From the Times:
As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.
The floods have helped send the price of ethanol up 19 percent in a month. They appear to have had little effect on the price of gasoline at the pump, as ethanol represents only about 6 percent of the nation’s transport fuel today.
But that share is expected to rise to at least 20 percent in coming decades. Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.
But we’ve got to achieve “energy independence”, right, Mr. Obama?
Filed under: agriculture, energy, transportation
Add to this the freakishly unnatural practice of monoculture industrial farming; hundreds of thousands of acres of genetically identical (and genetically engineered) plants, and the possibility of one single factor doing widespread damage to various grain crops becomes even more frightening, as any black swan can very quickly destabalize energy and food markets anywhere in the world.
Can no one at the Obama campaign google “wheat rust”?
I think they can, but then they go ahead and hit the “I’m feeling politically expedient” button.
[...] as I have remarked before, this is one of those very, very few cases where Barack Obama is clearly in the wrong even while – get this! – John McCain actually gets things right. Such a point of divergence is, of [...]
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I am voting for Barack Obama for President, because he is the person for real changes in the 21st Century in beyond. Break Obama will end work disincentive when it comes to public benefits that discourage people who works and has personal savings account that lose food stamp when trying to better your self. John McCain is the person of the pass he is history.
Salem, New Hampshire