Slashdot Mirror
Urging Congress to Cancel the Ethanol Tariff
reporter writes "The Wall Street Journal is urging Washington to discard the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. This tariff is effectively a subsidy for corn-based ethanol produced in the USA. Yet, producing ethanol from corn is highly inefficient and consumes 1 unit of energy for each 1.3 units of energy that burning ethanol provides. By contrast, ethanol derived from sugarcane (which is the sole source of ethanol in Brazil) yields 8.3 units of energy. Sugercane is about 7 times more efficient than corn. Some studies even show that corn yields only 0.8 unit of energy, resulting in a net loss of energy."
Does it really make sense to use corn to make fuel instead of food? Is there a surplus of corn that ethanol production can use? Will ethanol production cause the price of corn based food products to rise? Doesn't the US government currently subsidize farmers for growing corn?
It seems like this is a much more complicated topic than the media, industry, and agriculture interests are willing to acknowledge.
Indeed, SUVs were generally sold to insecure and stupid people. That's what Ford's own customer profile on SUV buyers indicated. They tend to be shorter than average, dumber than average, and generally insecure. They buy SUVs because they think a bigger vehicle makes them safer, and being higher up makes them feel powerful. In short, the majority of SUV buyers were either compensating. The SUV manufacturers know this, charge outrageous prices for SUVs and they used to get them. Of course, then the price of gas went up, the federal subsidies for SUVs were cut.
The other group who owned SUVs were small business owners who could get a $75,000 subsidy for the SUVs. Yes, that's right businesses could get a $75,000 per vehicle subsidy for SUVs because they were classified as "small trucks". This also why SUVs are less safe than normal cars, the safety standard for trucks are much looser than they are for cars. I'm not sure if this has been corrected in the States yet or not.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Pass middle school.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'