This and That

December 8, 2022

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 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.

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www.johnblockreports.com.