Ethanol Demand Is Boosting Food Prices Worldwide 599
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."
Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lose" (Score:5, Interesting)
George Monbiot wrote [guardian.co.uk] about this 2 months ago in the UK Guardian:
Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:4, Insightful)
If a farmer gets 100% of his income from agriculture, and 90% of his expenses are from buying agriculture products, he will still make a bit more profit if the market for agriculture products go up.
Anyway, this is all pointless, because in the end even the poorest country with the most infertile soil will have enough food for everyone if its a well run democracy that actually has a policy to bring food to everyone. If it isnt, well, then people might starve even if the country has both the money and soil to get food.
Re:Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't most third world countries depend on agriculture products as exports? So if agriculture products become more expensive, the food they buy is more expensive, but they will also have more money with which they can buy the expensive food.
Most third world countries can't export agriculture products because there's no-one to export to. First world countries, (read: the US and EU) have very powerful agriculture lobbyists. Our government subsidizes agriculture production - our farmers can produce the same crop cheaper than the African farmer because the government pays most of his costs. Even if the African farmer could produce a bushel of corn or cotton or whatnot cheaper than a domestic producer, tariffs and quotas prevent him from selling there.
If food becomes more expensive, the third-world countries are SOL. The vast majority of people in the world (first or third) are not commercial farmers who sell the food they grow, so the price increase benefits very few people.
In the meantime, starving people have to pay more for the same inadequate rations.
It's the Farm Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corn-based Ethanol is a Tragedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:3, Insightful)
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 far
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And the alternative is....?
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I will only cover Ethanol and biodiesel and even then I can only scratch
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Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Informative)
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 [bbc.co.uk].
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. [fas.org] (See 15th page of the PDF, footnote 5.)
Google for "Iran nuclear [google.com]", 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.
Ethanol Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wordpress.com] than ethanol - 1 gallon of gasoline contains 118,690 kJ of energy, whereas 1 gallon of ethanol contains only 82,958
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Amazon rainforest is carbon neutral (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Monbiot:"People - and the environment - will lo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 the
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Sorry I was busy smoking a joint and downloading a movie. What did you say?
No! Oysters! (Score:3, Interesting)
--
Rent solar power and save:
Corn Syrup (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Corn Syrup (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Corn Syrup (Score:4, Interesting)
In the past few decades Cuba has reworked its economy entirely, due to the trade limits of it's biggest nearest neighbor, and has since made itself nearly a self-sufficient entity, which is actually quite remarkable in itself.
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cane coke (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Corn Syrup (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Corn prices have been near historic lows, and now we finally have upward change (which apparently is something the under-educated news media doesn't grasp. Guess we know who flunked out of calculus in school).
I live in rural Iowa and work in Nebraska and have many friends who are row crop farmers. Both corn and soybean prices have finally increased past the government subsidy for minimum prices (which unfortunately has detrimental effects itself). Last year, farmers were dumping crops and not even bothering to store them due to the prices being so low. The took the subsizided minimum price and cut their losses. More farmers were squeezed out of the market. The U.S. economy has had a massive shift from farm-oriented rural economies over the past century (from 95% rural agricultural focused to less than 5%) which automation and technologies certainly improves, but the losses we've seen since 1990 has had little to do with any further automation.
Unless you've inherited at least 2,000 acres, you can't make the finances work in today's row crop economy. Those that are doing fine have more than 3,000 acres per family for corn and beans in our parts. At $2,200 to $3,200 an acre, you cannot purchase new land and go into farming and survive, even with considerable governmental support. You have to have a base of inherited land that has nearly zero cost as a base, and even then you're dependent upon subsidized government crop insurance. Consider these numbers: good corn yields around these parts of the Midwest are 140 bushels per acre. At $2.50 a bushel, your gross income per acre is a whopping $350. Less fuel costs, seed costs, fertilizer and other chemical costs, irrigation, crop insurance, tractor & combine machinery costs, contractor costs for spraying, trucking costs to move crops from the field to market, and any storage costs, you're looking at hard costs of $200-$250 per acre. $100 income per acre, before labor and land cost. Remember, I said you had to already own the land, because if you do the net present value math on 1,000 acres at $2500/acre (6% over 10 years), you'll be paying $340 per year per acre - which is almost as much as your gross profit itself. Care to dive into farming?
So understand that corn prices have been historically low, and now they are finally changing due to demand for the product. Any economist worth his salt can tell you the crops being produced aren't priced right when the total profit from the sale of those crops barely covers the cost of dormant land, let alone all the other expenses (using pragmatic numbers assuming 10% margins bearing full costs, we should expect to see $7 to $8 dollar corn per bushel, or must see a dramatic devaluation in farmland prices). Foreign subsidization of corn crop production has also kept prices unnaturally low, as well as import barriers on U.S. product. Just like global warming, you cannot have a rational perspective if you accept only the extreme outliers at one tail and call that a central tendency. Prices will change, and in this case, regression to the mean [wikipedia.org] is going to occur (meaning that things tend to want to go back to the normal medium, rather than staying at the extremes).
If you're looking for things to panic about, this isn't one of them. Be thankful that we won't lose even more U.S. crop production human capital, or the natural correction of this unnatural trend will be even more dramatic. Be encouraged that poor foreign farmers in Mexico, South America and elsewhere are being paid more for their crops, instead of throwing a couple more billion dollars at the oil elites. If you hate big business, hate the multi-billionaire clubs, hate corrupt oil cartels, then spend your gas money on ethanol fuel and biodiesel.
So get out of the corn business (Score:3, Insightful)
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Then you shouldn't be growing corn! (Or rather, this many people shouldn't be doing it.) There is an 'opportunity cost' to everything. If your example is true, then that means the following. If you can't buy land and plant
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They will probably start to use a method to synthesise sugar from crude oil...
and corn farmers everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Let's not forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here's an article from the Economist on Iowa's ethanol economy. [economist.com] The effects are obviously positive on the local scale, with higher profits, more jobs, and increasing land prices as more people try to rush in and get a piece of the subsidy. Still, the same subsidizing policy can easily kill off the whole industry, if the government decides tomorrow that another biofuel is more "in".
Food is too cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Food is too cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, sure, this could possibly lead to smaller portions, but what about people in other countries that don't have enough to eat to begin with? The price of torilla's rising 50% in Mexico doesn't mean "smaller portions" it means NO portions.
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Ask yourself, "Why is the price so high?"
In EVERY case of people starving on this Planet in this day and age is because of failed states. Period. Africa's food problems? Just look at their governments and how they appropriate food for their armies and buddies of th
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In the US, sure, this could possibly lead to smaller portions, but what about people in other countries that don't have enough to eat to begin with? The price of torilla's rising 50% in Mexico doesn't mean "smaller portions" it means NO portions.
Ask yourself, "Why is the price so high?"
In EVERY case of people starving on this Planet in this day and age is because of failed states. Period. Africa's food problems? Just look at their governments and how they appropriate food for their armies and buddies of the "President" (read Dictator). Sorry, the only food and starvation problems today are Government made. And no, I DO NOT mean some "evil corporation in their corporation offices being all corporaty" causing the problem. That reason is a smokescreen.
But in this case the failed state is the USA, having flooded Mexico with subsidized corn, killing off any chance of local farmers making a living, and then paying even more for the corn to make "bio-fuel".
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BTW, you are also "shoveling money" into Nigeria and Norway.
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Is this a good time to use the "insensitive clod" phrase?
Food is too cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
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No, other way around.
I knew you'd say that, but no.
Subsidies make farming a particular crop more profitable, they encourage farmers to switch to produce the crop (It's profitable), they encourage overproduction to maximise the return on the subsidy and as the supply increases, the market value drops. Subsidies drive down prices. More subsidy is required to maintain profitability and more farmers are encouraged to produce the crop, supply increases further and the market value drops further. We're long past the point where subs
Use Other Foods (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use Other Foods (Score:5, Informative)
Energy? Huh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Amen Bro! (Score:2)
I wish I could give you all my mod points for life.
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This is because the farm is no longer a nice little circle of self perpetuation. There are no livestock eating the vegetation waste, producing manure to fertilize the crops. The livestock has been shipped to a feedlot (where it's manure is basically toxic and unusa
WTF? Basic economics. (Score:3, Insightful)
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/pro
Green? Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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It's called balance.
Classic (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
A common misperception (Score:2)
Re:A common misperception (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Few Clarifications & Corrections (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
But yeah, it's all about biofuels.
A Few Thoughts (Score:2)
Price controls, while always a popular move, seldom work. Mexico, for a place with so much promise, is such a disaster economically that millions of people risk their lives to leave for completely non-war related reasons. I wouldn't use them as an example of anything that applies to the rest of the world.
The move to ethanol-blen
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I don't know about that study, but biofuel advocates do make that argument. The problem is that it breaks down if you clear, for example, Amazon rainforest to grow sugar cane for ethanol. Which is usually the case, since productive sites for agriculture a
Also using fuel as food raises fuel prices (Score:2)
Now the thing about emissions, that's kinda not the point. Burning the fuel may not be particularly cleaner (get it, particle... n/m) but
greenhouse gas emissions are not the point (Score:5, Informative)
Carbon cycle... (Score:2)
IMO, biofuels are just one way that environmentalists want to cull the herd.
Now that I have gotten that conspiracy theory off my chest, green friends have told me that bio-fuels are carbon neutral because they do not add any net new carbon to the cycle, but they do acc
I call BS! (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While I agree agriculture is oversubsidized (Score:3, Insightful)
Reducing the consumption of fossil fuels BAD?? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Or are most prominent environmentalists simply argumentative to the point where they will contradict themselves for the sake of opposing the inexorable progress of technology and industry?
I've long since dismissed the environmentalist movement for exactly this kind of thing. No matter what we to do try to placate them, we will be wrong. Givin
Illegal aliens.. by the gallon? (Score:2)
One of the consequences of diverting corn production to biofuels, and of the subsidies reaped by American farmers, is that the price of corn is skyrocketing in Mexico. And it's driving a lot of starving Mexicans to sneak into the States to eke out a living.
Can't blame them; they're only starving, ferchrissakes. In the meantime, we also have sugar tariffs and subsidies that prohibit a far more efficient crop for use in biofuels.
So, the next time some idiot farmer in Iowa spouts about illegal aliens to
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I was well aware of using them as tires, but they keep puncturing a lung and going flat.
Time to cease the hysteria (Score:2, Insightful)
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
How dumb are these guys ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ?
Obvious (Score:2)
This was predicted years ago on the basis of simple economics. It is going to put a larger gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots', as those without money are going to have a much harder time finding food.
This isn't going to affect just tortillas. Corn is used to feed livestock
Oil production has consequences too (Score:2)
3.8% isn't much over CPI (Score:2)
Really, are you sure that it isn't due to the rising cost of energy? It costs money to run farm equipment, and to transport the stuff. Or is it just due to inflation?
I believe that core inflation (excluding energy) in Canada [bankofcanada.ca] is 2.5%. The price of energ
Article is incomplete or misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [kingcorn.net] 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.
zero sum game? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Battery Tech To Save The Enviroment (Score:4, Insightful)
This could actually be a very good thing! (Score:5, Interesting)
Either that, or we're gonna kill a lot of people.
only time will tell.
-Rick
six inches, baby... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry, capitalism to the rescue (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Don't worry, capitalism to the rescue (Score:5, Informative)
First, capitalism needs to come into play. Right now, farmers grow as much corn as physically possible knowing that the government will buy it at a set rate, regardless of what the commodity price is.
The government needs to remove it's hand from this one and let the real market forces go to work.
High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:4, Insightful)
Alarmist reporting? Also, NAFTA... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Brazil outside of this world, say indutry experts (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]: 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 [wikipedia.org].
Corn? 10%? (Score:3, Informative)
Corn ethanol as a food buffer? (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Can we just move to biodiesal already? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the rising price of petroleum products is certainly having an impact on the costs involved with producing corn, but it really doesn't affect how much corn is produced (i.e. supply of corn), so the price of corn isn't driven too much by this.
Escalating petroleum costs cut into the farmer's profit margin, increasing demand for corn raises the price of corn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No non essential trips.
Re:Wakeup call (Score:5, Informative)
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 [journeytoforever.org]
* "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.
SUBSIDIES are a serious pain in the posterior (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's really scary (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Ross
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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...
Big OIl v. Big Ag (Score:3, Insightful)
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