Biofuels Policy May Kill 200,000 Per Year in the Third World
TUCSON, Ariz., March 28, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — U.S. and European policy to increase production of ethanol and other biofuels to displace fossil fuels is supposed to help human health by reducing “global warming.” Instead it has added to the global burden of death and disease.
Increased production of biofuels increases the price of food worldwide by diverting crops and cropland from feeding people to feeding motor vehicles. Higher food prices, in turn, condemn more people to chronic hunger and “absolute poverty” (defined as income less than $1.25 per day). But hunger and poverty are leading causes of premature death and excess disease worldwide. Therefore, higher biofuel production would increase death and disease.
Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels production over 2004 levels would push more than 35 million additional people into absolute poverty in 2010 in developing countries. Using statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Indur Goklany estimates that this would lead to at least 192,000 excess deaths per year, plus disease resulting in the loss of 6.7 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per year. These exceed the estimated annual toll of 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost DALYs that the World Health Organization attributes to global warming. Thus, developed world policies intended to mitigate global warming probably have increased death and disease in developing countries rather than reducing them. Goklany also notes that death and disease from poverty are a fact, whereas death and disease from global warming are hypothetical.
Thus, the biofuel remedy for global warming may be worse than the disease it purports to alleviate.
SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
The Delinquent Teenager
Climate Ponderings 
Ack!! my links http://www.jpands.org/vol16no1/goklany.pdf
http://www.aapsonline.org
For the past 500 years, mankind has lived in FEAR OF REALITY. Selfishness – driven by fear – is the root of many of our social problems.
E.g., the current AGW scare is a continuation of the irrational response almost 500 years ago to the report by Copernicus in 1543 that the Earth and the other planets all orbit a giant fountain of energy at the gravitational center of the solar system.
Precise measurements and observations on the Sun and other parts of the solar system have revealed that this fountain of energy is the creator, destroyer and sustainer of every atom, life and planet in the solar system [1].
The fountain of energy at the core of the Sun is neutron repulsion, the source of energy in the cores of
1. Atoms heavier than 150 amu, like Uranium
2. Some planets like Jupiter
3. Ordinary stars like the Sun
4. Galaxies like the Milky Way
5. The expanding Universe
We cannot control, but need not fear or ignore, the pulsar at the core of the Sun that created and sustains every atom, life and world in the solar system today.
References:
1a. “Solar Energy,” Adv. Astron. (submitted 1 Sept 2104; published privately 17 Mar 2015)
Click to access Solar_Energy.pdf
1b. “Supplement for Teachers” (published 30 Mar 2015) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Supplement.pdf
1c. “Intro: Science for Teachers” (published 23 May 2015)
Click to access Introduction.pdf