The dictator of the assisted living group, Joe Biden, wants to take away your light bulbs, cars, gas stoves, money and freedom. Now his friends at the United nations—the folks that protect Russia and China from being charged with crimes against humanity, supports the terrorists of the Middle East—and hates Israel—now want to take away your rice. That is not a joke.
“An even more hideous campaign by the green movement is its attempt to destroy mass agriculture. Synthetic fertilizers contribute to climate change, perhaps, but they also make it possible to feed the world’s 8 billion inhabitants, given limited acreage for farming.
To make matters worse, the World Bank is now using some activist scientists as cover to spread through the media an entirely new green panic. Agence France-Presse conveyed the misleading claim that rice, an efficient staple food for more than 3 billion people, is causing “10% of global methane emissions.” As it turns out, it isn’t the rice that’s the problem, but rather the habit of some farmers (this story was produced in Vietnam) to burn the straw left over from the harvest. Twitter actually had to intervene and clarify this fact with a community note.
Remember, the United Nations is now proclaiming that sex with minors are a good thing. So, not only are they promoting terrorists, they are now promoting pedophilia.
First, they came for gas stoves. Now, they are coming for rice
by Washington Examiner, 4/18/23
Speaking to a United Nations forum this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pulled a rhetorical sleight of hand increasingly common on the environmentalist Left. She tried to take climate change, an issue people generally don’t care about, into a discussion about international poverty, which most people genuinely do care about.
“Today, it is clearer than ever that transboundary challenges — such as climate change, pandemics, and fragility and conflict — are disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable populations,” Yellen said. “Put simply, it is no longer possible to fully deliver on our development goals without addressing global challenges with the urgency and scale required.”
Given that “fragility and conflict” is not a problem money can solve and that “pandemics” are not currently raging, the obvious point is on shoe-horning an alarmist global warming agenda into a package with broader appeal. The gist of Yellen’s comment is that, absent some kind of urgent, world-changing action on climate change, billions will remain or become further mired in the kind of grinding historical poverty that plagued nearly all of humanity throughout history until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.
There is, of course, no evidence that global warming will cause any such thing. On the contrary, industrial production, the availability of cheap fossil fuels, the opening up of markets for trade, and finally, the abandonment of mercantilist and socialist ideologies (especially in India and China) have converged to lift billions of people out of the poverty and tyranny that Milton Friedman once observed were the human condition for nearly all of history. Far from hindering development, the free market economic system that global warming alarmism seeks to subvert is the one proven method of pulling up nations in need of development, far more suited to the task than any amount of planning by international development organizations.
This becomes even more evident when one looks at all the campaigns that environmentalists are waging to lower human living standards, especially among the poor, all in the name of global warming.
Some of their efforts, such as banning the sale of gas stoves (and yes, this is ongoing at many different levels of government. It’s not some kind of right-wing conspiracy theory), are annoying and useless but nonetheless First World problems, at least. The more serious threat is that the world’s poor will not be given access to the cheap energy they need for their local economies to grow.
An even more hideous campaign by the green movement is its attempt to destroy mass agriculture. Synthetic fertilizers contribute to climate change, perhaps, but they also make it possible to feed the world’s 8 billion inhabitants, given limited acreage for farming.
To make matters worse, the World Bank is now using some activist scientists as cover to spread through the media an entirely new green panic. Agence France-Presse conveyed the misleading claim that rice, an efficient staple food for more than 3 billion people, is causing “10% of global methane emissions.” As it turns out, it isn’t the rice that’s the problem, but rather the habit of some farmers (this story was produced in Vietnam) to burn the straw left over from the harvest. Twitter actually had to intervene and clarify this fact with a community note.
This is a problem that technology and education can probably solve, as it has in the past, since the straw does have other uses. But if meddlers get involved more aggressively and attempt, say, to force the use of organic fertilizers, they may face even more severe consequences than they did in Sri Lanka, the president of which was forced to flee for his life last year. The rice crop is no joke — the localized disruption caused to it by central agricultural planning in China caused the deaths by starvation of as many as 55 million Chinese people in the late 1950s.
The war in Ukraine and the threat it has posed to agricultural exports from the region have helped illustrate how precarious the world’s food supply remains even in these modern times. It is outright irresponsible to adopt sloganeering demonizing important, life-sustaining foods such as rice and beef and the fertilizers needed for mass agriculture. Given that the entire point of saving the world from climate change is to keep it habitable for humans, any policy that causes food shortages for billions of the world’s poor would seem to defeat the purpose.
