Here is the latest corn chart for the Dec contract. Ethanol doesn't seem to going that great of a job of propping the price up. Nice try but no cigar.
Posted on 11/14/2013 6:35:18 AM PST by Wuli
CORYDON, Iowa -- The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/11/5902607/the-secret-dirty-cost-of-obamas.html#storylink=cpy
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
It is not only the corruption that comes from the Agriculture Department as a captive of those whom it is supposed to "regulate", but it is the political subversion of the EPA and the Energy Department to rigged the data so they can spin ideological-based and politically biased policies, policies that do not stand scientific and factual scrutiny of what those policies claim.
I encourage reading the whole article at the link, to see all the aspects of the issue it covers.
Ping.
It’s fairly simple; whichever party is flagged as attempting to kill ethanol subsidies will lose the corn belt vote. It’s hard to see how either party can win without picking up at least a portion of these states’ electoral votes.
I’ve stated for years, it’s crazy to support food-stocks for fuel. That corn can be used for food for livestock. That livestock can be used for food for the ‘starving’ in our country.
Putting it in a gas tank is idiotic.
Spare me. I live east of Corydon and have been there. Not to say I like ethanol particularly, but this article is overhyped crap. Corn is also at around $4 now, so that’s putting a damper on this kind of thing.
‘Bush League’ policy.. any way ya cut the corn.
NO beating around the bush about it.
ExActly what the environmental whackos wanted in the first place
Corn used for ethanol feedstock is also used for animal feed. Government mandates interfering with the marketplace are horrible ideas, but that doesn’t translate into DDG’s not being productive animal feeds.
This is true, BUT, this corn has had most of the calories sucked out of it and is not the same, nutritionally, as the original corn.
Raw corn is not well digested by animals, while spent distillers grains are. There used to be a saying to the effect that "if you feed corn to your cattle, your pigs and chickens eat for free".
and pork chops and beef are at sky high prices everywhere - i.e. the cost of feed, i.e. the corn/acres diverted to ethanol raising the price of corn for feed
it’s “fairly simple” - ethanol is not a sound policy in terms of energy, the environment or the economy - what it gives to the “corn belt” is paid for by everyone else in dozens ways that trickle through the economy, making zero net economic advantage of it - but, like all the farm subsidies, it’s a great and secure campaign funding and re-election scheme if you can move to a corn state and get in on it
Here is the latest corn chart for the Dec contract. Ethanol doesn't seem to going that great of a job of propping the price up. Nice try but no cigar.
the ethanol mandates - the models supporting them - were done by the EPA and the energy department using corn prices LOWER than they are today - the models supporting them fall about without those lower prices, yet the myth continues that ethanol is still meeting expectations - it’s not
ethanol cannot be moved in pipelines - it absorbs H20 too much; it has to be moved in trucks; trucks that burn oil-derived diesel to get the corn-produced ethanol to the refineries
ethanol is junk science and a political scam on everyone; where it pretens to give in one way - less C02, it pollutes with many others from ozone to the increased polutant run-offs into our rivers and from them to the oceans
ethanol is ONLY about one thing - king corn and the agro-industrial-enterprise Eisenhower didn’t understand he needed to warn us about
No, they are dependent on the price of fuel as well as corn, as well as cost of production. High corn costs can be set off by high fuel price.
Ethanol was designed to be a prop under the corn market. Farmers don’t make money on $2 corn and $4 gas, it barely pays out at $2 gas and $4 corn. Obviously corn working below $4 isn’t the best argument of corn ‘burning our food’.
That said, I agree with the rest of your statements. But understand, SOMETHING needs to be done with corn and other ag products (i.e. added-value ag) to make them profitable to grow. Something more than just animal feed and shipping it overseas.
Getting rid of ethanol will not help that problem. We need to replace it with some kind of processing to use the products beyond what we are doing now. We just can’t get rid of ethanol and gloat in cheap meat and big export numbers. We do that and the farm belt will go broke.
All I’m saying is it’s far more complex than this article’s clap trap and simple solutions will be no solution at all.
A lot of people forget, or they never knew, that producing fuel alcohol from corn was not the ultimate goal.
The ultimate goal was to produce fuel alcohol from cellulose, such as from corn cobs, or switch grass, or any number of things. They started with corn so that these companies could get cash flow to offset the R&D costs of developing the technology to ferment cellulose.
This article you posted is 2-3 days old and AP has published several additional articles since then on the subject. The latest alcohol article from AP deals with why the cellulosic technology has taken longer to develop than they expected.
The first cellulosic plants are now under construction and if everything goes well with the new technology, more plants will be built and eventually all the fuel alcohol will be produced with other than corn. That is several years down the road.
“The first cellulosic plants are now under construction and if everything goes well with the new technology, more plants will be built”
if the science is there and they can it on their own dime, not the taxpayers, and without any mandates
no
if there is less need for corn, there is less need for corn
it is not for the government to stimulate or create an artificial need for corn
“The Secret Environmental Cost of US Ethanol Policy
November 14, 2013 at 12:02:23 PM CST · 13 of 19
Wuli to snoringbear
it’s “fairly simple” - ethanol is not a sound policy in terms of energy, the environment or the economy - what it gives to the “corn belt” is paid for by everyone else in dozens ways that trickle through the economy, making zero net economic advantage of it - but, like all the farm subsidies, it’s a great and secure campaign funding and re-election scheme if you can move to a corn state and get in on it”
All you say is true. But, getting the corn growing states to give up their subsidies would be about as likely as getting the entitlement class to give up their EIC. Guess your best option is to move to Iowa.
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