Meat, Milk and Motors: The New China Syndrome Part 2
The knob allowed the driver to adjust the fuel-air mixture for either alcohol (ethanol) or gas. Henry Ford said that alcohol was “a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline.” Ironically, no one followed Henry’s advice until 2000 when George W. Bush subsidized Archer Daniels Midland to burn up, according to the distinguished McKnight University Professor C. Ford Runge, enough calories to feed one person for a year every time we fill up the 25-gallon tank in our SUV.
The Federal Reserve and John D. were behind our automobile-dependent consumer society and the outlawing of the production and sale of alcohol. John D. was a notorious “robber baron”, so we naturally assume his motivation was greed and profit.
But Rockefeller, known as a brilliant businessman and visionary, already owned or controlled most of the world at the end of the 19th century and as a member of the Federal Reserve he understood no one gets wealthier printing their own Monopoly money.
Therefore, if profits were the motive of the world’s richest man–John D. would have bought up all of the farmland in the United States or for that matter all of the farmland in the world, so he could really control the knob on the Model T.
Then Henry Kissinger’s quote would have been: “Control ethanol you control nations and people”
Rockefeller and the Federal Reserve were critical to our fossil-fueled industrial and consumer society, but that also made them responsible for much of the environmental damage done to the planet.
China’s leaders and their Central Bank were critical to the unprecedented growth of the Chinese economy that benefited the West, but replacing bicycles with automobiles is responsible for much of the environmental damage done to the East, West, North and South.
The vast trade surplus of $1.4 trillion and counting, a result of official Chinese government intervention to depress the Renminbi (RMB), is that every person in the (rich) U.S. has borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China so the Chinese economy can produce the most environmental damage in our history.
All too often we see the result of failed public policies, government actions and inactions, and conclude the leadership is inept, arrogant or just “stupid.”
Our last president Bush wasn’t “stupid” if his goal was Ecocide.
At the G8 summit, George W. Bush said, “Goodbye, from the (then) world’s biggest polluter.” He proposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, which would trash America’s last arctic wilderness. Sonar testing is about torturing whales and dolphins, and the border fence that keeps everything out but the illegals is disrupting an extraordinary source of biological diversity along a 2,000-mile-long region that includes deserts, mangrove forests, plains, mountains, river valleys and wetlands.
Chinese officials are worried about their people eating…meat
On November 11, 2008, NPR aired the story: “Chinese Government Fights Recession,” where Beijing’s correspondent Anthony Kuhn reports: “there is a lot of worry in the government that ordinary Chinese were not going to be able to afford to eat meat.”
In 1980, when China’s population was still under one billion, the average Chinese ate 20kg (44lbs) of meat. Last year (2007), with an additional 300 million people, it was 54kg.
Promoting meat in the world’s highest populous country and diverting grain to fatten animals will be “the end of self-sufficiency for China,” says James Rice, Chief of China Operations for Tyson Foods. “This year will be the last in which China produces enough corn for itself, and the last that it is self-sufficient in protein.”
The editors of World Watch state that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future-deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.”
Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”
Automobiles, milk and meat are the answer to the Chinese enigma;
China is on the bridge to ecocide.
Meat, Milk and Motors: The New China Syndrome Part 1
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