While warning signs are appearing of associated crises in the rapidly rising Third World populations and the rising prices for diminishing world resources of food and raw materials, the International Energy Authority has belatedly accepted the reality of peak oil and the fearful impact this will have on the future of the world.
The devastating nature of this issue is that humanity has used up half of the world's oil reserves, with the remaining half overwhelmingly lower in quality and in less accessible fields.
To counter the threat of rapidly rising oil prices, now exacerbated by the aggressive industrial intrusion of China and India, America is leading the field in the production of biofuels, sanctified by the dubious rationale of Al Gore and others hell-bent on reducing, if they can, human carbon emissions. How they will achieve this as China, India and the Far East industrialise further without a thought of carbon-emission control shows how falsely rooted are their efforts. The West has lost more than its geographical empires; it has lost its moral imperatives, and the great new industrial powers in the east are just not listening.
In the US, which supplies 65% of other countries' grain imports, 30% of next year's harvest has been designated for the production of ethanol for motor fuel. The outcome of this is that the rich countries' demands for biofuels are reducing the world's supply of food and increasing its price. As a shadow of coming events there were riots in Mexico in January by poor workers who had seen a fourfold increase in the price of maize by reason of the farming of industrial corn in place of food corn.
The cheap energy era is over. The scarcity of one commodity will beget another and the inevitable price rises on human necessities will impinge on the world's poorest, making food so scarce as to reduce the rate of human population growth.
The fatal consequence for the west is that a starving Third World will not submissively accept its fate but, rallying behind a militant leadership, will storm the citadels of the possessor nations. It has not escaped the notice of many that this inevitable process is under way.
Alastair Harper, House of Gask, Lathalmond, by Dunfermline.
Inadequacy of wealth
My grateful thanks to R F Morrison for keeping the debate going. In his letter (July 13) he refers to the Land Tax being "equitable". But the problem is, in this country, we don't "do" equitable.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a more equitable redistribution of wealth. From late Thatcherism to the present day the economy expanded, the free market developed and affluence arrived. Wealth has soared but re-distribution has been upwards, not downwards, creating a huge gap in wealth. When incomes soar, luxuries are sought and a house today is a luxury. Those with inflated incomes will pay inflated prices. Shortage of housing is not an error of the politicians, it is policy. Society would have benefited from less affluence. But affluence has not worked. It is the problem.
Those who live in luxury can never be satisfied, thus wars for oil will continue, as will ecological disaster. The poor will live with the stress of never having owned a house and middle-income dual-income households will struggle to pay, putting strain on marriages, perhaps causing family breakdown, the children being the losers. It is not the problem of poverty as such but the terrible inadequacy of affluence.
Morag McKinlay, 36A Weir Street, Falkirk.
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