Just wondering, you folks who want to save the shores of Malibu and Miami, as well as the frozen tundra of the arctic, from Drillbit Trailertrash: Just how many dead Mexicans does it take to fill the tank of your hybrid?

Or Indians?

Really. How many Third-Worlders have to starve, be poisoned, or otherwise shuffle off this mortal coil before you’ll let even a wind farm be built off Hyannis Port because you’re special?

How heavy the blood price of not political correctness but political convenience?

Could it be that Michelle Obama is on the right track when she says the United States is a mean country?

It sure looks like Michelle is on to something when the nation takes the biggest corn crops the world has ever seen and diverts kernel after kernel, bushel after bushel, ton after ton, to producing ethanol for your fuel tanks instead of food for starving masses.

Around the world there are 1 billion people who are “food insecure,” to use the term used by Rattan Lal, an Ohio State University soil-sciences professor.

Lal has a novel approach to this whole survival thing.

“We need to feed the stomach before we need to feed our cars,” Lal said.

But if we could feed our cars with petroleum from, oh, say, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to pick a place, it would allow us to free up some of the nation’s vast biofuel resources to make fuel for people.

Mexico already has seen tortilla riots. Seems they need American corn for the staple.

It’s more important, though, to use about a quarter of the corn crop for ethanol. That drives down supplies and increase prices.

As usual, it’s the poor and Third Worlders who are hardest hit.

Al Gore will get the ethanol he needs for his limo and fuel for the private jets he rides to sell carbon-footprint indulgences to the rich who hope they can buy their way into a green heaven.

Everyone else gets in line behind him.

Ethanol was supposed to be the liquid that would dampen the heat of global warming.

Science Magazine concluded this year that ethanol is a flash in the magician’s pan and produces no greenhouse benefits.

Emissions from corn and cellulosic ethanol “exceed or match those from fossil fuels,” the study said.

Ethanol is even being blamed for a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico stemming from the increased use of fertilizers that run off into the gulf’s feeder waterways.

That should be bad news in these oh-so-sensitive times, but Big Maize lumbers heartlessly on, building plants and driving up fuel and food costs.

The International Food Policy Research Institute said that if the biofuel users stopped production — and you know who the big biofuel producer is — corn prices would fall 20 percent and wheat by 10 percent within a couple years.

Of course, the best way to do that would be to cut ol’ Drillbit loose in the hideaways now forbidden to the likes of him — and the rest of us.

And really, it wouldn’t be mean.

•

E-mail Gary Harmon at gharmon@gjds.com.