DID AGW HYSTERIA CONTRIBUTE TO RIOTS IN TUNIS & CAIRO?

Bookworm asks the interesting question:

1. With help from Al Gore, Hollywood, and the entire Leftist panoply, global warming fears reach hysterical levels.

2. As part of their apocalyptic battle against rising seas and dying polar bears, warmists declare ethanol is one of the answers (never mind that it turns out that it takes 1.5 gallons of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol).

3. Did I mention that ethanol comes from corn? In the old days, people used to eat corn. Now they drive it.

4. To satisfy the panic-stricken need for drivable corn, food crops are diverted into fuel production.

5. The cost of staples rises substantially around the world.

5. In 2008, food riots break out, including riots in Egypt. (Here are three links supporting the ethanol/riot connection, one from a free market site, one from a technology site, and one from an organic food site.)

6. Although food riots haven’t been in the headlines lately, what do you bet that, with ethanol production still causing producers to divert food crops into the energy market, marginal economic societies such as Egypt continue to feel the effects of food shortages?

7. Voila — riot conditions. For history aficionados, remember that, in the 1790s, the French had suffered aristocratic depredations for centuries; it was the food shortages that triggered revolt (a la “Let them eat cake,” not that Marie Antoinette actually said that). The same pattern showed up in Russia, with rising discontent reaching a fever pitch with WWI shortages.

The fact that rising food prices are contributing to unrest in the Middle East has been noted recently. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported:

The state of emergency in Tunisia has economists worried that we may be seeing the beginnings of a second wave of global food riots.

Battered by bad weather and increasing demand from the developing world, the global food supply system is buckling under the strain. This month, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that its food price index jumped 32 percent in the second half of 2010 -- surpassing the previous record, set in the early summer of 2008, when deadly clashes over food broke out around the world, from Haiti to Somalia.

An FAO report noted that "recent bouts of extreme price volatility in global agricultural markets portend rising and more frequent threats to world food security."

In Jordan, too, rising food prices are fueling the protests. According to the Los Angeles Times:

In an unprecedented development in Jordan, protests similar to those that have rocked Tunisia and Algeria in recent weeks erupted in the Arab kingdom Friday.

Thousands of people took to the streets of the capital, Amman, and several other cities to protest rising food prices and unemployment, media reports say.

Aside from complaints, they also pointed rare and stinging criticism toward the Jordanian government, headed by Prime Minister Samir Rifai.

But are rising food prices linked to AGW and the ethanol for fuel movement? There's a lot of evidence that points to this connection. Money Morning noted:

"With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015," the president said in his speech to members of Congress. "[I]nstead of subsidizing yesterday's energy, let's invest in tomorrow's."

This commitment to clean energy investment increases the importance of biofuels like ethanol, made from corn and other agricultural products. About 40% of U.S. corn is used to make ethanol, and increased ethanol production leads to higher corn and food prices.

There is a definite correlation between an increase in biofuels production, especially bioethanol, and corn prices. U.S. corn prices surged 52% last year, and helped push the Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index to an all-time high in 2010. The index tracks the prices of 55 food commodities and climbed for the sixth consecutive month to hit 214.7 points in December, its highest reading since the measure was first calculated in 1990.

The last time food prices spiked was June 2008 when the Food Price Index hit 213.5. Corn reached its highest price in July 2008, climbing over $7 a bushel and squeezing the profit margins of ethanol producers. Most of the plants were built in 2006 when the commodity pulled in about $2 a bushel, making the industry so profitable that plants could be paid off in as little time as six months. But after corn's price surge, ethanol plants were shut down and later that year corn fell to around $3 a bushel.

Then U.S. farmers in 2009 produced the biggest bumper crop of corn in the nation's history - in excess of 13.11 billion bushels. While this usually pushes prices down, corn demand skyrocketed partly due to U.S. government subsidies for ethanol, which reached as high as $7.7 billion in 2009. In December 2010 the U.S. government voted to extend ethanol subsidies for another year, despite the protests of environmentalists and livestock producers who argue the tax credits drive up livestock feed prices and increase fertilizer and pesticide runoff in farmlands.

And as the Bangor Daily News noted, it's all based on nonsense:

Forty percent of American corn goes into ethanol as a gasoline additive. Yet this Hamburger Helper-style mix reduces fuel mileage, has little effect on petroleum imports, causes little or no reduction in air pollution or greenhouse gases, raises food prices, and will cost taxpayers $30 billion in the next five years in ethanol subsidies,

Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has expanded this misuse of a vital farm product by increasing the ethanol proportion to 15 percent for cars and trucks with model years of 2001 and later. The EPA needed to increase the ethanol mix because demand was falling short of the man-dated ethanol production level that will rise to 36 billion gallons year by 2022.

It does appear that what prompted the insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt, and the growing insurrectionist movements in Yemen and Jordan, at this time, was a rise in basic food commodity prices caused in large part by the global warming hysterics.