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The red-hot Congressional love affair with the alternative fuel ethanol is starting to leave many supermarket customers feeling mighty blue these days as they pay inflated prices for grocery staples.

Even worse, it's likely to dramatically increase the cases of chronic hunger, malnutrition and starvation in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa and Southeast Asia in the months ahead.

Too much can never be said of the great climate change policy farce. As many parts of the world suffer through harsh cold spells, record snow and deep-freeze conditions, governments and politicians continue to pursue hilariously contradictory policies to make the world colder still.  Or so they claim. What's really going on is another matter. Consider the latest news on oil and coal.

In the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and other countries, there is official endorsement of carbon taxes and carbon trading to raise the price of carbon-based energy so as reduce emissions.  How bizarre, then, to read the statement signed by finance ministers from these same nations calling for lower oil prices.

Spain and Italy, the European Union’s worst performers under the Kyoto treaty effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions, will not meet their commitments by 2012 unless taxpayers dish out up to $10 billion to buy carbon credits, mostly in the developing world.

The two Mediterranean countries are responsible for around 75 percent of the E.U.-15’s excess carbon dioxide discharges. By 2012, according to Kyoto, those discharges were supposed to be cut to 8 percent below 1990 levels. Although both countries have imposed strict additional limits on their carbon-intensive industries (in addition to other emergency measures), they will still need to offset the carbon dioxide produced by their expanding economies by buying carbon credits through the so-called flexible mechanisms.

EU finance ministers cast some doubt on the cost of the Commission's ambitious plans to combat climate change, saying at their monthly meeting that it must not harm competitiveness.

Finance Minister Brian Cowen said there must be a fair and transparent sharing of the burden of creating a low-carbon economy.

Street lights in suburban areas are to be switched off after midnight as part of council plans to save energy.

A series of trial blackouts will be carried out over the next few weeks by local authorities in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Essex among others.

Buckinghamshire council is reported to be switching off more than 1,700 lights along 25 miles of road in an attempt to meet energy targets.

Japan, famous for its hybrid cars and solar panels, may become an environmental pioneer in another sense: buying cheap carbon offsets abroad to minimize the burden on its domestic industry to clean up its act at home.

Japanese and Russian officials agreed over the weekend to launch talks about Japan buying surplus greenhouse-gas emission permits from Russia. Such a sale would mark a major – and controversial – development in the geopolitics of what to do about global warming.