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Food prices have been in the headlines lately, with more than enough stories blaming the crop shortages on climate change. That’s what the German greens would like to have us believe.

Today, with huge swaths of land being covered and devoured by industrial-scale biofuels agriculture and food prices rapidly climbing to politically dangerous levels, the greens are now calling for an end to biofuels. This marks a course reversal for the greens, though they refuse to admit it. Indeed, just a few years ago, the greens ignored all the warnings and were big proponents of biofuels: They played the key role in mandating the disastrous biofuels debacle in Germany.

Jan Fleischhauer of Der Spiegel recently wrote:

Anyone expecting an apology from the responsible persons, or at least an admission they had gotten carried away by their eco-optimism, does not know the greens very well. Even the hardest of realities are no match against the green conscience.”

Fleischhauer reminds us how in November, 2005, German Green party boss, then Minister of Environment, Jürgen Trittin said:

Fields will become the oil wells of the 21st century, the farmer will become an energy businessman.”

In the same year, green Minister of Agriculture Renate Künast boldly proclaimed:

We want to clear the way for farmers for biofuels, and to accelerate their introduction to the market.”

This, of course, was done through massive subsidies and mandating Germany’s E10 ethanol fuel.

Bärbel Höhn, a green leader of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populated state, went so far, Fleischhauer writes, to declare “bioenergy as a national security issue” because oil is a raw material that wars have been fought over time and again, and thus she ranked the promotion of bioenergy as having crucial importance for German society. It was: “World peace through German biogas,” Fleischhauer writes, sarcastically.

Today no greens want to be reminded of their enthusiastic support for burning food in gas tanks while the world’s poor go hungry.

Renate Künast recently told an audience of millions, with a straight face, on Germany’s ARD public television: “We were always against E10”. (E10 is now on the verge of being eliminated after years of failure).

Now that the greens have changed their minds and suddenly “have always been” against agrofuels, they need to come up with an alternative. No problem, Bärbel Höhn has a new solution: Fuel from wild herbs! Fleischhauer writes:

‘Fields of flowers instead of corn’, is the new slogan. Let’s hope this does not again turn into yet another state reform program. Otherwise picking dandelions will be fined soon – for violating the energy security of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

The greens have run out of ideas.

Also read:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/drought-not-the-only-factor-driving-up-agricultural-prices-a-851068.html