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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.
But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.
Start growing corn then.
Not many other issues are capable of getting left-leaning economist Paul Krugman and the Cato Institute on the same side.
I'm sure all Slashdot posters will quickly reach a friendly consensus too, it being an environmental and economical issue that also mentions left vs right wing politics. I'm looking forward to the thoughtful and informative debate.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
recently came out and said that, even with only a 15% ethanol/85% gasoline mixture - your mpg (due to ethanol's lower power density) gets reduced to the point that $3.20 gallon of pure gas becomes a $3.99 of the mixed type.
So financially and environmentally, it is good to fight the push for ethanol.
This was never about reducing oil dependence it was about subsidizing one of the most powerful lobbies the corn lobby. Corn alcohol requires large amounts of energy to produce so it actually increases the use of coal and oil. The current administration is also fanatical about hydrogen because most hydrogen is produced from fossil sources. Yes it can be produced by electrolysis from wind or solar but it won't be. It's like "clean coal". Yes coal can be burned more cleanly and the CO2 sequestered but there isn't a single clean coal plant in operation. There are better sources for alcohol but they lack powerful lobbies.
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!"
Nobody is trying to end fossil-fuel dependence here. Nobody is subsidising ethanol production, except in a rather technical sense. If people wanted to end fossil-fuel dependenence and make ethanol production easier, they could fund, subsidize, and promote any number of solutions.
What IS going on here is another huge subsidy for the very powerful corn industry. This particular subsidy is wearing a paper hat that says 'ethanol', which is enough to fool:
0% of people who know anything about energy markets.
25% of lawmakers
95% of the public
100% of all the libertarian slashdotters who have already jumped in and gone 'OMG teh socialism sux lol!!'
Now, repeat after me: ETHANOL is one thing, ETHANOL FROM NORTH AMERICAN CORN is another thing. You want energy, subsidize the former. You want money for corn growers, subsidize the latter.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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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...just because it's alternative. Ethanol has the only advantages that it's not oil and that it's renewable. Environmentally and financially it's foolish, as a previous poster pointed out. But one shouldn't be all that surprised to find us Libertarians aligned with anybody. It's the Party of Principle for a reason: Libertarians do their best to stay out of partisan politics and make public policy about what's actually best (gasp!).
In this case, Libertarians are against any and all forms of government subsidies, and it's rather obvious why if we're absolutely pro-free market. Nobody should read this article and say, "Wow, that's surprising that they're working together!" Rather, they should read it and really wonder why these different groups oppose subsidies for ethanol and whether or not ethanol is a viable choice for an alternative fuel.
After all, alternative != better.
... 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
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.
Of the tortilla crisis in Mexico.
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This isn't surprising. Among all the many other reasons mentioned here, let me add one more. Corn-based ethanol is not a solution to the issue of depleting nonrenewable resources. Simply put, midwestern topsoil is being depleted at a faster rate than the supply of oil and coal. I can't find the study by the Illinois EPA that I learned this from, but it's not hard to find sources explaining that "On human time scales, fertile topsoil is not a renewable resource."
Corn prices are fucking OUT of control. They were ~$2/bushel, but they have gone up a dollar or more since the bush admin enacted the fucking ethanol mandates. Ethanol is highly inefficient when mixed with gas, so you lose efficiency in your MPG, so that causes you to buy more fuel, so it is a nasty little cycle.
My great uncle is a corn farmer, he is salivating at the lips at the prospect the gov't is going to build all of these ethanol plants, a nice payday for him off our backs if it goes through. That is all it is, a payday, it isn't worrying about the environment. Sugar ethanol is much more efficient, 4x much so I believe. We aren't using that because we have subsidies and trade protections for the sugar farmers. HA!
While I occasionally enjoy Krugman's columns, it's only window dressing that Krugman and the Cato institute are on opposite sides. They really represent a duopoly of opinion that relies on "the other side" to give "their side" some sort of validity.
Periodic ideological alignment is necessary to demonstrate that both "sides" are willing to engage in creative problem solving and aren't just part of an ideological game.
Irrigation water and water for production of the ethanol is soon to be in short supply in many of these regions (of the US). Many of them teeter on the edge of drought every year, and the aquifers, stable for many years, are being depleted at a rapid rate once the stills (ethanol plants) are built.
This is on top of the propane used to make the fertilizer (corn is very hard on the soil), the natural gas to cook the mash, the electricity to turn the big drums, the diesel to run the tractors and combines, the diesel or gas to truck the corn to the still and transport (by train usually) the ethanol to (close to) the point of sale (it has to be mixed in locally, not at the refinery).
All in all, it makes slightly more sense than just paying the farmer not to grow the corn. It makes no sense whatsoever compared to bio-diesel (beans fix nitrogen), ethanol from sugar cane, or even burning through the cheap gas now while bringing more nuclear on line.
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).
Cows don't digest corn well - not too surprising since it was never a part of their ancestors' natural diet. They digest it so poorly that they become prone to all sorts of intestinal diseases. The only way to feed cows corn and not have them sicken is to add large amounts of antibiotics to the feed to hold down the diseases that digesting corn makes them prone to. This leads to widespread antibiotic resistance that makes many diseases harder to treat in human beings.
As for human beings, the older among us can recall how much better food tasted when it was all sweetened with sugar rather than corn syrup. There are some pretty strong concerns about corn syrup not being so healthy for you either - although it's probably not as bad for us as corn is for cows.
Ethanol is a boondoggle, and I'll prefer any presidential candidate who stands firmly against subsidizing it. But corn too is subsidized - has been for decades - and that leads to it being used in other ways that are already seriously screwing things up. Plus, agriculture is not infinitely renewable, not the way we practice it. The US has lost something like half its agricultural topsoil, on average, over the last century or so. Long-term viability requires us to take more agricultural land out of production, rather than exploit our land more extensively for short-term gain. Over the long run, in many locations, agriculture is just another form of strip mining - at least until we develop technologies we don't currently have to replace millions of tons of topsoil that current practices have allowed to be washed away and otherwise depleted. Soil is more precious than oil.
There's no easy fix here. And corn shouldn't even be a candidate.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton