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Ethanol Demand Is Boosting Food Prices Worldwide
hereisnowhy writes "The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, the CBC reports. Increased prices for ethanol have already led to bigger grocery bills for the average American — an increase of $47 US compared to July 2006. In Mexico last year, corn tortillas, a crucial source of calories for 50 million poor people, doubled in price; the increase forced the government to introduce price controls. The move to ethanol-blended fuel is based in part on widespread belief that it produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline. But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel. Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol — whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops — requires more energy than can be derived from the product."
George Monbiot wrote about this 2 months ago in the UK Guardian:
you had me at #!
I've heard that our heavy dependence on corn as an additive (e.g., corn syrup) is one main contributor to the lack of affordable, healthful food options in grocery stores. Might this work to reverse that trend?
-dave
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are rejoicing. Not only has the US government mandated the use of corn and corn derived products in just about everything that US consumers use, now their profit margins will soar above whatever they were being subsidized for. Most corn in North America is big business farming, so they are off and running toward all those dollars, no matter how inefficient using corn is for fuels.
All we have to do now is declare corn growers as reducing global warming, and that every stalk of corn planted saves a child to make the headlong rush toward bio-diesel an unrecoverable flop.
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Farmers have been unable to support themselves by farming because of the insane cheapness of food, and high fructose corn syrup being so cheap is one of the big parts of the obesity epidemic. Anything that raises the price of food means portions will need to be reduced, and farmers will be more likely to be able to support themselves by growing crops.
I frankly don't give a shit whether the emissions are "cleaner" with ethanol. If it means I'm not forced to shovel money into the pockets of Arab governments, Russia, Venezuela, etc, just to continue to make a living and survive, then I'm all for it.
They should make ethanol from unhealthy foods instead, like Twinkies, eclairs, or Jolly Ranchers. I find my car runs on the watermelon flavor the best.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel. Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops -- requires more energy than can be derived from the product.
Who cares if it requires more energy or not? If the greenhouse emissions are equivalent, then it comes down to which is cheaper. If ethanol is less or the same cost as gasoline at the pump, then I want ethanol. I might even pay a little MORE because it gets OPEC's huge cock out of my ass. The US is one of the largest corn producers in the world. If we can make our own alcohol fuels domestically then we should pursue that.
Look, I don't give a wet fart how green the fuel that makes my car goes is. The simple fact is, the mere act of existing has negative consequences on something. So I don't really care if my car is "green" or not.
All I want is the cheapest fuel possible. At the very least, I don't want to be tied to a single source for the fuel. Especially the Middle East.
The day oil ceases to be a major fuel source is the day the whole Middle East dries up like a popcorn fart and blows away in the wind of irrelevance.
I hope to not have to buy a car again for another five years. When the time comes, though, I won't consider any car that doesn't get at least 60 MPG. Hopefully it will be electric instead. Give me a SmartCar that is pluggable, does 100 miles at 70 MPH between overnight charges, and I'm there.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Well, that's what we get for letting hysteria and politics shout down environmental science. And many of the more strident environmental groups have no one but themselves to blame - they embraced the politics and hysteria because (in the short term) it furthered their agendas. Politicians and the corporations (including big agriculture) that bribe^H^H^H^H^H contribute heavily to their campaigns are far from stupid, however, and will twist things to their advantage. The corporations make money and "be green", and the politicians can sucker voters by "being green" and both laugh all the way to the bank. My favorite one was how DuPont got all green over Freon - because they owned the patents on non-CFC-based refrigerants that would replace it. Nice of "t3h world is going to end!!!1!!" crowd to get the government to force everyone to replace their patent-expired Freon with something much more profitable, never mind that this raised the cost of refrigeration and decreased the quality of food supplies in poorer countries.
In the long run, the most outspoken members cause the rest of the environmentalist community lose credibility (because the world doesn't end), and the politicians will just look for the next sucker cause to exploit. Too bad for the environment.
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If I'm not mistaken, that means $47 per year. Which really isn't that bad when you notice the price of gasoline lately.
Ethanol is not really chosen for its environmental friendliness. The environmental models I know of are based on the fact that the increased crop production produces a greater number of carbon sinks. Increases in carbon sinks won't show up in the EPA testing.
The real reason for choosing ethanol is its availability. It's easy to come by and is currently cheaper than gasoline. The US also has a great deal of surplus farming capacity from which to draw greater yields. (Though folks generally argue about how much surplus capacity there is, and how much can be brought online before food production is seriously impacted.)
Actually, that comes from the US Government's ethanol studies done in the 1970s. Dr. David Pimentel headed up those original studies. Since then, technology has improved and the US Government's studies have shown it to be energy positive. However, Dr. Pimentel has continued to rely on the outdated figures in attempts to discredit the newer findings. So the ethanol community is in a bit of a flux, with Pimentel rallying his forces against the idea that ethanol is a sustainable energy source.
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But yeah, it's all about biofuels.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
...that most fertilizers and pesticides applied to corn are derived from petroleum bases. Farming equipment also uses diesel/gasoline during the planting, cultivating and harvesting of corn. Adding to this, natural gas and propane are commonly used to run corn dryers used to reduce the moisture content of the harvested corn. At one point in 2005, the cost of the fuel for these dryers was more than the revenue produced from the corn itself, making it a wash to even bring the corn to market.
Sure, the price of corn is being driven up by its use for ethanol production, but let's not forget that the cost of growing corn has risen sharply as well in recent years, mostly due to the rising price of petroleum based products.
Ethanol is added to gasoline to reduce carbon monoxide emissions and ground-level ozone as an alternative to MTBE. Greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide) have nothing to do with it.
- The cost of fresh produce increased in price in terms of real dollars by over 40% between 1985 and 2000 whereas soft drinks using corn syrup declined in cost by 23%.
- A dollar buys you 1200 calories of cookies or chips but just 250 calories worth of carrots.
- The top subsidies are for corn, rice, wheat, soybeans and cotton. There often translate into cheap meats and dairy as most of this gets reused as animal foodstuffs.
- Most estimates are that subsidized US corn has displaced over 2 million Mexican farmers who move north to get jobs.
Blaming ethanol production for these ills is just plain stupid. Follow the money of the farm bills for real answers.There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I assume you don't drive a gas guzzler then or take lots of long flights. They are only meeting a demand just like drug dealers.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You can get mexican coke (cane sugar, sweeter, less carbonated) easily at any mexican grocery. If you live somewhere without mexican grocery stores, you can buy it online. I've only seen it in small (355ml), tall glass bottles.
Man, you really need that seminar!
These "solutions" will make a grand total of zero impact on anything, aside from providing an excuse for everyone to meddle in everyone else's business. I can't wait for the CFL inspector to come knocking on my door to make sure that I don't harbor any illegal standard light bulbs. Never you mind that CFLs contain toxic levels of mercury, so that whey they are tossed in a dump, the mercury can contaminate the soil and groundwater.
Even if global warming is frighteningly real (perhaps) and man made (doubtful), the only thing we should be doing about it is learning to cope. Return to a nativist lifestyle is not an option, and these solutions cause more problems (mass starvation anyone?) than they solve.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
The motivation for corn-based ethanol is political. While Washington advocates "free markets", American politicians of all political persuasions advocate subsidizing the production of corn-based ethanol because American agribusiness nearly owns the government.
Generally speaking, subsidies cost taxpayers dearly but do not pose a hazard. Corn-based ethanol is an exception. It drives up the price of corn and could lead to severe malnutrition in Mexico and other poor countries which cannot afford higher prices for basic food items. Subsidies for corn-based ethanol could indirectly kill people (via starvation) in the 3rd world.
Do American politicians care? No. They care only about making American agribusiness happy.
Do they need to buy a fscking clue ? Of course there's no difference. The combustion products of ethanol are pretty much the same as those of gasoline. Why do they need to do a fscking study about something that's covered in Organic Chemistry 101 ?
"A permanent moratorium on growing plants in soil as a biofuel feedstock is what we need."
And the alternative is....?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Fossil fuels until nuke facilities are built and can supply the energy.
But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel.
No shit. Ethanol releases carbon dioxide while it burns, too. However, its carbon dioxide was already in the atmosphere, absorbed by the plants, then released again when burnt. That makes it carbon neutral*, even though the emissions are the same.
Or, did they mean to take that into account? Who knows, the article is incomplete or misleading.
* I'm talking about the carbon in the plant, not carbon used in production. That's next.
Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat or other crops -- takes more energy than is derived from the product.
No shit. Unless it violates certain laws of thermodynamics, of course the energy derived is less than the energy required to produce. But they don't talk about where that energy comes from. Maybe it's all from the sun, or from other renewal resources. Do they mean that the same amount of net fossil-fuel based carbon is released? Who knows, the article is incomplete or misleading.
Re: Food prices
The US subsidizes farmers who grow corn, because corn prices have been historically too low to support production. Now, corn prices are higher, and we're complaining about what it does to food costs? How about we take away the subsidies - clearly no longer needed - and give the money to food programs. Then, we look into the side effects of corn being the majority of all American's diets. See some of the repercussions in the recent documentary King Corn. Maybe we could find something else that could substitute for corn in some foods. Like, say, sugar, if we'd remove our tariffs. (Hey, if folks from other countries could sell their sugar to the US for food, they'd have more money to buy our more-expensive corn.) Then, maybe we could find something better than corn to use for ethanol. Like, say, hemp or switchgrass. I'm sure if corn gets too expensive, some entrepreneur out there will start looking for alternatives.
But all of that would be constructive work toward making our planet a better place. It's far better to rant and rave and use single points of change as excuses to throw up our hands and give up.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a nuclear energy source that passes prominent environmentalists' litmus test.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The big donors to US political parties are not corporations. They are unions.
The US is controlled by UNIONS! Unions demanded the war in Iraq in order to produce more jobs with living wages! Unions required that we borrow trillions from China as a display of worker solidarity! Those in unions want to see jobs outsourced to India so we can have time to spend with our family during the week!
That's right folks, our country is run by a bunch of unions.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Are you saying there is some way to use illegal aliens as fuel? Please elaborate.
I was well aware of using them as tires, but they keep puncturing a lung and going flat.
Food is too cheap because farmers get big subsidies.
Deleted
Cornell, Cornell. That sounds familiar. Oh yeah! Isn't that where Pimentel works? i.e. The same guy who's been trying to discredit ethanol for the past 30 years?
Studies that have been done independent of Pimentel's research have shown the exact opposite to be true:
List of studies
* "Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol" - "We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24."
* "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update" - "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain."
* "How Much Energy Does It Take to Make a Gallon of Ethanol?" - "Using the best farming and production methods, the amount of energy contained in a gallon of ethanol is more than twice the energy used to grow the corn and convert it to ethanol."
* "New study confronts old thinking on ethanol's net energy value" - "Ethanol generates 35% more energy than it takes to produce, according to a recent study by Argonne National Laboratory conducted by Michael Wang."
Why is it that every study that shows ethanol as net negative has Pimentel's name on it somewhere, while independent studies are quickly showing the exact opposite to be true?
Pimentel's numbers were probably correct in the 1970s. It's not the 1970s anymore, and that guy is becoming a serious pain in the posterior.
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One option is hydroponics. The most promising crop is algae. A study done at Sandia said some years ago that growing algae in foot-deep concrete "raceway" ponds (a circular stream) agitated by paddlewheels suggested that it should be economical before diesel fuel hit $3/gallon.
Another option is to only make the fuel out of waste oils and cellulose. Biodiesel can be made out of waste animal fat, but honestly that can only provide a small portion of the demand. Tyson Foods is currently engaging in a trial in Ireland with ConocoPhilips. Cellulosic biodiesel is rapidly approaching as a viable technology.
You could also ignore the possibilities of biodiesel and go straight to butanol. Butanol is made by bacteria in the "ABE" process, in which a specific organism originally isolated as an aid to making TNT can be used to make fuel. ABE stands for Acetone, Butanol, and Ethanol. All three of these things can be burned in an ordinary gasoline engine, but Butanol is the most interesting compound in this regard as it is a direct one-to-one replacement for gasoline. The ABE process can be used on any organic matter.
You could go all-electric, which would require building more nuclear plants, and building breeder reactors to supply them with fuel. Using the proper types of reactors prevents the use of the systems to produce weapons-grade materials; all breeders are not the same (no pun intended.) But this would be in many ways a more major undertaking than the other options because the infrastructure to transport and dispense biodiesel or butanol already exists - precisely the same means used to transport diesel and gasoline, respectively.
Ultimately, the answer can only be a combination of these and other ideas. But it's easy to see that topsoil-based fuels are utterly and completely wrongheaded. They deplete soil, techniques used in mass-farming create hardpan and reduce diversity in soil, killing off the majority of organisms found there, and so on. Everything about modern farming techniques is wrong! It's simply not a sustainable activity on its own. Depending on it for fuel will cause a crisis rapidly. Certain parts of the world cannot feed themselves today because of their agricultural activities in the past. The Amazon is approaching a crisis state in which it can no longer support itself and it collapses entirely - eliminating the source of some 25% of the planet's oxygen.
If we don't get a grip on agriculture now, it will all be a moot point soon, because we won't have oxygen to breathe.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops -- requires more energy than can be derived from the product.
News Flash: Environmental groups argue for the second law of thermodynamics!
Really... the whole reason fossil fuels are so compelling is the energy that went into making them was used eons ago. Ethanol requires resources *now*. The big advantage of ethanol (from a climate change standpoint) is it's a zero-sum game with regards to carbon dioxide emissions. We're not taking concentrated carbon from millions of years ago and turning it into an atmospheric gas, we're using plant material that was created, in part, from recently utilized atmospheric CO2.
In my opinion, feeding people now trumps using a fuel source which consumes enormous resources. Let's also not forget irrigation - our aquifers are being depleted faster than then can get restored. I doubt California is going to embrace growing corn, which can require large amounts of irrigation, for ethanol when they are running out of drinking water.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
The sooner cars go electric and we can consolidate our energy sources at the power plant, the better, because it's much easier to make a power plant clean, than to make an internal combustion engine clean. The only thing holding us back is the pitiful state of the Battery. If we spent half the money on battery research that we did trying to make cars run on food, we'd be running silent, emissionless cars before we even ran out of oil.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
The gateway for most countries to get out of the third-world-nation status is agriculture. The problem though is that the US government subsidizes US farmers so heavily that we are keeping the world market prices artificially low. If the ethanol demand increases crop values, the market will demand more crops and more poor farmers out side the US will suddenly have a profitable profession, spreading wealth, profit and MORE FOOD.
Either that, or we're gonna kill a lot of people.
only time will tell.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Chomsky has written about it as well
Published on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by The International News
Starving The Poor
by Noam Chomsky
The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order's structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.
In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city's central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.
In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.
In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect -- a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.
In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.
The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn't direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called "free trade," a posture that collapses quickly on examination.
It's not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.
The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they're convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.
The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies," in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush's trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.
Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn -- and tortillas -- have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.
The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.
Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers -- a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural
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You can discredit guys like Pimentel virtually over night if you just remove pork barrel for ADM and the oil companies, charging oil companies importing oil the fair market value for the cost of military enforcement of trade routes to the middle east letting ADM sink or swim in the resulting price environment.
Seastead this.
The fact that biofuels are introducing competition for scarce food resources is a regulatory problem, not a problem with biofuels themselves. There need to be laws in place to prevent the food supply from competing with the biofuel supply. eg. only waste oils/alcohols, oils derived from inedible crops using land not fit for human consumption, etc. should be permissible as 'fuel'. This will be a net positive for the environment, as more existing carbon in the atmosphere will be utilised as unused swathes of land are brought under heavier agricultural development with hardy crops like mustard seed.
Not necessarily...
It depends entirely on the plant and the location. Plants are simply solar collectors that store sunlight as chemical energy in the form of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins (amino acids). I agree that plants for energy should probably not displace plants for food, but there are a lot of places unsuitable for food plants that may be suitable for fuel plants.
Secondly, even if biofuels were to require more energy to grow than you could get out of them there may still be an argument for them as a portable energy storage medium. This would depend entirely on the source of the excess energy. Say it takes 50% of the energy in a biofuel to grow the fuel and 55% of the energy in a biofuel to refine the fuel. If the refinery energy came from solar then the biofuel could be a decent portable energy storage medium. Possibly better than hydrogen.
As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me in February: "It looks like we're going to burn up the last remaining six inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks." I *heart* Jim Kunstler. Here's a link to his piece on ethanol, etc..
If corn prices doubled, then more farmers will plant corn, and it will cause the price of corn to drop. I'm sure at some point there will be a crisis where too much corn is produced, which will cause a plummet of corn prices and another "corn crisis", and less farmers will plant corn, cycle repeats, etc. It will all work itself out.
BTW, ethanol is not added to make emissions cleaner, it was added to replace MTBE. It's a widely held misnomer that it was added to decrease emissions or whatnot.
Heavy water is not H30. Heavy water is DOH -- Deuterium, Oxygen, Hydrogen. Deuterium, in turn, is Hydrogen with an extra neutron, making it about twice as massive as standard hydrogen. So heavy water has about 19 atomic mass units per molecule while water has 18.
[quote]and illegal[/quote]
Sorry I was busy smoking a joint and downloading a movie. What did you say?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Conservation alone isn't a replacement for burning fossil fuels. Sure, it's a good idea for many reasons, but the fact remains that we need a source of energy that can maintain and improve our standard of living.
Environmentalists argue that high standard of living and technological progress is mutually exclusive with good stewardship of the earth. They will never be taken seriously by enough people to make a difference until they abandon their pessimistic ludditism.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Regards,
Ross
The same climate conditions that are good for corn are good for soybeans too. With the price of corn skyrocketing, many farmers, understandibly, will switch from soybeans to corn. Our free ride with cheap fuels has come to an end.
Actually, that has already happened. There was an article on that very subject in the Wall Street Journal just a few months ago, and how the switch is already under way.
Maybe if we stopped subsidizing oil, gas, corn, and other things the market would work better, huh? But I'm not holding my breath. That's why I bought a few hundred shares of Valero Energy (ethanol from corn) at the IPO.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Perhaps food companies should stop putting that crap in everything that they make. Just a thought. 2 birds with one stone. Obesity problems are likely to go down too.
The Farm Bill subsidizes 5 commodity products, one of which is corn. This bill has far-reaching consequences, which include starvation of population in Africa (by subsidizing farmers the US competes with the 3rd world countries, who cannot compete at that level with a super-industrialized nation that only needs 1% of its citizens to work as farmers and even then it produces enough food products to feed a quarter of the planet.) Now, should the US politicians care about this or should they only work to make the US farmers happy, that is a different question. I am not a US politician or a US citizen, but I understand why a US politician would rather make a US citizen-farmer happy than think about far-reaching consequences to other countries. Other countries do not vote for this US politician, that's probably the most important point to remember.
You can't handle the truth.
We have enough uranium to power the world for several thousand years. Basically we stopped reusing it. We run it through and convert a small amount to plutonium. Rather than keep running it and burning off the plutonium we get rid of the "waste" when in reality it isn't even 1% used up. We could pretty well build massive arrays of solid constructed nuclear power plants without any dependence on anybody else. Also we could start burning off our nuclear weapons, splicing them with depleted uranium and using them up too.
Dependence is a worse argument than the laugh-out-loud funny nugget... "it takes power to mine the Uranium and usually that power is coal power!" -- As if producing energy on the flip side doesn't offset it, or that the same argument can't also be applied to solar panels (which by the way we should start producing more).
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Who cares if it requires more energy or not? If the greenhouse emissions are equivalent, then it comes down to which is cheaper.
Well, energy is going to be scarce in the future, right? In the recent past, energy prices were almost equal regardless of medium (cost of 1 gal of gasoline was nearly the same as the equivalent energy in electricity).
The whole point of getting stuff from the ground is that we can do it cheaply in the sense that we get more energy out of the material than we spend extracting/processing/transporting it. That's why Oil is Big Business. If we could get the same thing from raking and burning leaves, things would be much different....
Spending more energy than we extract from ethanol actually *increases* overall energy consumption (over something like gasoline). This transforms ethanol from an energy "source" (loosely speaking) to something more of a carrier (like an efficient battery). I don't see how this can be a viable option (in anything but a very short-term view), for both economic as well as environmental reasons.
To me, it seems like using ethanol for cars is like running our car off non-rechargable alkaline batteries. (The require more energy to produce than they yield). It's just stupid. But right now government subsidies make "Stupid" "Profitable"... And that my friends, will be the decline of our great civilization...
Do what I do and ignore them, they spout as many lies as the other side. Ethanol IS cleaner, this study looked at greenhouse gasses (CO2) which are going to be about the same for any Hydrocarbon, however other pollutants are better (and CO2 has only recently been considered as a pollutant. Those dang environmentalists produce tons of pollutants by breathing, imagine if they all stopped?). Co-incedentally, growing plants consumes pollutants as they breath in CO2 and release they waste product, O2. Ethanol also breaks our dependance on a limited resource, crude oil. Imagine if we didn't care about mideast oil, except as it affected the price we earned for our own oil exports. We could leave Alaskan oil in the ground as a "strategic reserve" and let the wilderness alone.
Environmental extremists are waiting for a pipe dream, Hydrogen powered cars where all the H is produced by means of Solar power and the batteries consist of Hemp and seawater instead of metals and strong acids. Any intermidate steps distract from their long term goals
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
The change in prices in Canada, according to the article, was 3.8% year-on-year. Inflation, per the Bank of Canada, is 2.0%. That is a world-wide increase in prices? Inflation aside, the impact of transportation fuel prices on bringing food to the grocery store can easily account for that increase.
As for Mexico, how many ethanol plants are there in Mexico, a country that produces 3.5 mm bbl/day of oil and consumes 2.0 mm bbl/day of oil products (source: April IEA OMR)? Not that many. So why the impact in Mexico? It's because the US used to grow so much corn that we couldn't use that we dumped it on the Mexican market, lowering their cost of corn, and taking some of their producers out of the market. The sudden increase in ethanol production due to oil product price increases has sucked up this additional supply, and now those producers will come back into the market.
Yes, it sucks that Mexican consumers were hit with such a swing this year, but it's due more to NAFTA than anything else. So if you want to get your knickers in a twist about something (which I don't advise), blame free trade and the natural delay in the supply/demand feedback loop. But note how there weren't a bunch of articles when the price of tortillas went down after the implementation of NAFTA.
Not all countries extract ethanol from corn. Nobody does that in Brazil. All ethanol here is made from sugar cane, which has a higher production rate than corn. And, here in Brazil, the use of ethanol never made any influence on the cost of food, just a little bit on alcoholic beverages. :)
There are a lot of cars here running on ethanol since the 70s. In 1986, more than 76% of all cars sold ran on ethanol. For a long time already, all gasoline sold here has 25% of ethanol. Many of the cars sold in Brazil now are flexible-fuel: they can run on any mixture of gasoline and ethanol. They are a huge selling hit. All all gasoline stations in Brazil sell both gasoline and ethanol
More information about ethanol in Brazil can be found at Wikipedia.
We can produce far more ethanol from sugar, switchgrass, and hemp. We need to re-organize our national priorities to explore these crops and keep corn as food, not as fuel. Sorry corn lobby. When you use E85 the difference in emissions in undeniable. Who cares about E10. Its time to do what Brazil has already done and get off Gas, and jump on a fuel we can create domestically and sustain a healthier world.
I have a company that can sequester CO2 permanently using Clams. For an investment of $1000 you can sequester 1 ton of CO2 in two years plus you will get back $1200 when the clams are harvested for market. http://www.carbonclamup.com/
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Can anyone produce an economically sound argument to the contrary?
Yes. My doomsday machine, which I guarantee will kill 90% of the world's population, would need the entire output of the US electricity grid for three years to charge (What can I say? If it was economic to run, I would have used it already). Add the methane released from 5,400,000,000 decaying corpses and it won't be carbon-neutral until at least 2147...
Blank until
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
by having more energetic mollecules -so while its true that each biofuel ton produces three times more CO2 than fossil, it will move your car three times longer too
Are you kidding me? Ethanol doesn't have more "energetic molecules." I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean - are you referring to temperature? Maybe net energy content?
Regular ol' gasoline is a more efficient fuel than ethanol - 1 gallon of gasoline contains 118,690 kJ of energy, whereas 1 gallon of ethanol contains only 82,958 kJ. You car will travel almost one and a half times (1.43x) further on a gallon of gas than on a gallon of ethanol. Maybe gasoline has more "energetic molecules"?
The problem is *big* bussiness know it's profitable... for someone else.
Still waiting for the punchline. In the United States, Big Agriculture, especially the midwest corn belt absolutely loves biofuel in general, and ethanol in particular. A few reasons why:
"Big Business" makes a ton of money from this. Difference is that "Big Oil" survives despite repeated, baseless congressional investigations and windfall taxes, while "Big Agriculture" flourishes because of subsidies and protections.
Government manded corn demand (ethanol requirements) + no other way to get corn or ethanol (tariffs and protectionism) = $$$
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned.
I don't think anyone believes that ethanol should be banned - but this is what happens when you tinker with a perfectly functioning market for something stupid like political gain.
The government doesn't "support" the oil industry - unless you call repeated congressional investigations, fuel taxes, and attempts to confiscate those "windfall profits" from Exxon's 10-15% margins "support."
There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty
A few problems with that:
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So you want to insure there's overproduction to take up the slack if there's a temporary shortfall in supply. But now that you've told all these farmers to overproduce, come harvest time there's a glut in the market. Too much supply means the price drops, often to the point where the farmers (or agribusiness) can't stay in business.
This leads to the second reason for subsidizing food production - to maintain long-term production capability. Farming is a relatively slow process compared to other businesses. It has a very long time constant, often exceeding billing cycles by an order of magnitude. This makes farmers (or agribusiness) very sensitive to fluctuations in price. Farmer Joe puts in a half year's work raising a crop. If the price drops for a few weeks when he has to sell, that doesn't affect him for just a few weeks. It affects him until next year's crop. The money he gets from that sale has to carry him through until next season (assuming a single crop). Otherwise he goes out of business. Since most crops are harvested around the same time, a short-term price drop can cause a large portion of the nation's food-producing capability to go belly up. Not a good thing.
So you need to insure overproduction, but at the same time maintain higher prices than free market economics would dictate. And finally you need to insure prices remain relatively stable. The solution? Subsidies. The government spends a little money to guarantee there's enough food for everyone to eat each year, and that production can remain steady year-to-year. If you can make back some of those subsidies by using the excess crop for other purposes (humanitarian aid to other countries, corn syrup, ethanol, etc), then all the better.
The question of how much to subsidize I leave as an exercise for the reader.
A 1.3 to 1.5 energy gain is miserable compared to other sources. It can never be more than solar power, because quite literally, the energy comes from the sun. Slowly!
You'll notice that the farmers aren't using alcohol to produce the crop or the pesticides and fetilizers.
How many of the dryers and stills use the alcohol or byproducts to get their heat?
And just forget about making steel or aluminum with energy from alcohol. There is energy used in every step of the process for everything that gets produced.
Force a low-density energy source on the economy, and watch it go back to pre-1900 levels. Because that's what they had then. They broke out of their condition and created an industrial revolution that raised the standard of living of mankind beyond anything before in history, mainly by lowering the cost of energy. The society that resulted from an industrial economy then raised a generation of brats who figure they can destroy the basis of their civilization without it affecting them.
Watch as the exodus of manufacturing from the U.S. continues ....
Most experts agree that corn ethanol isn't really useful as an enviromentally friendly fuel, but could there be a use for it in building a buffer into the food production system. Right now farms are heavily subsidized, in part to make sure that there is an oversupply of food incase of drought or other stresses on the food supply.
However, what if instead of subsidizing farms to achieve excess food production we instead burn 10-15% of the food supply as ethanol? If there ever is a serious stress put on the food supply there's now a big buffer built into the system. Of course this additional buffer may not be necessary as there's already a buffer in place with food that's currently used to feed livestock (I don't know how much extra food we get if we start eating all this food ourselves though).
I stole this Sig
The amount of problems with ethanol are staggering. The raised food prises, the fact that we practically pollute more MAKING ethanol than any environment savings (Which, apparently, seem to be nonexistent). Beyond this, it's near impossible to make enough ethanol to support the U.S...
Biodiesel, on the other hand, can be made with nearly ANYTHING and nearly ANYWHERE. Human waste? We can make biodiesel out of it (There was even a slashdot article about that). Used frying oil? We can make biodiesel? Algae, grown in swampy areas unfit for farming? We can use it. The catches are seriously minor too. For the U.S., the big issue is a lack of acceptance of Diesel as a whole. Secondly, colder climates could have problems with it, due to it solidifying. The second one may be an issue if you life in ice cold weather, but as a whole, it seems FAR more promising than Ethanol (And, it seems that Europe has pretty good Biodiesel penetration, too). The U.S. needs to give up on the ethanol dream.
Do it with oysters, they mature faster! All you have to do is be sure that all that up stream biofuel production does not increase the nitrogen load and kill all the oyster/clam beds. If you do oysters you can also get value added in your sequestration by using the shells as a building material called tabby: http://www.bcgov.net/bftlib/tabby.htm. Biomineralization is one of the key sequestration methods and we need to make room for it through nitrogen/phosphorous management.s -selling-solar.html
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Rent solar power and save: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Only applies to spent fuel. You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels. And reprocessing still leaves the fission products to deal with, as well as mining and processing tailings.
The problem is that reprocessing isn't economical at current conditions - which is why initial U.S. attempts failed and why Germany is ending their program.
This might change if all the external costs were included; but then if all the external costs were included, we wouldn't even be considering plutonium and uranium fission.
(We wouldn't be considering biofuels from food crops either - biowaste, algae, and fuel crops like hemp and switchgrass, maybe bamboo. Growing food-grade corn to make fuel-grade ethanol is just plain stupid, and has more to do with lining the pockets of agribusiness than with meeting energy needs.)
And breeders aren't a perpetual motion machine. You still run out of uranium in the order of decades ro centuries. (Unless you go to thorium, in which case spallation "energy amplifiers" are a much better design. Those, and fusion, are where we should be looking to nuclear technologies.)
...until you separate them out, or change your bomb design to account for a different mix of isotopes. In 1962, the U.S. detonated a bomb made from "reactor grade" plutonium. (See 15th page of the PDF, footnote 5.)
Google for "Iran nuclear", and tell me that we're going to let every country on earth have a couple of plutonium factories, on the assumption that they're all too dumb to be able to do that.
Separation is not easy, but certainly not impossible. Many of the claims of difficulty of obtaining weapons-grade fissionables are based on the difficulty of handling highly radioactive waste. When you have martyr wannabe's standing by, though, a lot of these problems are solved. Shielding? Feh. "Come here, unskilled uneducated believer-type. You will die a glorious death for $CAUSE and be assured of a rewarding afterlife if you handle this Rock of the Gods exactly as I tell you..."
Indeed, given the fears of a "dirty bomb", bad guys don't even have to seperate, or achieve a fission bomb. Take a chunk of mixed Pu, stick it in the middle of a Ryder truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer, and drive into the center of $BIG_CITY. Let the good times roll.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Rainforest is carbon neutral. There is such a rich and efficient ecosystem that the vast majority of organic matter is recycled in some way. The forest mass is in a steady state (where it isn't being chopped down, of course). The topsoil layer is only a few feet thick and not rich at all - which is obvious when you look at the slash and burn pattern of agriculture there. Yes, it produces a significant fraction of the world oxygen output. But it then consumes it again.
What people forget is that plants consume oxygen! They need aerobic respiration just like every other living thing. During the night, they emit carbon dioxide. They just happen to produce a surplus of oxygen as a result of their growth process, because they source carbon from atmospheric sources (i.e. CO2). Animals in the rainforest all consume any dead plant matter with immense efficiency. And the animals get eaten by smaller organisms, etc, etc. All of these steps emit the carbon that the plant biomass originally sequestered.
An ecosystem only has a positive oxygen production (and carbon sequestration) when the biomass it produces increases. The biomass of the rainforest, per hectare, remains pretty stable (until you burn it). Ergo, the rainforest is not as commonly portrayed, "the lungs of the planet". If you were to enclose it in a huge glass dome tomorrow, the human race would not suddenly keel over from lack of oxygen.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a regulatory effect. The enormous amount of water transpiration alone must effect global climate in ways that we probably don't fully understand. And it's value as one of the most biologically diverse environments on earth cannot be understated. From a selfish point of view, more cancer treatments come from the rainforest than anywhere else.
But environmental campaigners really need to focus on arguments that are not disprovable without even resorting to spin and misinformation.
I'm a farmer myself, and it's articles like this, from urbanites who have no idea what agriculture actually entails that piss me off.
Is Ethanol raising base commodity prices? Yes. Wheat is up $4 / bushel (used for flour), Barley is up $2.00 / bushel (Used for beer, among other things), Canola is up about $30 / tonne (Used for oil), Flax is up about $5.00 / bushel (used for healthfood).
Are these price-hikes due to Ethanol/Biodiesel? At least partially, yes.
But, why is food going up? I see a lot of people are blaming farmers for this... we are only now starting to make a living off of one of the most intense jobs in the world. You all make $30 - $50k a year, at least! We make $10K, and that's in a good year. You work 9-5, we work 5 - midnight, if not longer.
This brings me back to my point... let's look at peas, a bushel of them is worth $5.00 at the farmgate. In the store, you're looking at around $200 / bushel for whole peas! The only processing done on them, is cleaning and packaging. Do you see where the profit is?
Let's look at Oats: We make $2 / bushel. A bushel of rolled oats (Quaker Oats, etc) is roughly $270. I mean, it may cost some to process it, but it never is that much.
I could go on, but I think you get my point.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
Why? Because you got a free ride, and now you have to pay for it. See, burning fuel results in externalities that, right now, you aren't paying for. $12/gallon gas actually begins to offset those externalities, and the result is you actually paying for your lifestyle, instead of the bill being paid by the environment, etc.
It's called balance.