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Greens Blame Global Warming For Riots In Egypt: Mubarak’s A Hero

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Greens Blame Global Warming For Riots In Egypt: Mubarak’s A Hero

EGYPT In Chaos: We waited and we waited. and then in came: the troubles in Egypt can be blamed on global warming.  Cameron Scott knows that Mr Mubarak is not blame:

Most major political shifts are caused at least in part by economic pressures. Food prices are now at an all-time high. Those prices have, according to a wide range of analysts, contributed to the political revolts first in Tunisia and now in Egypt… But here’s the kicker: Food prices aren’t just some arbitrary economic statistic. They measure (inversely) the planet’s success at sustaining its human population. And right now, it’s not doing so well. The reason? Erratic weather spurred by climate change.

Only, there are bumper crops – cereal production would be the third-highest on record. Global commodity prices do rise and fall. But there is no direct link in that fluctuation to climate change.

And in Egypt the food prices can be high but, as David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writes, Mubarak tries to keep them low:

But food prices for basic items are heavily subsidized in Egypt … there are rations and subsidized goods of inferior quality available at very very low prices, and these parallel markets for better and more freely available flour or bread or rice or cooking oil that are available at more like market prices.

Mubarak – champion of cheap food! Not much of a slogan to revolution is it? Maybe the Egyptians are upset with him for something else..?

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Protesters gather outside the Egyptian Embassy in London, in a show of solidarity with thousands of anti-government activists in Cairo and other cities.

Posted: 1st, February 2011 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)