Hello everybody out there in farm country. This radio commentary is brought to you by the National Corn Growers Association, CropLife America, and Renewable Fuels Association. They are all friends, supporters, and allies of a healthy farm economy and prosperous rural America. Thank you.
And now for today’s commentary –
Not much time between now and Christmas, and Congress must pass legislation to fund the government, or we will be shut down. We need an annual budget, but I expect they will just pass another stop gap spending measure to get us into January. Republicans want to delay until they take control of the House next year.
You may have heard this, but the President of Mexico has announced that he plans to ban his country from importing genetically modified corn. Keep in mind – more than 90% of the corn that we grow is genetically modified. President Obrador of Mexico has since said his ban would be on corn for human consumption – not livestock feed. We don’t need a trade fight with Mexico.
“Climate Change” is on TV and in the papers every day. Temperatures are going up. The world will be destroyed. Okay, we probably need to deal with our problem. But here are some facts we need to be aware of. Last year, 7 million acres of our forests burned. Blame global warming. Did you know that in 1930, 90 years ago, forest fires burned 50 million acres? That is 7 times this year’s burn. Between 1926 and 1950 10 million acres were burned each year. Should we blame carbon dioxide in the air for the fires? We do have more CO than we had in years past. However, we don’t have more forest fires. Disasters are happening – floods, droughts, storms – but we just see and hear more about them today with modern communication.
Professor Roger Pielke at the University of Colorado argues that climate-related disasters have declined between 1990 and 2020. Insurance Company Munich Re reports this – “A total of 2900 people lost their lives in natural disasters in the first half of the year, much lower than the average for the last 30 years.” Michael Shellenberger, a Democrat who ran for governor in California, tells us that the trend in deaths due to natural disasters continues to decline. Death from cold weather is causing far more deaths than warm weather. A New York Times environmental author acknowledges that warming by the end of this century will be up 2 or 3 degrees. That is less than half the prediction in 1918. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t try to stop the rising temperature, but we don’t need to blame every problem on climate change.
Until next week, this is John Block reporting from Washington, D.C. If you would like to review my radio shows going back more than 20 years, just go on-line to www.johnblockreports.com.
