CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earthquake in Haiti has caused more than 100,000 deaths and destroyed the homes of 1.5 million people. It’s a devastating blow to Haiti—but we don’t know how to prevent earthquakes. All we can do is help Haiti rebuild.

 

On the other hand, we do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. The Vitamin A problem is far bigger than the Haitian earthquake, and it keeps on going, year after year.  

 

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene.  The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes.  None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

 

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed—without evidence—that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet.” 

 

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene—and offered it free to the Third World—Greenpeace still said no.

 

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

 

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus—Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.  

 

“A danger to the planet,” of course is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

 

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.  

 

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from societies resources. They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

 

Not even Greenpeace should want a poverty-stricken world full of blind children.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Back during the bad old Bush presidency, the eco-movement loudly endorsed ethanol, particularly cellulosic ethanol, as a good eco-substitute for gasoline. Now they’ve changed their minds. They’re finally admitting that you can’t grow ethanol and food on the same acres. If you’re going to add ethanol to your shopping list, you need to clear more land to grow the feedstock. When forest or grassland is cleared and plowed, huge amounts of carbon stored in the soil gas off into the air. If Global Warming is man-made, this is a serious problem.

 

This gem of newfound wisdom has just been published in the October 23 issue of Science, and dutifully repeated by the Washington Post and the other Green media collaborators. The lead author is Princeton’s Tim Searchinger, formerly a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.

 

Where were these “environmentalists” when Bush and the Congress installed their ill-considered mandates for corn and cellulosic ethanol? Three full years ago, I did a study with the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled Biofuels, Food or Wildlife:  The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol. I warned back then that making any useful amount of ethanol would force us to plow millions more acres of wildlands—first for corn and then for poplar, pine, and other fast-growing trees to make wood chips for cellulosic ethanol.

 

I warned there wasn’t enough land to go around. Nobody cared; because the Greens approved it. But the Greens are playing bait-n-switch. First it was solar, but the sun only shines for half of each 24 hours. Clouds interrupt too. How can we keep the lights on at the school and the hospital? 

 

Then it was wind turbines. But a big EU power provider has testified that wind is so erratic you need 90 percent of your installed wind capacity matched in “spinning reserve”—burning fuel—from fossil or nuclear. Why bother to make the wind turbines at all? 

 

Corn ethanol nearly doubled world food prices in three years, and is set to do it again whenever there’s a short corn crop. Cellulosic ethanol is still unworkable and the environmentalists are now telling us not to bother.

 

They don’t want us to have energy! Paul Ehrlich and Maurice Strong—the Canadian “grey eminence” of the UN—agree that the threat to the earth is “too many rich people.” And energy is the key to the affluence. So we must tax away the energy.

 

What about more nuclear plants that don’t emit CO₂?  The Obama administration won’t allow spent nuclear fuel to be stored at Harry Reid’s Yucca Mountain, and it won’t permit reprocessing. Strike it off the list!

 

Now we learn that the energy-tax bills currently in the Congress contain a little clause that lets the White House renege on all those emission permits the big companies have sold their souls for—if CO₂ levels go too high. That’s not temperatures too high, but CO2 levels in the atmosphere too high. So what if CO₂ has almost no linkage to our temperatures? As the oceans recover from their Little Ice Age chill, the laws of physics guarantee higher and higher CO₂ concentrations in the air. Talk about legislative sleight-of-hand! 

 

Again I will warn the Green movement:  If children are starving for lack of nitrogen fertilizer for the crops (made with natural gas); if elderly voters are literally freezing to death in their homes for lack of coal; those laws won’t be worth the paper they were drafted on (considerable as the paper piles already are).

 

In fact, the Congress itself will race to change the laws before you can say “tea party.” 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA: The Chesapeake Bay is in eco-collapse. The once-clear waters are clouded with sediment, so the eel-grass cannot grow across the bottom for baby crabs to hide in. The oysters, which once filtered every bit of the bay’s water twice daily, have mostly succumbed to such viral diseases as MSX and Dermo.

 

The bay that yielded 25 million bushels of oyster per year in the 1940s has lately produced only about 200,000 bushels annually. Chesapeake seafood restaurants mostly import their crabmeat and oysters. Watermen have left for other jobs. A massive federal restoration project began in 1983, aiming to cut “over-fertilization” in the Bay by 40 percent—but regulating sewage plants and farm fertilizer has failed to make much difference.

 

We hadn’t done the science. Blaming “pollution” was no adequate prescription for restoring the Bay’s health. But research has apparently now found the key. A recent massive experiment in the Great Wicomico River found that oysters on high shell reefs (16–18 inches above the bottom) are thriving. The test-bed oysters are fighting off the diseases and grow above the sediment, while oysters on the river bottom and on lower shell mounds failed again.

 

The Great Wicomico now has as many oysters as all the waters of Maryland—185 million. The journal Science reports “unprecedented restoration of a native oyster population.”    

 

It wasn’t pollution. It was the gradual permission for power dredges in the Bay, which traditionally had permitted only sail-powered dredges. The power dredges tore at the shell piles that were vital to the health of the oysters and the baywater they filtered. Viruses attacked successfully because the oysters were no longer growing high up at optimum-flow depths. After the oysters failed, the water then clouded, hampering the eelgrass and the baby crabs.

 

The eco-activists’ cries of “overharvesting” and “pollution” led us in the wrong direction. The money spent on the bay’s restoration up until now has been largely wasted. But now the future of the by looks bright: give the oysters high starter-reefs, protect them from harvest until they reach sustaining numbers, and guard the shell reefs against power dredging.   

 

Obviously, we need a better way to harvest oysters—which will provide major benefits to oyster populations in Europe, Australia and affluent regions around the world where oysters and their water-filtering have been 90 percent lost.   

 

It seems so simple suddenly!  Since we did the research.

 

The environmental movement hasn’t been much help at fixing things: 

 

• Farmers, not environmentalists, invented the herbicide-based no-till farming that cuts soil erosion by up to 95 percent.     

 

• The behavior of the ozone hole in the Arctic hasn’t changed since we banned the supposedly-evil CFCs.

 

• School children found frogs with too many legs or too few, and the activists blamed it on pesticide runoff. Science has shown the deformities were caused by natural parasites burrowing into the leg joints of the tadpoles—and dragonfly larvae eating them off.

 

Conservation is a wonderful thing, but it is science that gives us the capacity to achieve it.

 

Resource:

D.M. Schulte et al; “Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Population, Science, vol. 325, August 28, 2009; pp. 1124–1127.

 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net