DOCTORS FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS NEWSLETTER

The federal government has in the past recommended stocking the pantry in case a avian flu pandemic keeps you away from the grocery store. Now a top investment advisor notes that rice in the pantry may bring a higher investment yield than cash in a money-market account. Food prices rose 6% between 2005 and 2007, and the rate of increase is predicted to double. The best yield in a one-year certificate of deposit is now about 4.1% (pre-tax), and you're lucky to get 2.5% in the money market, while food inflation on average is 4.5%, according to the most recent government figures.

“I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food,” writes Brett Arends (Wall St J 4/21/08). “No, this is not a drill.”

Some stores are limiting purchase of certain foods, such as rice and cooking oils, as some countries, faced with domestic shortages, are banning exports (Wall St J 5/1/08).

In the rest of the world, “Famine,” the Apocalyptic horseman on the black horse, is being named, with nearly a billion people at risk of hunger and malnutrition. Since 2002, food prices have risen 65% worldwide, and dairy 80% (WorldNetDaily 4/1/08). Rice stockpiles have reached a 26-year low, and its price has doubled in the last year (Bloomberg News 4/3/08). Grain stocks are at the lowest level since records were first kept. Wheat hit $24 a bushel, up from $3 four years ago (Martin Walker, UPI 2/27/08). The World Bank Group estimates that 33 nations face potential social unrest because of acute increases in food and fuel prices.

Many contributing reasons are cited: a rodent plague in India, cold weather, bans on genetically modified crops, increased fuel prices. Then there are massive government subsidies and mandates to feed food to cars as ethanol, called “one of the biggest blunders in history” (San Francisco Chronicle 4/2/08). The EU Commission rejected claims that producing biofuels is a “crime against humanity” (EU Business 4/14/08).

The record 30 million acres the U.S. will devote to ethanol production this year will consume almost a third of America's corn crop, while yielding fuel amounting to less than 3% of petroleum consumption. Yet the Congressional Research Service warned in December that even devoting every last ear of American corn to ethanol production would not be sufficient to meet federal mandates. John McCain and 24 other senators are urging EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to use his waiver authority to eliminate looming mandates

(Wall St J 5/7/08). The EU, however, has vowed to stick to its target for biofuels.

“You can't change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives,” which could result in disintegration of the landmark EU climate change and energy package, an EU official said (EU Business 4/14/08).

Until a way is found to extract energy from useless cornstalks and fallen trees, biofuels, like all other “green” energy sources, devour vast expanses of land.

In a classic 2007 paper, Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University and one of the main organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference in 1979, calculated the amount of energy generated by renewable sources in terms of power output per square meter of land disturbed. To grow the wood required to fuel a standard 1,000-megawatt electrical plant would take a forest covering 1,000 square miles. Replacing our 600 coal-fired plants would take a forest the size of Alaska. The reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, which generates 1,000 megawatts, covers 250 sq mi. A wind farm generating that much electricity takes 75 sq mi. Meeting U.S. electrical needs with solar by 2050 would require 34,000 sq mi, or about one-quarter of New Mexico (Wall St J 5/2/08). Biomass from 2,500 sq km of prime Iowa farmland would be needed to replace one nuclear generating station.

“Let's stop sanctifying minor and false gods and heretically chant, ‘Renewables are not Green,'” Ausubel suggests. They wreck the environment. He is a promoter of nuclear energy (Environment & Climate News October 2007).

THE GREEN AGENDA AND RIGHTS

The Green agenda, now rationalized as protecting us from climate Apocalypse, involves hammering agriculture and the economy as a whole with taxation, regulation, and litigation. The UN effort (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC is a creation of the UN) “appears to be the most successful effort ever launched at destroying the U.S. economic system (capitalism) that is routinely taught as the cause of all evil” (webcommentary.com 5/15/08).

Worse, Global Warming has been called “the left's perfect storm–a force to demolish faith, family, and freedom. There's no area of our lives that can't be invaded–taxed, controlled, regulated, or obliterated–in the name of serving and protecting the planet” (Don Feder, quoted in TWTW 5/17/08, www.sepp.org). Last December, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Western Australia, urged the government to impose a $5,000 “baby tax” and an annual $800 “carbon tax” for each additional child born to a family with two children. The Optimum Population Trust warned that if the British didn't voluntarily limit population size, the state would have to force them to be environmentally conscious in the bedroom– note that British fertility is below replacement levels (ibid.).

Although innovation is clearly needed for humanity to meet all its challenges, “rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers” (ibid.)–in climate science as well as other areas. In government, in academia, in the media, and even on the Internet.

“Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change” will be quickly subjected to the bidding of “Opinionator” William Connelley, writes Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post 5/3/08). Connelley may be the world's most influential person in the climate change debate, next to Al Gore, Solomon says. Scientists who are skeptical of global warming, even if they work in unrelated fields but have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will get smeared (TWTW 5/10/08).

A CHILLING THOUGHT ON CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE 2050 DEADLINE

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness” (George Orwell, 1984). Posted on the Cambridge Conference Network by Benny Peiser. To subscribe, see abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cccmenu.html. (By 2050, the world is supposed to have CO2 emissions reduced by some 80%.)

STILL TIME TO REGISTER FOR MEETING!

The 2008 meeting of DDP will be held July 11-13 in Mesa, AZ: see enclosure. The deadline for hotel registration is extended to June 9: Make your reservations now! If you wish to go on the bus tour to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, sign up early, as space is limited and we expect to be oversubscribed!

DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp