Salsa Lovers Unite!

Hot house tomato growers have discovered that enriching their crops with high levels of Carbon Dioxide (C02) produce bigger sturdier plants and higher yields of fruit with increased levels of Calcium, which translates into more money in the grower’s pocket. All of which is good news for farmers as well as for those of us that love salsa.

It is also good news if you love cucumbers, lettuce or just like to look at flowers. C02 is a natural fertilizer for plants, which allows them to grow faster, larger, produce greater yields and to live in drier climates. Warming of the climate is also good for plants. Warmer temperatures stimulate plant growth and provide longer growing seasons. Perhaps most importantly, more plant life provides more food for animals. All of which benefits human health, prosperity and happiness particularly if you like a little carne-asada with your salsa.

In addition to an abundance of food, there are other economic and societal benefits to “global warming.” A 2006 study showed that the “reduction of wintertime mortality would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat-stress related mortality.” Economist Thomas Gale Moore calculated that “if temperatures were 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the U.S., 41,000 fewer people would die each year from respiratory and circulation diseases.”

In order to stop the earth from warming climate alarmists are like the Blues Brothers on a “mission from God” to save the planet by reducing levels of man made C02. It is one of the great ironies of the climate alarmists’ claim to superior virtue (to say nothing of intelligence) to that of climate realists: If they are successful in stopping the earth from warming (pause for laughter) they may limit the production of foodstuffs. And in their rush to transform the world economy in order to lower concentrations of a gas essential for human life, they are actually enacting policy that is actually detrimental to the poor and wanting. This is, of course, is bad news if you are destitute and hungry.

Consider the alarmists push to adopt bio fuels as a replacement for fossil fuel.

Bio fuels require a considerable amount of bio mass (the plant material converted to fuel) and that requires a lot of acreage. In order to avoid man-made global warming, the European Union decided to replace 5.75% of its fossil fuel usage with bio-fuels by 2010 and increase that amount by another 8% by 2015. In order to reach this target, Europe would have to use 14-27% of its agricultural land to reach this 5.75% target. Meeting the target requires significant imports from countries like Brazil and Indonesia.

What is the problem with poorer countries exporting bio mass to wealthier nations? Nothing if you don’t care if poor people eat. Even farmers in Indonesia want the best price for their crops. So when growing bio mass is more profitable than food, guess what they grow? The scarce farm land in these developing countries is used to produce fuel instead of food, which reduces the amount of food thus driving up the price.

We are not immune from market forces here in America. Jeff Rubin, a chief economist at CIBC World Markets, a bank based in Ottowa, Canada writes, the “diversion of an ever-increasing share of the American corn crop from human consumption and livestock feed to energy production is putting steady and unrelenting pressure on food prices.”

All this is not to say that bio fuels are bad or that there is no role for them to play in any comprehensive energy plan. Research in making ethanol production truly affordable by turning common garbage products into fuel is extremely promising. However, any energy policy that claims to be concerned with the poor and starving would not focus on policy that rations energy in order to avoid producing C02, but would instead be directed at increasing our capacity to create abundant, low-cost energy. Indeed our industrial and technological civilization depends upon it.

Dr. Willie Soon, chief science advisor at the Science and Public Policy Institute, writes that if through the misuse of “science and through misguided public fear and hysteria, mankind significantly rations and restricts the use of hydrocarbons, the worldwide increase in prosperity will stop. The result would be vast human suffering and the loss of hundreds of millions of human lives. Moreover, the prosperity of those in the developed countries would be greatly reduced.”

So much for the alarmists’ moral mandate!

Tragically, so much suffering all for the sake of reducing a completely natural, life essential atmospheric trace gas that has no causal effect on the natural life beneficial warming of the planet.

I say put on some sun glasses, have a margarita and pass the chips and salsa.

Joseph C. Phillips is the author of “He Talk Like a White Boy” available wherever books are sold.