The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: The “true cost” footprint of any product or service is comprised of a combination of water, energy, toxins, climate change emissions, child labor, tax avoidance, and any other “costs” to be measured.
Bottom line: ignorant government policies, and particularly the mandating of corn's use to make ethanol, have driven the price of corn up for real people who want to each corn and products containing corn (which turns out to be just about everything).
It's Getting Harder to Bring Home the Bacon
By MARY KISSEL, April 30, 2011
Wall Street Journal
C. Larry Pope, CEO of the world's largest pork producer, explains why food prices are rising and why they are likely to stay high for a long time.
It's also a business under enormous strain. Some “60 to 70% of the cost of raising a hog is tied up in the grains,” Mr. Pope explains. “The major ingredient is corn, and the secondary ingredient is soybean meal.” Over the last several years, “the cost of corn has gone from a base of $2.40 a bushel to today at $7.40 a bushel, nearly triple what it was just a few years ago.” Which means every product that uses corn has risen, too—including everything from “cereal to soft drinks” and more.
What triggered the upswing? In part: ethanol. President George W. Bush “came forward with—what do you call?—the edict that we were going to mandate 36 billion gallons of alternative fuels” by 2022, of which corn-based ethanol is “a substantial part.” Companies that blend ethanol into fuel get a $5 billion annual tax credit, and there's a tariff to keep foreign producers out of the U.S. market. Now 40% of the corn crop is “directed to ethanol, which equals the amount that's going into livestock food,” Mr. Pope calculates.
“I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.”
Kevin Kelly – Author of What Technology Wants.
Read the article The Library of Utility on the Blog of the Long Now Foundation.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness
The post Search: errors that resulted in great ideas and especially the comment on need to fully integrate women and minorities reminded me of Ellen Swallow Richards. She was one of the first publicly acknowledged female heavy-weights in intellect and values in the USA, in my opinion. See especially her later books, The Cost of Food, The Cost of Shelter, The Art of Right Living, The Cost of Cleanness, Sanitation in Daily Life (1907), and Euthenics, the Science of Controllable Environment (1910). I had forgotten that she was also responsible for introducing the word “ecology” into the English language.
Wikipedia/Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 19th century, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards graduated from Westford Academy (2nd oldest secondary school in Westford, MA). She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.
See Also:
