Richard Disney

This is another Harry Reid moment of “open mouth, insert foot.” When Harry Reid says that “coal makes us sick”, he is not tuned into reality. Electrical power from coal and transportation from oil based products have improved the lives of Americans and the world enormously.

Also, without ample amounts of electricity and gasoline driven engines, Las Vegas would still be about the same size as Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada. Maybe that is how Senator Reid prefers it.

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Hat Tip: Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey

When the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls Harry Reid a “YouTube sensation”, they don’t mean it as a compliment. Given that the city runs on a tremendous amount of coal-based electricity and depends on oil-based transportation to bring gamblers and tourists to the desert oasis, they find Reid’s latest comments sickening in their own right. Far from making the world sick, the industrialization spurred by fossil fuels has made the world and its residents healthier than ever:

By Thursday afternoon, the video clip had close to 400,000 hits on YouTube. Like an “American Idol” reject who has no idea he can’t sing, Sen. Reid serves up speechification that crashes and burns in spectacular fashion.

Doesn’t the Democratic Party have its own Simon Cowell, someone with enough common sense to cut off the Slipup from Searchlight before he finds all new ways to embarrass his home state?

Funny thing about coal and oil. Before they began transforming Americans’ everyday lives by providing electricity and transport that didn’t require a horse, average citizens trudged though life with mouths half-full of teeth, fortunate to live past age 40. Far from making us sick, they’ve powered advances that have extended the country’s collective life expectancy to about 80, helped eliminate hard-core poverty and made us the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet.

Today, coal still provides half the country’s electricity — power that allows Las Vegas air conditioners to run 24 hours per day during the soul-searing heat of July, power that lets partygoers enjoy the city’s luxuries at all times. And how did they — and the foodstuffs they ate for breakfast — get to this otherwise uninhabitable tourist outpost? They drove or flew here on a tank of fossil fuel.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Las Vegas Review-Journal: Been to Vegas lately, Harry?

Tags: harryreid, searchlight nevada, las vegas, nevada, senator reid, energy, coal, gasoline, oil, electricity, solar power, slip up

I told someone about a year ago that ethanol and biofuels were going to wreak havoc on food prices. I remember saying something like, “when you start burning your food in your gas tank you are not making a good decision.” The person I said that too kind of scoffed with an eyeroll. I may have been more correct than I wanted to be.

Again, government mandates in the marketplace prove to be harmful. If there was a real non-government enforced market for biofuels people and companies would buy into them. When are the Stateists ever going to learn?

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Fri Jul 4, 3:34 AM ET LONDON (AFP) - Biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent, according to the findings of an unpublished World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

The daily said the report was finished in April but was not published to avoid embarrassing the US government, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent.

Biofuels, which supporters claim are a “greener” alternative to using fossil fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and rising food prices will be on the agenda when G8 leaders meet in Japan next week for their annual summit.

The report’s author, a senior World Bank economist, assessed that contrary to claims by US President George W. Bush, increased demand from India and China has not been the cause of rising food prices.

“Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases,” the report said.

Droughts in Australia have also not had a significant impact, it added. Instead, European and US drives for greater use of biofuels has had the biggest effect.

The European Union has mooted using biofuels for up to 10 percent of all transport fuels by 2020 as part of an increase in use of renewable energy.

All petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include a biofuels component of at least 2.5 percent since April this year.

“Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” the report said.

It added that the drive for biofuels has distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production, and sparked financial speculation on grains.

But Brazil’s transformation of sugar cane into fuel has not had such a dramatic impact, the report said.

“The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140 percent between 2002 and this February,” The Guardian said.

“The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15 percent, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75 percent jump over that period.”

Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report - Yahoo! News

Tags: biofuels, stateism, statism, collectivism, capitalism, market forces, global, maize, wheat, prices, distorted food markets, green,

Hat Tip: First Friday Collective