Patrick J. Michaels*
Special for El Universal

Haiti has always been a land of turmoil. However, this month it experienced a brand new type of disturbance: a food riot caused by another nations' pandering to the global warming mob. Haitians took to the streets, demanding that their government do something about the high price of food products. Similar riots have taken places in Southeast Asia and Africa. Expect the same very soon in Latin America, where local authorities have voiced their concern to international organisms regarding this phenomenon.

Food prices are on the rise. For most of the late 1990's and through 2005, the price of soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade had remained pretty stable, at about USD 5.00 a bushel. Since then they have shot up over 150 percent, to around USD 13.00. Corn has doubled, to USD 5.00. Wheat prices have tripled.

It started with the 2005 Energy Policy Act, passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president, mandating that an increasing amount of ethanol be admixed with gasoline. It was sold as a road to "energy independence" and as reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we emit, reducing dreaded global warming. By now, 15 percent of our corn crop is being distilled, diverted from the proper purpose for such distillates (i.e. drinking), combusted, and sent out the tailpipe of American cars.

The Act required production of four billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, increasing by approximately 700 million gallons each succeeding year.

It's only going to get worse. As if to add more 200-proof to the fire, President Bush, citing global warming in his 2007 State of the Union speech, called for production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol by 2017, displacing 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with this intoxicating elixir. This is five times the amount mandated in the 2005 Energy Act. He claimed that this would help the US get off Middle Eastern oil.

Is the ethanol fever going to have any measurable impact on world temperatures?

Let's stipulate that, indeed, 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption is somehow replaced. Transportation accounts for roughly one-third of our national emissions of carbon dioxide, so this would reduce our total emissions by 6.7 percent if ethanol contributed no new greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Everyone knows that's not so, and many studies indicate that substituting ethanol for gasoline actually puts more carbon dioxide in the air than simply burning gasoline.

But, just assume a 6.7 percent savings in emissions. Based upon recent data, the number of cars on the road will rise by this percent in about four years. 

What does that do about global warming? It prevents 0.01º C worth in the next century.  You experience this ambient temperature change every second of your life.

Now,  extend this policy to all the nations of the world in which there are appreciable numbers of cars (called "Annex 1" countries by the United Nations), and the amount of warming that doesn't occur is 0.03ºC.

No one will ever be able to detect these temperature changes in global records, which vary naturally by about 0.08ºC from year-to-year

The 20 percent displacement is impossible. The US produces about half of the world's corn, and if we turned every kernel of it into ethanol we'd still be 40 percent short of the President's modest target. To get there, we would have to find an economic way to make ethanol from cruder plant materials-so-called "cellulosic" ethanol.  No matter how much money governments throw at this (including a lot from the 2005 energy bill), no one has figured out how to do this economically, and people have been at it for decades.

Of course we won't completely burn up our corn. We'll incrementally ratchet it up until the inflation in food prices becomes politically untenable. There will be protests in the developing countries. Some will be very violent, while in the rest of the world, not a dram of a change in climate owing to ethanol will ever be measured.

As Ashock Gulatoi, director of Washington's International Food Policy Research Institute told the Financial Times, "It's finally a trade-off between filling stomachs and filling diesel [or ethanol] tanks in cars and trucks". 

The sad fact is that Haiti's unrest is only the slightest foreshock preceding the massive civil earthquake that is going to be unleashed as more absurd policies are mandated by the global warming mob. Look for the next explosion to be in Latin America.

* Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute (www.elcato.org) and author of "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media"