account as we learn to adjust to less.