My friend has a sticker on his bike that reads “I don’t need a war to power my bike.” Indeed, it seems that biking (or good old-fashioned hoofing it) might be one of the last conflict-free modes of transportation. As alternative fuel options are explored in order to lessen the world’s dependency on oil, it appears that the same old problems aren’t going to go away.
Take biofuel, for example.
The managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, suggests that governments who subsidize biofuel production are contributing to global starvation.
“Giving subsidies for biofuels … basically acts as an implicit tax on staple foods,” he says.
What this means is that if a country is focused on producing fuel, then it’s not focused on producing food. With riots erupting over the past few weeks over food shortages in the Caribbean and Africa, it’s obvious that the world is approaching a crisis point. The U.S., for example, is the largest producer of ethanol, which is produced from corn and other grain crops. The U.S. government has heavily subsidized ethanol production, paying farmer to produce ethanol.
I love the idea of running my car on recycled vegetable oil, and it seems like that is what the grass-roots biofuel movement is all about. But turning the world’s fields into ethanol producers does not seem like a long-term solution.