Originally Posted by Lebenz

“ Let's make a list of raw materials necessary to maintain industrial agriculture.

Ores of iron, copper, aluminum, titanium, magnesium and trace metals.

Coal.

Petroleum.

If any of these raw materials came under the control of some evil person, that person could wreck the world's economy at a minimum or cause the mass starvation of perhaps 3 billion human beings and incedentally, wreck the economy.”

I wrote my MA thesis on the topic of genetics and agribusiness between 1930 and 1960. Petrol products played a distant 3rd role compared to the development of hybridization, vastly increased irrigation and also greatly enhanced education in agricultural techniques.

To this day petrol products (fertilizers and pesticides) are not as important as are irrigation and continued development of preferred strains of crops. Not to suggest that petrol products don’t play a role, but they are not the core component your comments makes them to be.

WRT the war, Bush could have and ought to have given the people of the USA a choice between an aggressive assault in the name of subsidizing Detroit, or to offer a choice to pursue energy efficiency in the extreme. But he didn’t offer any choice. The result is that were all miss-lead. The jury is still out on weather we were lied to, but it appears more and more that that was the case. At this point the very least that could be said was all to convenient a case of incompetence. And that’s a case which has been repeatedly demonstrated by Bush et al.

The truth of the matter is that we could easily maintain our agricultural production and reduce our consumption of oil by at least 50%. The primary difference would be smaller cars.

Scared and insecure men start wars, incompetent and inept men drag them out without end, and those are the hallmarks of the Bush admin.