Say Anything Blog

Noel Sheppard

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a global warming alarmist coming out strongly against the use of biofuels.

Though George Monbiot isn’t a household name in the States, he is considered one of Britain’s leading environmentalists, and is regularly quoted by warm-mongers to advance climate hysteria.

Yet, despite his irrational disdain for carbon dioxide, Monbiot has long campaigned against the use of biofuels.

With that in mind, his Tuesday article in the British Guardian contained his harshest criticisms to date for this supposedly eco-friendly source of energy that global warming obsessed media in America dare not share with the citizenry (emphasis added throughout):

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It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.

Those familiar with Monbiot know that he has quite a flare for the dramatic:

"The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them."

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Of course, NBC also wouldn’t want its viewers to read Monbiot’s startling conclusion:

"If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes, it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong."

As amazing as it might seem, I largely agree with Monbiot’s assessment; where we part company is in who are the cowards, who are the weak, and who are the strong.

When conservatives have pointed out this obvious truth about biofuels, we are accused of being anti-environment; wonder what the deranged lefties will say about this guy? He’s one of their heroes, but he is at least somewhat capable of discerning the obvious truth of the matter.