Posted on 02/08/2007 7:35:28 PM PST by Kitten Festival
Energy: Could lowly switch grass mow down the petropower tyranny of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez? A U.S.-Brazil ethanol pact signed this week may supply the fuel to do just that.
Chavez's hostile anti-American dictatorship grows worse as his oil earnings pile up. With the U.S. as his best customer, buying about a quarter, or 1.1 million barrels, of Venezuelan crude oil each day, the bitter coda is that every barrel we buy fuels his anti-U.S. actions.
These range from crazed speeches to colonial acquisitions like Bolivia to rogue-state alliances with Iran and Zimbabwe to menacing moves against neighbors like Dominica, Guyana and Colombia with $4 billion in weapons purchases.
High oil prices, low supply and his own expropriations of foreign oil partners in Venezuela only increase Chavez's oil cash and clout. The U.S. has been largely helpless, because it has few alternatives to buying Venezuelan crude.
But a new deal announced with Brazil to pool ethanol technology and produce greater quantities of ethanol in both countries could help. ...
The ultimate aim of the ethanol deal is to create a commodity market. This could give every country in the region alternatives for energy buying. In turn, it will undercut Chavez's monopoly and abusive influence.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who flew to Brazil to iron out the deal, made no secret of that. "Energy has tended to distort the power of some of the states we find to be negative in the world — Venezuela, Iran," said Burns, quoted in the Washington Post. "And so the more we can diversify our energy sources and depend less on oil, the better off we will be."
...this signals an impressive new U.S. diplomatic offensive
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
see post 118, and lighten up.
LOL
"Ethanol = Unsustainable, subsidized, food burning, mileage ruining, non-pipelinable, corrosive, caustic, economically backward FRAUD!!!"
As American farmers sell their corn and other ethanol producing crops for ethanol production to be sold at a high premium cost over regular old dirty oil, several situations will happen:
1. The 2nd and 3 rd world countries that depend on our corn and other cereal crops will become Sudans and hot beds of social unrest. America will be blamed for this green arrogance.
2. Corn syrup and other cereal by products will start a wave of inflation as the added costs of these by products impact so many food products.
3. Inflation in the fuel market will happen as the ethanol becomes more expensive each day due to market shortages of the corn and other products.
Especially #2. That corn syrup is in EVERYTHING these days!!!
Although I may seem somewhat of a Luddite on "Alternative Energy," I put it's advocates in the same GovernMental EnvironMental bag with the "Organic Crowd" and the stop exhaling anti-Carbondioxide before we all die crowd!!! (aka Globular Worming crowd)
It really pains me to see conservatives sucking into this GANG-GREEN crappola, driven by fear and loathing, rather than positive commonsense, which is supposed to be the attitude of genuine, authentic consertatives!!!
I know that's JudgeMental, but authentic conservatives never shrink from making adamant and accurate judgements!!!
Please tell your advisers that they have mistaken wrath for frustration and disgust, to a great extent, due to having higher expectations of genuine and authentic conservatives, especially here on FR.
Please see my response to Grampa Dave, above and relay that point of view to your advisers as soon as you can, ok??? I think they'll actually understand what I'm stating.
First, and ugliest, is the tariff on imported sugar. At this time, this amounts to about 60% of the price of sugar worldwide. You can confirm this figure by checking the closing prices of Sugar #11 (''world'' sugar) and Sugar #14 (''domestic'' sugar) on the NYBOT any business day.
This tariff is and has been indefensible for decades. It exists for one reason: the domestic sugar lobby, whose profits are so high (for a simple commodity-based business) that they can afford to and regularly do buy off the Regress, wholesale, so much a head with a cash discount. It serves no economic purpose whatever; sugar is hardly an indeustry needing ''protection''.
Secondly, one cannot discuss ethanol today w/o noting carefully that there is a sizeable tariff on imported ethanol, too, some 50-odd cents/gallon. Couple this with the blending subsidy, the other farm ''support'' largesse, and the sugar tariff, and in reality there are at least four different subsidies for corn-based ethanol in the US.
Remove these subsidies and absolutely nobody would use ethanol as a motor fuel -- and I don't give the tiniest tinker's damn how much high-value animal feed is produced as a byproduct of wet milling. We already have lots of animal feed, more than we can use in fact, so who gives a rip about the byproducts, eh?
The ethanol scam isn't about energy, or energy-independence (haha), or anything other than one thing: money. Boatloads of money. Your money. My money. Every taxpayer's money.
You are one of the few writers I've seen who correctly charactierises ''ethanol'' as being both about corn AND sugar. The problem is, sadly, that ADM almost never loses in D.C., and the sugar lobby NEVER loses. Put these two groups of pirates together in a cause, any cause, and it's a done deal.
More's the pity. But, it's typical; when government attempts to pick winners in the economic sphere, everyone -- I mean absolutely everyone -- other than ''the chosen'', gets screwed royally.
BOHICA, m'friend, but FReegards nonetheless.
Bump
I thought this was a rhetorical question.
The true answer is that we are a nation of disparate types. Yes, there are many who are willing to climb on your bandwagon, but there are also many who get just as excited about the opposite point of view.
Does this mean we are doomed to stagnation? No. The prudent types will prevail, after observing a few sensible experiments.
In the meantime, we can all do more. Regardless of your feelings about the efficacy of ethanol production, it makes sense to insist that your next vehicle be as flexible in its fuel requirements as possible.
My interest is essentially intellectual curiosity. I do not intend to join anyone's pitchforks at Midnight parade.
I would like to see an impartial investigation into the possibility of producing butanol from agricultural waste and food byproducts. If the hype is in any way reliable, butanol could be brought into the fuel mix without serious repercussions.
One of the points raised above is that American agricultural procedures can bring forth an astonishing variety of useful things besides food. I have long thought that one way to boost a farm's productivity and profitability is to reduce its fuel costs. Fuel plants grown on the farm, and the resultant fuel being used on that farm, would reduce the farmer's need for imported, and expensive, petroleum-based fuel.
I am at the same time a lover of tradition and a lover of innovation. I love the look and feel of a book, for example. But if kenaf fiber can produce a high-quality paper and preserve wood growth for the building industry, I think it is conservative to endorse it.
Similarly, if new techniques for producing fuel from otherwise unused or scrap materials can help us to reduce our addiction to foreign oil, I'm all for that, too.
Yes, Bob, I understand... You've looked at life from both sides now... as the female folk vocalist of the 1970's sang... and this is your safety perch from which you can appear wise as a moderate old owl! The wisest person in the room, so to speak.
Have you ever defended the timber industry from the radical GovernMental EnvironMentalist despots who have ruined it's great and sustainable traditions??? If you have, you are certainly a rarity indeed!!!
If I could get to know you better, I'll bet I'd find you to be an American of excellent character and more productive than most. But this fadish casting about for alternative energy or raw materials is kinda dumb on it's face.
If ANY of these alternatives were viable, they'd have been adopted long before this simply through the demand for supply of the most viable by our system of markets!!!
Thus, I see all this speculating and daydreaming as sophomoric sophistry and smacking of negativity toward our own traditions of a sort that smacks of liberalism, or that there's something wrong with what America has been doing because we're not all hyped up over trying to fix something that really isn't broken in the first place...
Now if you think that those statements are filled with wrath directed soley at you, then don't even give it a "soft answer" and I'll understand.
Only difference, perhaps, is that I broke it down a bit more specifically.
Best of all worlds? Let a large cargo of raw sugar rot, then give Chavez an enema with it, and dump the rest into ADM's air vents at their Illinois headqtrs.
And set fire to the cane fields in FL and LA. 3 or 4 times a year, if possible. The envirowhackos would approve; cane is pretty hard on the soil, and in the US, cane is only grown on pretty marginal land to start. No loss at all, the soil improves over time. Bit of a problem for the sugar barons, but, frankly, if they can't make an honest profit w/o dipping into your and my pocket, screw them.
<<<--- NOT a nice guy on this subject
Didn't think so. W/o enormous tax AND production subsidies, Brazil's vaunted ''ethanol economy'' wouldn't even exist, let alone be a subject for discussion among petroilliterates.
Brazil is ''oil independant'' (sic) with regard to automobiles? Your ass. What absoute rubbish.
Any gov't can subsidise ANY nonsensical product for a period of time, in order to (try to) induce citizens to use the gov't-approved inferior product, but there's no exception in history to the intractable fact that THIS little game runs out, and in an historically very ugly fashion, p d q. Brazil consumes a very sizeable amount of crude and product, and produces relatively small amounts of any of these. Perhaps **close** to enough for their nation, but I rather doubt it, and in any case their consumption will outstrip production (if it hasn't already) in a very small number of years, like, say, 3-4.
Not at all. It's what we've always done. No matter what the product or the process, innovators have always struggled to find alternatives, in order to provide a choice, a better market position, or to take advantage of a previously underutilized resource. Just consider the efforts of George Washington Carver.
"If ANY of these alternatives were viable, they'd have been adopted long before this simply through the demand for supply of the most viable by our system of markets!!!"
Some of the alternatives are indeed viable, and additional studies will disclose methods by which they may be made even more competitive. Nearly a hundred years ago, you could fill up your Model T with either alcohol or gasoline. You had a choice, depending on what may have been more plentiful in your area.
Obviously, alcohol was not able to continue to compete against alcohol directly. It lost out in straight competition to the more available and easily provided petrochemically derived gasoline.
But as has been stated above, as gasoline and other petro stocks rise in price due to increasing demand, at some point alcohols of various types will again become price competitive, even without subsidization. Simple economics dictates that it must be so. Why fight against a rising tide?
I see it, too.
Yours on the ethanol and sugar industries was brilliant.
And, if one is to step back and take another look at the larger scene, one can also see Pegs to the "Anti-Obesity" movement, and why. And why some schools and politicos wish to abolish "sugars" from students' diets.
Diabetes and Autism are on the rise in US children. Could high corn fructose be involved in these numbers? Remove those items, move the fructose/sugar over to a newer industry and use, keeping the economy stable in re GDP.
I'm all for America's "energy independence". And witnessing Chavez swimming in the oil he can't sell.
Unfair of you to bring up this fact, as Brazil is an heroic nation to the greenie-left, which wants ethanol fuel for everyone.
Truth of the matter,not that it matters, is that Brazil has been ramping up its own oil production quite steadily. God forbid they should clear some forest to increase cane production.
SAVE THE CORN FOR WHISKEY!!!
".....While a number of domestic refineries use Venezuelan crude oil, 11 accounted for 80 percent of Venezuelan crude oil used in the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands ...."
Although it would hurt some oil companies temporarily, we can do very well without Venezuelan Crude, which is pretty crude indeed, requiring highly specialized refineries. After the 11 US refineries which handle Venezuelan Crude are switched to other feedstocks, which takes a while, Chávez would really be up a bit of a creek, because in order to use the stuff, other refinery facilities would have to be found and adapted, which also takes a while.
Oilco economic hossheet aside, Venezuela needs us one hell of a lot more than we need them.
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