Posted on 08/28/2007 8:54:49 AM PDT by nuke rocketeer
—Dr. Robert Peltier, PE Editor-in-Chief
Fueling Around
Europeans didn't know that corn existed before Columbus "discovered" America. It had been cultivated by indigenous North Americans for thousands of years before the Italian brought home what was to become a favorite food for many. The more adventuresome even figured out how to distill corn into something more to their liking.
Fast-forward five hundred years, and those yellow kernels are embroiled in a political food fight. Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, is being served up as a way to slake our thirst for foreign oil. Ethanol is even on the menu of the Iowa Caucus, the first major primary of the 2008 election year. It also is featured prominently in the latest energy bill passed this June by the Senate. One economist at Iowa State University predicts that enough new distilleries will be built in the state to make it a net corn importer. "We'll be the Arabs of the Midwest," says a manager of an Iowa farm cooperative.
(Excerpt) Read more at powermag.com ...
No problem, that. They're all coming here anyway.
I think what is going on is exciting and interesting. Altogether, all of the players combined are smarter than any critic.
Often, however, the feds forget that once an industry has matured, it's time to take off the training wheels and let the market drive the prices.
http://www.butanol.com/
http://scbiofuel.blogspot.com/2007/02/ethanol-vs-biobutanol.html
But after all the criticism he calls for a mandate
to force the consumer to use ethanol so we can see
if producers respond.
Why do this for an inherently substandard fuel?
Bad idea.
Better idea; sweet crude.
There is a large net-negative to every “bio-fuel” solution that is only hinted at in this article (how ethanol’s tax subsidized, government-fiat, increased demand is “fueling” cost increases across the regular food chain, domestically and internationally).
The source of that large net-negative is something that the proponents of all “bio-fuels” brag about - they’re “renewable”.
And how are they “renewable”, by what processes are they “renewable”? They take resources - land, water, energy - that are presently used and needed elsewhere, and convert those resources to the production of the “renewable” energy.
Meanwhile, the real positive of “fossil” fuels lies ignored - they are not needed for anything else; if they were not converted for energy production they would just sit where they lie.
We make use of what would otherwise have no function - fossil fuels, while current political correctness praises “energy production” that mandates all kinds of otherwise useful resources be converted to “renewable” energy. Kind of perverse logic, in long term economics, if you ask me.
Sounds to me like the “renewable energy” world can only be more expensive and poorer for the average man, when all costs are considered.
A. Ethanol is not less polluting.
B. Man-made CO2 is not the cause of global warming.
C. The production and use of Ethanol is not less harmful to the environment overall than the gasoline additive MBTE that ethanol was mandated to replace.
The only “victory” that Ethanol presents is that the corn lobby has found a means of politically perpetuating government subsidies for them just when it was beginning to lose political support for the basic “agricultural” rational for their continuance. And the Clintonoids wail about the influence of energy “special interests” over “Republicans”??? Talk about hubris in hypocrisy!!!!
Despite the warnings about ‘renewables’ over the years, the left has kept pushing and pushing. Now they are finding out that old truism that a ounce of bitter experience is more powerful than 10 lbs of good advice. It seems that we never learn until our collective noses have been rubbed so hard into the poop pile we can never get the smell out.
Libs don’t even learn than for very lng. They are entirely devoted to the idea that it is entirely possible to pick up a dog turd by the clean end.
That is an interesting point. Factor into it that our corn crop has produced huge surpluses which have been a problem for us and others. It has cost us in price supports whicxh we now don’t have to pay. I read that Bush has thus saved $10b. Also, we were accused of dumping cheap corn on the world market with which third world farmers could not compete. Some say that drove some Mexicans here. With corn prices up, however, those poor farmers may even be able to buy tractors qand make some money. They may make some ethanol, too. It is not a panacea, but it is not all bad either. But then, I am from the corn belt.
One question among others that comes to my mind about corn to ethanol for fuel is the water supply. How much additional water will be needed to grow the corn, make the mash, condense the alcohol, etc? If I remember correctly, many of the agricultural areas in the corn belt and westward are already at or nearing a water crisis. The aquafirs are rapidly going down and the populations in desert areas going up. There are a number of alternatives to fossil fuel use for generating power but I have yet to hear of a good substitute for fresh water for use in sustaining human, animal or vegetable life.
One question among others that comes to my mind about corn to ethanol for fuel is the water supply. How much additional water will be needed to grow the corn, make the mash, condense the alcohol, etc? If I remember correctly, many of the agricultural areas in the corn belt and westward are already at or nearing a water crisis. The aquafirs are rapidly going down and the populations in desert areas going up. There are a number of alternatives to fossil fuel use for generating power but I have yet to hear of a good substitute for fresh water for use in sustaining human, animal or vegetable life.
“But then, I am from the corn belt.”
Yea, the “industrial-welfare-queen region” of the U.S. If every industry in the nation received the % of their income that has been derived from tax subsidies and direct payments from tax subsidized programs that the “corn belt” has received in the last 30 years, the United States would no longer exist; it would have been completely bankrupt long ago.
More to the point, welfare is like an addictive drug and it is hard to wean people.
You evade the fact that I am referring (with respect tax subsidies and direct income from tax-subsidized handouts) to an industry, and within that industry to some particular segments of it (agro-industrial empires), not individuals. Give the auto-industry, the retail industry, the entire energy sector, steel, cement, tourism, computers, construction, mining, transportation and every other industry the level of corporate welfare that the “corn” lobby gets and the nation would nearly immediately spend itself into oblivion.
The economic history is that 85% of the farm subsidies go to the top 5-15% of “farms” (in terms of income) which, within agriculture is not predominately family farms.
The economic history is that “farm subsidies” by their distortion of “payments” (total payments of all kind) to those in major commodity markets have done more to destroy “family farms” than anything the 1940s American socialists could have invented. The subsidies did not save family farms, they helped to destroy them.
They have accelerated the consolidation of farming into fewer and fewer hands; made it less economically viable for family farms to succeed; and in those two areas alone engendered economic conditions that year by year require family farmers to quit (because such a large income is derived from crop supports and subsidies, larger farms and growing surpluses benefit the larger farms at the expense of the family farm).
With the demise of the solid family farm, the native small towns and the native labor surplus in “farming” regions has shrunk as well, requiring more and more imported labor year by year.
It is a farce to suggest that any of this has been or can be the legitimate long-run interests to the majority of people in the region - who, were it not for the skewing of annual income averages by the inclusion of the minority that is being subsidized the most, would be among the poorest in the nation.
I don’t disagree, but try to talk them out of even a penny. They are so completely locked in that they are not the same rugged farmers their ancestors were. Now, create a new market that increases the price of that corn fourfold and you now have a way to back out of the subsidies.
You're saying "now create a government-fiat mandated market", ethanol, that in itself is subsidized, and which only due that government mandate, and for no other reason, artificially increases the price of corn.
There is a better way. End the entire present construction of all agricultural subsidies, 100%, and institute separate measures, limited by income, unrelated to commodity markets themselves, to help (and strictly limited to) small family farms, and only small family farms. You can have an "FHA" style program for mortgage and capital-expense loan assistance TO SMALL FAMILY FARMS; you can have "small business administration" grant and loan programs, limited TO SMALL FAMILY FARMS; you can provide government assistance for groups of family farms to create their own co-operatively owned and operated distribution companies; and academic training and professional expertise for such co-operative units to help its members predict the most optimal production goals. There are dozens of things that can be done for small money and can be made UNAVAILABLE ACROSS THE BOARD to an entire agricultural sector, without regard to income.
The agricultural subsidies were structured like Medicare - even the billionaires get them. It's a waste, and there is NO legitimate need to reach a "replacement" of those subsidies as a continuing sop to the entire sector.
On the other hand, if "energy", as a economic enterprise, should get some assistance at this time it should (1) not be at any time in the form of distributing payments and direct subsidies, from the taxpayers to anyone, (2)it should be done in the form of reducing, in the extreme, taxes that energy outfits might otherwise have to pay, (3)it should be ACROSS THE BOARD to ALL energy production or distribution enterprises, for ANY kind of energy, or energy source WITHOUT DISTINCTION (yes, coal, nuclear, gas, oil as well as EVERYTHING else - to no greater or lessor extent).
If there should be tax breaks for "energy" it should mean that All energy should have the same tax advantages, the tax advantages should equal and level, and let true science and markets reward those who true science and the markets demonstrate should be rewarded - not politicians and not "science" that is more political science than honest "climate" science.
There is really no reason to do what you suggest. Attachment to small family farms that are not economically viable is sheer sentimentality, and that is not a public interest, at all.
Many family farms that have a hard time now would be economically viable, in our major commodity-growing categories, just as they in fact are in most other categories that are not subsidized, were it not for the price/market perversions that result in the major commodity growing categories, from the subsidies for those commodities.
And since when is a stable, agricultural-based, rural small town, heartland culture of a nation NOT in the “public interest”, while the likes of Archer Daniels Midland is??????? Your priorities, as to when and where it is and is not appropriate for the government to provide some modicum of assistance are off kilter.
Western “free traders” complain about the high price of rice in Japan - something that the Japanese themselves do not complain about. But, rural Japan, unlike rural U.S. has not seen the heart of the national rural heartland and culture destroyed with subsidies that fail to discriminate between giant corporations and small farmers. Even now, technology, such as the internet, is extensively put to use NOT to drag Japanese from small rural communities, but to enhance the prospects for their continued success as small rural communities. When looking at the sum, and the foundations of what makes a nation, the way the Japanese have kept their rural life vibrant is not something to be arrogantly dismissed, from a strict “free traders” point of view, as “not in the national interest”. if anything, in the long run, it is very much in the national interest, in any nation that has the means to feed itself from its own native resources.
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