Just keep the ethanol production where it's supposed to be, and there won't be any trouble...
Biofule from corn is not the same corn used for human consuption.
“Biofule from corn is not the same corn used for human consuption.”
I’ll ignore the spelling errors. You are wrong, although that is the liberal argument. It is feed corn, and it is used in normal times to feed the chickens, turkeys, hogs, and cows that we then eat. It is also used for the corn syrupfructose (sugar) used in almost every modern food product. It is that sugar that they distil into alchohol/ethanol. BTW- it takes 30% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it produces. IOW’s evertime you burn a gallon of ethanol you are also burning 1.3 gallons of fossil fuel. This is paid for by gov. subsidies, increasing our debt. It should be called deathanol....
What kind of corn is used for biofuel then? All corn is used for human consumption.
The absolute impact of using corn to produce alcohol on the food supply should be minimal. That's because only a small part of the food value of the corn kernel is converted to alcohol, the rest is still used as animal fodder.
The corn kernel consists of starches, some protein and other minerals, etc. It is ground and turned into meal. Water and yeast are added. The resulting mash ferments, turning some of the starches into alcohol. The alcohol is distilled off, leaving the mash. This residue - which is still the great majority of the nutritional value of the corn - is dried and sold as a high-protein and very valuable animal feed called "brewer's grain."
So, it's simplistic to say that corn-to-fuel has anything approaching an acre-for-acre impact on our food growing capacity.
The big criticism of corn-to-fuel is that the distilling process requires large energy inputs that some have very legitimately questioned whether you're coming out ahead on a total BTU basis. In other words, by putting in other fuels - like precious natural gas - to fuel the distillation process, do you really gain enough to make the corn-to-fuel process worthwhile?
That's a very legitimate concern. I would say that the answer is the so-called "closed loop" distillation process. In these systems, the brewer's grain is fed to hogs, which yeilds pork and copious amounts of pig manure (I can attest to that from personal experience). The pig manure is captured in large tanks where it undergoes anaerobic fermentation, producing methane (natural gas), which is then used to fuel the distillation process.
That makes perfect sense to me. I honestly see passingly little impact on food production and very large gains in energy production in these closed-loop systems.
As to whether we should subsidize it, I would say that let's first get honest about how much we subsidize oil. The Army and Navy in the Persian Gulf area are clearly there to, among other things, protect our oil supply, but those staggering costs are never included in the price a consumer pays for a gallon of gas at the pump. Our dependence on oil has a lot of other costs that the government externalizes onto the taxpayers, like paying for transportation infrastructure, and national security issues like the Gulf States financing terrorism on money we send them every time we fill 'er up at the pump, and on and on.
So, I'd say that granting a tax break for producers of alcohol in closed-looop systems makes sense. At least, if we can justify all the externalized costs of oil, then we certainly can give our corn producers a tax break and take other measures to ensure that E-85 is everywhere.
Just keep the ethanol production where it's supposed to be, and there won't be any trouble...