"Can't be corn, 'cause corn is niiiiiice!"
Posted on 06/18/2008 7:32:32 AM PDT by DGHoodini
As a farmer in North Central Illinois, I feel it is imperative that I respond to the most recent deluge of negative media attention, and letters to newspapers, attacking ethanol. We must look past the fear mongering rhetoric that is being distributed by the big oil companies and the multinational food processors.
Just 18 months ago the price paid to farmers for corn in Bureau County , Ill. was only $1.88 per bushel (56 pounds of food for $1.88!). At that time it cost me well over $3.00 to raise corn. Today the price paid for corn in the county is $5.42 per bushel, but because of higher energy related costs such as fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, seed and equipment it costs me close to $4.00 per bushel to raise it. It is true we corn farmers are finally making a profit, but more importantly the amount of corn sweetener in a soft drink has gone from ½ ¢ to just over 1¢. The corn used to make a pound of tortillas has gone from 4¢ to a dime. As you can see, corn farmers are receiving a very small
(Excerpt) Read more at acga.org ...
Be careful what you believe. Consider the source.
Mark Belling (local radio in Milwaukee) has been saying for the past couple of years that the Ethanol mandate is having a ripple effect in the price of energy and food, and I believe it. Never in American history has the government subsidized a protect which is inferior, and less efficient then the common alternative. With Iowa kicking off the Presidential season there is no way a candidate can be against Ethanol so we are stuck with it.
It ain't grain and oil that are going up in price... US dollars are going down in value.
“The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
think it’s getting bad now ? wait until they use that same solution to fix SS & Medicare...
"Can't be corn, 'cause corn is niiiiiice!"
Brings to mind Dan Ackroyd's classic Jimmah Carter impersonation ...
"Inflation is our friend. Didn't you always want to wear $1000 suits and live in a $200,000 home. I know I did. Well, now we can. All it takes is a little ink and some paper."
Maybe Argonne National Laboratory should stick with smashing atoms.
Starting off accusing the other side presenting its argument as "fear mongering rhetoric" never increases my confidence in what is to follow.
How about ....
(D) All of the above.
If the price of oil were affected only by the fall of the dollar, the European truckers wouldn't be staging oil price strikes as the Euros in their pockets are worth a lot more dollars than they were worth before.
Ditto for European food prices .
How to the government subsidy rates get figured for corn farmers?
Grass-roots support for ethanol comes from the National Corn Growers Association and its well-funded state affiliates. They are joined by the Farm Bureau Federation and National Farmers Union, and all are helped by the Washington-based Renewable Fuels Association. Among the industry’s “senior advisers” is D.C. insider and former senate majority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
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Keith Bolin is president of the American Corn Grower’s Association.
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2007
Corn growers received $2.1 billion in government payments for the 2006 crop, down from $9.6 billion for the 2005 crop and the smallest amount of aid since 1996, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Government farm aid has fallen because payments in two of the three farm aid programs fall when crop prices rise.
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2002
Corn’s place in the US economy is secure, judging by Congress’s approval this spring of an unprecedented $190 billion farm-subsidy package. One of its largest beneficiaries was corn growers.
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the U.S. government paid corn farmers $51.2 billion between 1995 and 2005
corn has been grossly overproduced for 20 or so years, and a lot of the uses we’ve found for it — like ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup — are government-created boondoggles
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2008
The ethanol industry is like few others. It is sustained, just as it was nurtured, almost entirely by public spending. The corn ethanol industry wouldn’t exist without billions of dollars in federal subsidies and artificial markets shaped by federal production mandates.
Energy and farm legislation that advanced in Congress last month, for example, gives another hefty push to continuing ethanol subsidies in the form of a 51-cent per gallon blending credit to refiners and mandating production of 36 billion gallons by 2022, quintupling current levels.
The corn surplus is about to dry up with an estimated loss of a million acres in Iowa flooding alone. Vilifying farmers has been a cheap shot fueled by middle east oil interests and the envirowhacks.
That is the truth. Stuff we bought a year a ago here in Israel, with dollars, is costing about twice what it did..it is amazing.
There are FReepers here who feel the detractors of ethanol are "wack-jobs" and that GREET is gospel. I'd like to stay cynical on both sides to learn more of the FACTS. My cynical side tells me that Argonne is funded predominantly from Illinois universities who might just be funded by "big Corn" and just MAY be influenced in their investigations.
“As a farmer in North Central Illinois, I feel it is imperative that I respond to the most recent deluge of negative media attention, and letters to newspapers, attacking ethanol. We must look past the fear mongering rhetoric that is being distributed by the big oil companies and the multinational food processors.”
Wow, a corn farmer blaming the high price of corn on “big oil”. Shocker! “Stick it to that mean ol’ “big oil” by buying more of MY product.”
I believe corn can be partially blamed for the increases in prices. The real blame goes to the farm state congressmen who have been pushing ethanol at the expense of new drilling for oil. They have consistently voted against new exploration, such as ANWR in an effort to artificially prop up the ethanol industry.
I am sure they were hoping for somewhat higher gas prices to make ethanol look more attractive. These current gas prices have worked opposite to what they were hoping for, another example of government interference screwing up the markets. Now, instead of corn coming to the rescue, people are realizing just how important new sources of crude oil are, which is a good thing. Start the drilling for more oil, use the corn to fatten up our steak supply!
If they whine that they can't do both they get no more funding for their ethanol boondoggle!
One only need look to see how much corn is exported each year to see that domestic use is far less than total grown.
Over a million metric tons went to Japan alone last year.
“The tyranny of two appetites for the price of one?”
This I simply don't understand your meaning.
Are Keith Bolin and “KeithinIowa” one and the same?
With Billion$ of tax payer dollar subsidies at stake it makes one wonder whether anything the corn growers lobby says can be taken at face value. They stand to lose much if their greedy agenda is scaled back.
They stand to lose much if their greedy agenda is scaled back.
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The entire ethanol scam is a disaster. It is bad stuff for car, boat and airplane engines. It collects water and stimulates corrosion. Only 10% ethanol content is presently allowed by federal standards because of this issue. The fat corn farmers are getting greedy — the impact on food prices is just for starters. We, especially in Kalifornia, are scammed by the state government, the same moron socialists that stuff MTBEs down our throats as the “cure-all” for what little pollutants remain from cars and ruined many engine parts and polluted water suppliers.
These invasive, moron socialists are killing this country. They have to be stopped.
>>If there were a genuine “appetite” for ethanol
>>it wouldn’t require mandated use and subsidies to survive.
I certainly agree with that ;-)
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