If you found out your weight problem was contributing to high cholesterol, would you berate your doctor, or would you try to eat less?
Similarly, if you learned you've been placing the wrong oil in your vintage auto engine, would you freak out on your mechanic or try to find the proper lubricant?
Shooting the messenger is a time-honoured tactic for idiots who get too stressed out to find solutions to any form of problem.
And right now, the idiots are environmental Neanderthals who are trying to use the world food crisis to blame the biofuels debacle on climate-change activists.
It was only a year ago that the New York Times first reported impoverished people in southeast Asia were having trouble paying for the palm oil they desperately need as a source of calories.
The problem, the paper reported, was too much of the Indonesian and Malaysian palm crop was being diverted to the production of biofuels, and that was driving up the cost of cooking fuel.
A similar problem had already been witnessed in Central America, where people living near the poverty line were complaining about the rising price of masa harina, the corn meal they use to make tamales and tortillas.
But the real global freakout began when some countries began limiting the export of rice and consumers started hoarding the grain, which up until recently was synonymous with affordable sustenance.
Immediately, the average Western consumer became aware of what environmental scientists had been saying for years: Biofuels was a form biofoolishness.
Clearing rainforests and plowing under grassland to grow crops for use as motor-vehicle fuel amounted to insanity, especially when it requires an awful lot of fossil fuels to clear those forests and fields and spread the fertilizers to grow those crops.
While there may come a day when the science behind biofuels makes sense -- Brazil, for example, is trying to turn algae into fuel -- the current American practice of diverting feed corn toward ethanol plants is an obvious travesty.
When the Bush government gleefully announced it was getting behind biofuels, agriculture experts knew the program had nothing to do with helping out the planet: It was just another massive subsidy for Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, the monstrous food-processing conglomerates who've been driving U.S. farm policy for decades.
So when the news broke that the production of biofuels was doing more harm to the planet than helping it -- and making life painful for the most impoverished people on Earth to boot -- who did the opinion-makers and policy wonks criticize?
Amazingly, the U.S. agriculture lobby got off remarkably easy.
The biofuels debacle was blamed on "global-warming alarmists" and "climate-change scarecrows" who somehow forced the governments of the world to mess with the global food supply.
True enough, the move toward biofuels was always sold to the public as an environmentally responsible idea. And some elected officials swallowed this hooey themselves, since creating more subsidies for food processors (note that actual farmers rarely benefit) is always a popular legislative practice.
But the worldwide price of food is also on the rise because the cost of creating food is ballooning with the price of oil. It takes an ocean of fossil fuel to manufacture fertilizers, drive tractors and harvest crops off any field -- and another ocean of oil to ship those crops around the world and keep them cool in refrigerator trucks and containers.
It's horrifying, but the amount of gasoline used up by the production and transport of food in North America is believed to be roughly equal to all the gas used by every single passenger vehicle on the continent.
In other words, it's easy to see how biofuels-induced hoarding is not the sole reason food prices are rising. But this staggering statistic also speaks to the wastefulness of Western culture, and the real source of global crisis: We all simply consume too much stuff, all of which requires oil to manufacture and ship.
Obviously, blaming environmental activists for talking about climate change is sheer idiocy in an age when our collective bad habits are what are actually discombobulating the planet.
Drive less. Buy less. Use less. Waste less. These are the simple solutions to a global headache caused by the overconsumption of fossil fuels.
Here in Manitoba, where we're almost capable of feeding ourselves, it's tempting to ignore the food-crisis component, or simply dismiss it as another media-manufactured headache.
But it is an entirely real threat to the well-being of hundreds of millions off human beings who rely on a small handful of basic staples -- rice, corn, wheat, barley, sorghum and millet -- to meet their nutritional needs.
Likewise, climate change is already a very real threat to coastal people who are busy seawalls (resorts in the Maldives are already photoshopping them off their website photos) and Arctic residents whose hunting and fishing patterns are out of whack (try telling any Inuit ice-free summers are normal).
Denying the existence of either problem and berating activists for talking about them really just amounts to shooting the messenger.
To repeat a cliché, everything is interconnected. And that includes the tendency of intellectually dishonest people to blame other human beings when they're confronted with the need to change their own behaviour.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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