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Strange Bedfellows Fight Ethanol Subsidies
Reader Actual Reality sends us to Business Week for a tale of the strangest political coalition to be seen in a while — greens, hippies, libertarians, and livestock producers uniting to get ethanol subsidies reduced or killed. The demand for the alternative fuel is driving up corn prices and having big impacts on other parts of the economy. Not many other issues are capable of getting left-leaning economist Paul Krugman and the Cato Institute on the same side.
COnservatives have been singing "free-market" for years...
Singing to the corn farmers, who have been given so much cash that things like sugar farming are being driven out of the country? Ask yourself why we're using corn for ethanol when Brazil has shown that sugarcane can be used much more efficiently?
Down here in Texas, corn farmers struggle to convince their corn crops to live over the summer, but that's ok, because the feds will happily shell out cash for irrigation systems that weren't needed back when sugar was grown here. Up north, sugarbeets (also superior to corn for ethanol) used to hold sway, but increasingly farmers have been lured to the free money (on TOP of the rising corn prices).
The only tune conservatives (or liberals, or libertarians, or...) sing is "vote for me!"
Why not lobby to drop all farm subsidies, not just the ones for ethanol? It would take the same amount of effort and do even more good, as large, corporate farms are the ones who mainly benefit from them.
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... as the Scientific American special on the environment a few months ago concluded.
...
Ethanol production does not save anything, because current production methods, storage and distribution use as much energy (mostly natural gas, and fuel) as it saves.
The money would better be spend on R+D into new forms of ethanol production than buying votes in the mid-west
Start growing corn then.
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Maybe we can finaly stop paying farm subsidies. Quit growing tabacco and grow corn as a cash crop. Maybe a farmer can make a living again. The beef industry hates it of course because of higher costs. Expect prices to rise at the local hamburger joint due to rising costs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidi
The truth shall set you free!
Holy crap, an "I work there" situation for ME!
Working for a corn refiner, I can tell you that though there is an increasing demand and price for corn due to ethanol plants spinning up, the glut of distillers grain/feed from their spent corn will be putting tremendous downward pressure on the animal-nutrition side of the market. In a wet mill, we depend on our co-products (corn hull, fiber, gluten, spent germ, everything but the starch really) prices rising and falling with the price of corn. Now we're having competition in the feed market from ethanol plants whos business models don't typically include needing to sell their feed. Granted, distillers grain is kind of gnarly (not as finely tuned as a wet mill's products) but typically farmers more interested in lower cost nutrition. And they're going to get it.
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
Are you sure about those numbers? I don't have a consumer reports subscription so I can't double check but I think you may have transposed the 2 numbers.
E10 (E10% EtOH/90% gasoline) and E85 (85%EtOH/15% gas) are the common blends sold in the US. The first can be used in any conventional spark ignition engine while the latter requires a flex-fuel vehicle. Some states require that all gasoline sold is actually E10 - if I remember correctly CT, NY, HI and MN are some that come to mind.
Anyway, yes, E85 contains about ~30% less energy per gallon than straight gasoline, so yes, it requires more to go the same distance. However, E85 also has an octane rating of 105, meaning you can tune the engine to run on E85, as Saab did with the 9-5 Biopower. It has a 2L turbocharged inline 4 producing 180hp optimized to run on E85.
Why not biodiesel, which works in all current diesel engines, and is much easier, cheaper and energy efficient (compared to ethanol) to produce? Long story short, you can get vastly more biodiesel per acre of land than you can ethanol, the diesel will run your engine for (at least) twice as long compared to ethanol, and you don't need a specially built environment-engine to run it. Almost any car model has a diesel engine option already. So why is everybody talking about ethanol? Why do ethanol cars get Eco-benefits? (Your own conspiracy theory goes here).
You have an excellent point and I've looked into this myself.
What I learned upon speaking with a sorghum breeder is that most sorghum previously grown in the U.S. had sweet stems. However, they bred this characteristic out to increase grain yields. Folks are looking at going back to high sugar sorghum for ethanol production, but this germplasm is not well adapted to the regions of the U.S. where sorghum is most widely grown (i.e. the Southern and Central Great Plains). It doesn't compete well with the currently grown genetics.
Since corn doesn't grow well in these regions without supplemental water (and that is becoming harder to get), this might be the only way that places like Western Kansas can participate in the ethanol craze.
It isn't to try to force them to drive less, necessarily. It is to try to get the people who cause the pollution to pay for the consequences of that pollution. You aren't trying to claim that cars don't pollute, or that pollution doesn't cost society, are you?
It really sounds like you are trying to force me to pay for the expenses you cause, and I don't quite see how that's fair. Forcing me to pay for the health effects caused by your driving sounds more like fascism to me.
How would you handle things differently, in a way that put the true cost onto the people who caused it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton