Earth Daze, Courtesy Of Al Gore

Earth Daze, Courtesy Of Al Gore

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted Monday, April 21, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Shortage: Al Gore sees no climate improvement since he made "An

Inconvenient Truth." Actually, things have gotten worse. As the

environmentalists celebrate Earth Day, the rush to replace fossil

fuels threatens global famine.

A week after Tax Day, April 15, we are forced to endure another

indignity, Earth Day, April 22. This Earth Day finds the world

threatened not by rising sea levels, but by rising food prices. Many

on the planet are more likely to starve than drown, and we have only

Gore's disciples to blame.

In an interview with the British paper The Sun, the jolly green giant

whined: "I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the

movie in 2006." The polar bears, he says, are still going to drown,

and boats will soon be moored to the top of the Washington Monument.

To be sure, we're setting weather records, but they're not what Gore

has in mind. Record cold temperatures have occurred over the globe

this winter, and the only concern about flooding is from record

snowfalls across the planet.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently warned of a more imminent

threat, one ironically created by the rush to save the planet.

Speaking in Accra, Ghana, the U.N. chief said the world must

drastically increase food production to ease skyrocketing prices that

have caused food riots in countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso and

Haiti.

The production of food grains has increased. But it is being diverted

to empty gas tanks, not empty stomachs. Gore and others have warned

that climate change is an imminent threat to the world. We would argue

that climate-friendly policies are more of a threat.

The Gore-induced rush to biofuels has diverted crops such as corn,

soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. Vast swaths of rain forest in

places like Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to provide

farmland not to feed the hungry but to fuel our cars. Our own grain

belt has been increasingly diverted to ethanol over corn flakes.

This has pressured food prices while damaging the environment. In the

U.S., more cultivation has increased runoff from pesticides and

fertilizer, creating dead zones for aquatic life from Chesapeake Bay

to the Gulf of Mexico.

As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute reports, agricultural

expansion leads to higher releases of carbon from biomass and soil

above and below ground. Fertilizers that increase yields also increase

nitrogen discharge into waters and emissions of nitrous oxide