How is it possible to be a professor and also be this damn ignorant?
According to Prof Lang, all assessments of the world’s food systems reach the same damning conclusion, namely that “a big crunch is coming”. Falling oil reserves – needed for fertilisers – climate change and a soaring global population are coming together in a perfect storm.
What the hell do oil reserves have to do with fertilisers? We don\’t use oil to make them after all.
We use natural gas to make fertiliser. You know, that stuff we\’re all about to drown in as the shale revolution gets underway?
More so because climate change, in so far as it is happening at all, is likely to mean higher crop yields.
Canada and the US are large grain producers. If they get warmer, along with Russia, we all stand to benefit. Even more so because higher CO2 levels are good for plants.
But it is all meaningless bollocks because you can tell that the Good Professor is not going to let little things like facts get in the way of a good moan.
Thankfully as our oil becomes heavier and sourer, we get more sulphur from it as well, which is used in fertiliser.
From his bio:
With that sort of background, it is amazing that he doesn’t believe fertiliser is hand knitted from moonbeams by fairies, enslaved in butterfly cages dug deep under the Norfolk ‘hills’.
The ‘organic fertilizer’, of course, being the fairy shit.
Professor of Food Policy argues that food policy is the most important thing in the world.
Rent seeking shyster.
Yawn.
Because no-one takes these seriously. The likes of Tim Lang and Prince Charles are just old men yelling at clouds, pals to certain fringe groups of morons who thankfully are nowhere near industry.
Tim Almond – “Because no-one takes these seriously. The likes of Tim Lang and Prince Charles are just old men yelling at clouds, pals to certain fringe groups of morons who thankfully are nowhere near industry.”
That is what people said about Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud in Vienna in 1913.
How did that work out?
Wonder if Lang was actually chief ‘scientific’ adviser to our former Government Chief ‘Scientific’ Adviser?? There’s more than a hint of persuasion visible from here. Echo chambers spring to mind.
SMFS,
You’re always going to have fruitcakes. Fruitcakes only get to power because people get desperate enough to try the fruitcakes rather than sane people.
The irony is not lost on me that the sort of people who generally run anti-fascist campaigns are the people who would also create the sort of economic catastrophes that foster fascism.
Ignorant? Only w.r.t. the production of fertilizers. Since he has a PhD in social psychology, most likely he is thoroughly de-educated as well.
Prof. Lang is wrong about almost everything – but he is most wrong on the health claims he makes for his food fascism:
http://theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/sorry-tim-but-every-days-feast-day-in.html
I’m not saying Tim Lang is correct, but actually, we do use oil to grow our crops, Tim. Oil powers pretty much all of the equipment (tractors, harvesters, combines, etc.) in farming.
“I m not saying Tim Lang is correct, but actually, we do use oil to grow our crops, Tim. Oil powers pretty much all of the equipment (tractors, harvesters, combines, etc.) in farming.”
But if push came to shove, it’d be a fairly simple matter to fuel the entire agricultural fleet with bio-diesel, liquified gas or anything else came to mind. Unlike road transport, there’s no need to set up complicated supply networks etc. Agricultural fuels are already delivered bulk to point of use. Just a matter of appropriate engine conversions & suitable storage facilities. Changeover could be phased in as part of the usual plant upgrading cycle.
I sense an “Erlich moment” here. Every now and again. (I.e. every fortnight) we have a ‘respected’ academic predicting catastrophe, and our establishment media dutifully reports it, but never points out the many occasions they have been completely wrong in the past.
Catastrophism seems to be a waste product of advanced, wealthy democracies.
Peak food.
Doubt it. So far as I can see it’s a consequence of millennialism in the cultural mind of Christendom. The idea that there is an imminent end which will be either marvellous or terrible, and the consequence of mankined either achieving a state of grace or of utter depravity, resulting in Earth becoming either a perfect kingdom of God, or a global, sadistic punishment arena, seems to me to be pretty clearly delineated in these catastophist fantasies.
Tim Almond – “Fruitcakes only get to power because people get desperate enough to try the fruitcakes rather than sane people.”
Well that and the fact that fruitcakes who are utterly opportunistic, deeply committed and well organised do tend to win. Most Communist parties were probably a few thousand people in 1939 but they rose to mass movements during the war. Admittedly that did take a war, but it still proves you have to watch the fruitcakes.
“The irony is not lost on me that the sort of people who generally run anti-fascist campaigns are the people who would also create the sort of economic catastrophes that foster fascism.”
I doubt it is an irony. Liberal states tolerate the extremists who win in the end. They carry the seeds of their own destruction. Because the Tsar would not punish the families of terrorists, or the terrorists themselves worth a damn, the Tsar-s family was murdered along with millions of others. The anti-fascism is not a cause of their indeological problems, but a public justification for whatever psychological problems they are working through.
11Norman Benson – “actually, we do use oil to grow our crops, Tim. Oil powers pretty much all of the equipment (tractors, harvesters, combines, etc.) in farming.”
While other people are right about how quickly substitutable it is, Egypt is about to hit the wall and faces actual starvation, in part because they cannot afford to import diesel so there will be less planting this year.