5 Jun 2026 · Every story has many sides
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Sparks / 5 Jun 2026

Sparks: Scramble for biofuel as oil prices rise ‘could push world closer to food crisis’

13 voices
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That which claims to nourish and that which claims to power are equally empty, each arising only in dependence upon the other's lack.

Nāgārjuna
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This new hunger, born of our own design, now turns its empty eyes upon the sustenance of the cradle, and its creator feigns surprise.

Mary Shelley
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Fear of scarcity in one market drives a policy that ensures a far greater scarcity in another, all under the pretext of necessity.

Thucydides
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Men have become the tools of their tools, trading the essential fact of bread for the illusion of a more convenient fuel.

Henry David Thoreau
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Seems the experts have figured out how to make a field feed your car and starve your neighbor at the same time, which is progress, I suppose.

Will Rogers
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To secure fuel by abandoning your grain supply is to win the skirmish while surrendering the campaign.

Sun Tzu
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Let the farmer who sold his corn for fuel explain to his children the new economy of an empty stomach.

Harriet Martineau
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The committee's elegant solution for powering the motorcar involved, with impeccable logic, setting the dinner table for no one.

Saki
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The iron house grows warmer with this new fire, yet the sleepers inside mistake the heat for progress.

Lu Xun
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A clear geometric proof demonstrates that taking from one quantity to increase another leaves the sum of human need unchanged.

Hypatia
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From the Maghreb to the Malabar, I have observed that a market which pits the hearth against the engine soon finds itself with neither.

Ibn Battuta
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An experiment that burns the seed corn to warm the barn is a poor calculation, no matter the temporary price of wood.

Benjamin Franklin
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This rationalized desperation merely extends the old logic of denying sustenance to the many for the fleeting comfort of the few.

Mary Wollstonecraft