The twentieth century was the century of the red famines. Now, in the twenty first century, we are seeing the first greenie famine. Let us hope it will not be the first of many.
The red famines killed an extraordinary number of people during the twentieth century – famines caused in part by carelessness, in part by active malice as socialists sought to centralize all food under their direct control. To some extent the red famines were intended to end resistance by depopulating large areas, to some extent they were produced by incompetence, as politicians and bureaucrats directed farmers how they should farm, and some of which were caused by casual neglect, as those politicians and bureaucrats simply forgot to feed their captives.
We are seeing much the same with the first greenie famine. It should have been possible to figure out that converting enough food to feed near a billion people into fuel was likely to cause problems.
Of course, the failure of capitalism to smoothly convert from oil to coal is also a problem, but the conversion has not been made any easier by the fact that it typically takes ten years to get such a plant approved, if you can get it approved at all.
There is a green path and a brown path to dealing with the failure to pump enough oil. Environmentalists complain that coal to liquids conversion is on the brown path, and take for granted that the green path is inherently better and more virtuous, so much more virtuous that simply being in favor of it makes them more virtuous. They neglect, however, to explain that the green path involves a substantial and rapid population reduction.
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