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Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry
Socguy writes "According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift.
"It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention."
Those of us who home brew have already seen the hit on both barley and hops.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
However, there are many other crops from which alcohol can be derived.
Which have also jumped markedly in price. Corn, wheat, and rice are all running at record or near-record highs in their prices. So your other libations will also jump in price.
Except that using corn for making ethanol actually ends up putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the next century than simply continuing to burn fossil fuels. Last week's Time magazine had a long, well-written article about this topic.
They make local market dents all the time. The cumulative effect is pretty much nil, but I'm sure that they impact prices and availability in a given city or region fairly often.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You are correct that scientists are split in their opinion about the next solar cycle. Some say it will be more intense than the last one, and others say it will be less intense. But it doesn't have anything to do with any global warming debate.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yup [startribune.com] and it's really hurting everyone from large pizza chains [news-press.com] right down to the local Asian restaurant my wife and I frequent at least three times a month.
Just thank god you don't live in, say, Haiti or Egypt, where there've been food riots due to skyrocketing prices (like, 40% increases since January type skyrocketing).
The use of food as a fuel source is, without a doubt, the most idiotic, selfish, short-sighted thing the developed world has ever dreamed up...
Sorry, but the Heartland Institute has the is an dedicated to unregulated, free markets. They are a policy organization masquerading as a research group, one which has been accused of being funded heavily by Exxon. Now I usually view GreenPeace's "facts" with quite a bit of skepticism, but I do the same with anything coming out of the Heartland Institute. Both organizations are so hell bent on political influence, that they can't maintain the objective view needed to supply useful facts. At some point science-with-a-political-slant becomes political-rhetoric-with-a-scientific-slant. Both of these organizations are well over that line.
We are all just people.
Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure.
I believe the word you're looking for is "externalities". Pollution and environmental issues are external to the market, so the market doesn't account for them. You need to internalize externalities with taxes based on them -- you need to assign them a realistic cost compared to what damage they do to society, and the market will readjust with that taken into account.
I'm a Keynesian; I don't believe in the authoritarian-socialist view of telling businesses, "You will do this," or, on the economic-libertarian view, doing absolutely nothing. I believe in the government simply adjusting the prices of elements of the market with taxes when needed to make externalities that have serious costs but are normally ignored now have costs that are factored into the market, and letting the market make its own choices now that it's facing true costs. And with the taxes collected as such, you can reduce general taxation on corporations and inviduals and/or ameliorate the damage caused.
In such a situation, I think that, for example, coal power would largely become uneconomical, while techs like wind, solar, and deep geothermal (EGS or whatnot) would become much more popular. But if coal power plant operators can still be profitable when compensating for the greenhouse gasses, heavy metals, and particulate matter they emit (prices based on the consequences of those actions, such as increased healthcare costs), and while paying more for coal that's compensating for the water pollution and so forth (also with prices based on the consequences of those actions), then by all means, continue.
But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth; it also went to Harvard.