Well, What Did Anyone Expect?

Food security and the rapid rise in food prices make up the "elephant in the room" that politicians must face up to quickly, according to the government's new chief scientific adviser.

In his first major speech since taking over, Professor John Beddington said the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem, and cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was "profoundly stupid".

Indeed, the whole thing is profoundly stupid. We know that producing biofuels with current technology actually increases emissions (the detail is that the fertiliser used to grow the crops releases more NOx than previously thought) rather than reducing them: for everything except recycled chip fat that is.

So how did we get into this situation where on both sides of the Atlantic we have mandates insisting upon the use of such biofuels? Well, that's just politics that is.

The aim and intention of the system is that we have a mechanism to deal with those problems which have to be dealt with both collectively and need the powers of compulsion available to the State. What actually happens is that when the hue and cry is raised, everybody and their aunt with an agenda puts forward their pet proposal as a solution.

It doesn't matter that such pet proposals will make the specific problem being addressed worse, that's an irrelevance. It's simply a hook on which to hang whichever idiocy is favoured.

We have the Greens insisting that the solution is to regionalise the economy, to reduce globalisation, to curtail trade: when even the basic models which underly the IPCC predictions of climate change state that this will make things worse.

We have the above mentioned biofuels, we have the recycle everything movement (yes, you can recycle too much), it's very like those pushing the ID cards system: a solution to every ill, from terrorism to identity theft, when anyone with an ounce of detailed knowledge knows that it will make these problems worse.

A useful lesson really: anyone who thinks that politics is going to provide a solution to climate change really just isn't paying attention to what politics is and politics does.

Politics as it is practised is not an impartial attempt to solve our collective problems, it is squealing interest groups trying to get theirs while the going is good. Pigs at the trough really isn't the way that things get sorted out.