Soaring Oil Prices Fuel Biofuel Rush Threatening Global Food Crisis

Well, they say we are running out of gas, which is a problem, so the experts have decided we should start eating our gas, which is a solution, provided you don’t mind your dinner tasting like a carburetor. It is a curious thing about modern policy; it always seems to arrive just in time to solve one problem by creating a larger one that requires a different set of experts to explain why it is actually a feature, not a bug.

The situation is this: oil prices are rising, which makes the folks who own the refineries quite happy and the folks who fill their tanks quite nervous. To soothe the nervousness, the bright minds in Washington and Brussels have pointed to biofuels. Now, biofuels are made from crops. Corn, soy, sugarcane. Things that people eat. So, the logic goes, if we divert a significant portion of the world’s food supply into the gas tanks of automobiles, we will have solved the energy crisis. The only side effect, according to the experts, is that food prices might go up a bit. They say “a bit” the way a man says “a little rain” when the river is already over the banks.

I have always believed that a man who has never had to choose between feeding his family and filling his car has a lot of opinions on how to do both. The experts warn that this scramble for biofuels could push the world closer to a food crisis. That is a polite way of saying that the price of bread is about to become a luxury item for the very people who need it most. It is a fascinating economic theory, really. It suggests that if you take food out of the mouths of the hungry and put it into the engines of the wealthy, the market will somehow balance itself out. I suppose it would, if the market were run by people who didn’t have to eat.

The irony is thick enough to spread on toast, if you can afford the toast. We are told that biofuels are green, clean, and sustainable. They are certainly clean, in the sense that they leave the stomach empty. But let us look at the bipartisan nature of this folly. The Democrats talk about saving the planet, and the Republicans talk about energy independence. Both sides agree that the best way to achieve these noble goals is to turn the farm into a fuel depot. Neither side seems to notice that the farmer is still the one planting the seeds, and the consumer is still the one paying the bill. The only difference is that now the consumer is paying for the privilege of watching his dinner drive away.

It reminds me of the time I tried to fix a fence by using the posts as kindling. It kept the fire going, but the fence didn’t hold up very well. The politicians are doing the same thing. They are burning the furniture to keep the house warm, and then they are surprised when the guests start complaining about the draft. The experts say this is necessary. They say it is efficient. They say it is the future. I say it is just a fancy way of saying that the people at the top are comfortable enough to ignore the people at the bottom.

The truth is, we cannot eat gasoline, and we cannot drive on corn. We need both, and we need them to be affordable. But when the price of oil goes up, the solution is never to lower the price of oil. The solution is always to raise the price of everything else. It is a simple arithmetic trick, really. If you can’t make the pie bigger, you just make the slices smaller and charge more for the plate. The folks back home knew this all along. They just didn’t have a committee to tell them it was a feature.