Mark Steyn On The First Casualty In The War On Global Warming

Rich people in America are fighting a war on Global Warming, and what do you know, poor people are losing.

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the
US Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag
has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very
pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all
over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards
as the greatest challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On Global
Warming."

Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in
fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have
adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of "climate change."

But let's take it that the editors of Time are
referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a
measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That's the "war":
one degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn't exactly
Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in pre-emptive war. The
editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to,
say, Iran's nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion
to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let's cut to the tree. In my corner of New
Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My
town is over 90 per cent forested. Any more trees and I'd have to hack my way
through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck
behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker
"TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH." Very funny. And even funnier when you consider
that on that stretch of Route Seven there's nothing to see north, south, east or
west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It's on every measure other
than tree cover that Vermont's kaput.

So where exactly do Time magazine's generals want
to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It's
all these Third World types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline
to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time
iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it's a flag of
eco-colonialism.

And which obscure island has it been planted on? In
Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on
April 12th. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the
distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to "global
warming" — or, at any rate, the "war on global warming" that Time
magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in
Port-au-Prince.

Prices have risen 40 per cent since last summer
and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits
made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty
and affordable? Well, one out of three ain't bad.

Unlike "global warming," food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from
Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even
pasta protests in Italy.
So what happened?

Well, western governments listened to the
eco-warriors, and introduced some of the "wartime measures" they've been urging.
The E.U. decreed that 5.75% of petrol and diesel must come from "biofuels" by
2010, rising to 10% by 2020. The US added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol
subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in "biofuels" production by
2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a
stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply
into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 per cent of U.S.
grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel
higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you've suddenly got less to
eat? Or, to be more precise, it's not "you" who's got less to eat but those
starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Go read the whole thing.