Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 05/27/2008 9:53:19 AM PDT by Winged Hussar
"In terms of renewable fuels, ethanol is the worst solution," Patzek says. "It has the highest energy cost with the least benefit."
Ethanol is produced by fermenting renewable crops like corn or sugarcane. It may sound green, Patzek says, but that's because many scientists are not looking at the whole picture. According to his research, more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol than the energy contained within it.
Patzek's ethanol critique began during a freshman seminar he taught in which he and his students calculated the energy balance of the biofuel. Taking into account the energy required to grow the corn and convert it into ethanol, they determined that burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65 percent. Later, Patzek says he realized the loss is much more than that even.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
The farmers aren’t buying it, either. I live in an area of Indiana that grew a HUGE amount of corn last year. There are literally thousands of acres that were knee-high in corn this time last year lying fallow. I drive past them every day.
Even the no-til equipment for soybeans leaves traces that I would notice. The fields surrounding the Evansville Regional airport haven’t been touched. That totals about 3000 acres. There’s about 1500 more along Green River road north of Lynch to Booneville-New Harmony road and about 1000 more just east of US 41 on B-NH rd.
It’s interesting that whenever there is a suggestion that a collectivist response to a perceived need is called for, it’s always someone else’s wealth that should be collected.
Corn last year would normally rotate into beans for this year, but the window for planting beans is much later in the spring than corn. The tenant will plant the bean field after he has all his corn planted. With $13.00 beans, no one leaves prime land fallow.
You’ll have to excuse me for asking just what in the he!! you are talking about, since I KNOW I did not suggest any sort of collectivist response. It is COLLECTIVISM that is creating 90% of our problems and ethanol is primarily another collectivist response, which SOME on this board are eager to embrace. I am trying to get you to embrace a FREE MARKET solution instead. Which would have the extra advantage of NOT depriving the poor in third world hell holes of food they need. Of course part of MY solution would entail getting rid of crop subsidies across the board, stopping all government contributions to foreign aid and the UN, and getting rid of the UNCONSTITUTIONAL restrictions on people drilling for oil wherever it can be found, while at the same time encouraging (tax incentives or just the “bully pulpit”) development of fiscally responsible alternatives.
So kindly explain to me just where I called for a “collectivist” solution to the situation. Else ask that your comment be removed as totally inappropriate.
When you advocate for below market prices for farm commodities so that “we” can feed the third world, you’re advocating for the confiscation of either the farmer’s or the taxpayer’s wealth.
And just where did I do this? I advocated doing away with crop subsidies, not enacting below market pricing. I advocated getting rid of the ethanol mandate that is artificially DRIVING UP prices for food (of ALL sorts, because feedstocks of corn for animals is more expensive and reducing acreage devoted to OTHER crops is being reduced to grow more subsidized corn). So just exactly HOW do you come by your conclusion?
Or are you referring to my response to that jackass, Liberty 275? Because if he, she or it is serious in that post, about letting someone starve to death because food that could be sold (at market prices) to that country is being diverted through government mandates and subsidies to ethanol production to give Liberty 275’s corvette an increase in horsepower, you’ve got the cart and horse mixed up real bad.
The US exported more corn last year, even with the surge in domestic ethanol production, than it did the year before without the ethanol production. If the subjects of Third World satrapies are starving, it’s not the fault of American farmers.
From looking at the WX reports for your area, you’ve had a substantial amount of rain this month - over 5 inches. Last year during May, you had less than 3” by this time. Apparently about 20% of this moisture just happened in the last few days.
When you have too much moisture in the fields, and you don’t have sufficient drainage, you get results like this: your tractor is stuck in the mud up to the axles. Your planter is nearly lost in the churned up trenches behind the tractor.
http://combineforums.proboards42.com/index.cgi?board=tractors&action=display&thread=1696&page=1
To get that tractor out, you have to pull yet another tractor out into the field to pull out the first tractor, then you have to get out the implement or planter. That explains why there are two tractors in many of those shots.
Those are the fun times. Sometimes, you need to get an excavator out into the field to dig a path out for the tractors. This explains the big track hoe you see in some of these pics.
Then you have to put all the mush back in place, smooth it out and make it navigable for planting and harvesting.
This, we almost never had to do in Nevada. Our soils have high sand/gravel content and drain very well. Clay-bound soils of the rivered areas of the midwest - woof. They can hold moisture in them for a month unless you’ve put in a lot of drain tile to drain off the water.
As wet and cold as this spring has been, there’s a lot of corn in the midwest that will go in weeks later than it did last year. Some of the corn might go in as late as the second week of June. If the soil doesn’t dry/drain out soon enough, many farmers might have to switch to soybeans to salvage the season. If you see them planting the fields late in June or even out into July, it might well have absolutely nothing to do with ethanol or corn economics; it might be a simple issue that they could not get into the fields soon enough to plant corn.
As I like to tell people: farming looks oh-so-easy from the spectator side of the fence. I used to think so too. After I got into farming, I learned that farmers have the patience of Job and the courtesy of Miss Manners. Because if they didn’t, they’d likely punch the lights out of most know-it-all non-farmers who spout nonsense heard every day.
Look, I don’t mean to rain on your parade here, but here’s the facts about why people in the third world are hungry:
Their politicians are using food as a means of political retribution and control.
That’s it.
For example, Zimbabwe. Zim used to be the “breadbasket of Africa” - they exported quite a lot of food, they used modern farming techniques and equipment, they really did a very good job of producing food.
Then the commie thug Mugabe decides that he’s going to drive off the successful, modern farmers because, well, they’re white. And white people in Africa must be guilty of *something*, so let’s take their land away and “redistribute” it to Mugabe’s flunkies.
Net result, they’re importing food now, and well on their way to causing a big-time humanitarian crisis. The US farmer, subsidies and ethanol are nowhere on their event horizon of problems.
How to solve this problem? It sure isn’t to export food to them, even at cheap (or free) prices. The real solution to this problem is for the US POTUS to drop a couple of dimes in the following order:
1. UN HQ in NYC. Withdraw from the UN and tell them to bugger off. We’re going to cut our own road in foreign policy now, and thank all of you chump ankle-biters very much, but we’re no longer going to listen to you, much less feign interest in what you have to say.
2. Call up the Commandant of the USMC, then the JCS and say “We need to send a MAU into Zim, and we want to kill Mugabe and his thugs. Happy hunting, bury the bodies so they don’t stink up the joint, and be back here in three months.”
No reconstruction, no “nation building” or other such nonsense. Just kill the thugs, bury them and leave the natives to put things right, the way they want them.
That would do more for feeding those poor people than sending any amount of food aid into these dirt-hole nations. They obviously can grow food, they obviously have the climate and soil to make real production. All they need are the clowns eliminated. What the west needs to do is quit playing patty-cake with these clowns. Just lay down a card that says “We’re no longer going to feed you and your thugs and empower you through idiotic foreign aid that you steal to enrich yourselves. We have a new rule: you starve your people, we kill you.”
Pretty soon after we did the third one of these clowns, you’d see there be no more famine in the world. In the whole of the 20th century, there has been no famine that has been attributed to crop failure. The have *all* been the result of political policies, transportation failures, trade wars, etc. The deaths due to political famines (eg, Ukraine, the Chinese famine of ‘58 to ‘61, et al) have body count that make the Holocaust pale in comparison.
The central problem is that the Europeans are just ducky with tyrants killing their own people, just so long as they don’t cross borders to do it. As long as they stay inside their own fence and kill their own people, the UN and the Eurocrats are just ducky with that. Then when the bodies stack up high enough, they start hectoring us (the US taxpayer) to fund the idiots in the UN to “save these poor people.”
I’m fed up with it. And I really don’t have the patience of a millisecond for anyone to blame the US farmer, who feeds more of his fellow humans than any other group of people on the face of the whole wretched planet. (about 112 for every US farmer, last I saw)
I’m not blaming the farmers or anyone else but the government and its idiotic, not to say CRIMINAL, policies on energy and particularly ethanol. More food could be sold abroad were it not for the subsidies and reduced acreage re: ethanol/corn production. But my main comment was in response to Liberty 275’s completely asinine comment about someone starving to death so his/her Corvette could have more horsepower. That was way over the top. But I would almost agree with you on the remedy for the Mugabes of the world... except that I would set up a trust fund somewhere and use it to fund bounties on these scumsuckers... like Mugabe or those thugs “running” Burma. Make it a free market, private solution.
Tax breaks and investment perks for moderate temperature geothermal ORC power plant technology that operates off industrial waste heat / geothermal applications to generate power directly and run at 90% efficiency, without impacting oil and gas production.
....is not correct for waste heat. I have done some research on these units and contacted the manufacturer. A typical temperature difference between the heat source and the heat sink is about 120F. The maximum (Carnot) efficiency runs about 20%, not 90%. The actual efficiency is below 20%. Given the capital cost to install and start these units, the price of the energy it will replace has to be very high.
I am not saying these are bad units, I like them. In cases like the Alaska geothermal field, where it was replacing expensive diesel generated electricity in a remote and isolated location with free hot water and a relatively constant and cold heat sink (a local cold 50F stream that flows by gravity), it works. However, in the lower 48 states, there are not many places where this is economical.
As long as you can continue to pump more oil out of the ground, it doesn't matter IF there is a net loss. It only matters when the oil supply goes dry, which it has not.
I'm not saying every "energy bit" Pimentel uses against corn based ethanol should legitimately be counted against it's production, but if there is an activity that would not have happened except for the production of ethanol, then it should be counted. In my opinion, this includes the energy expended to build more tractors just for that purpose, etc., etc. Does this make corn based ethanol a loser? I don't know.
The real "bottom line" question is, if we were to run out of oil tomorrow, could corn based ethanol produce enough fuel on it's own to run the nation AND support it's own production?
If the answer to this question is no, then this is a losing energy policy and not doing corn based ethanol is the better alternative. If the answer is yes, then the question becomes a matter of cost on a btu basis vs. other fuels.
As with the AGW issue, this really should be a scientific question with only one possible answer, not a political issue decided on consensus or payoff.
There you go, using that word “criminal” again for some use other than feeding the wretches of the third world.
Down this road lays increasing criminalization of food inequity for any reason. You overweight? Then the excess calories you consume are criminal. Putting barley into beer, which isn’t a necessary staple? You’re a criminal.
You don’t want to go down the road of deciding that something other than feeding the wretches of the third world dirtholes is “criminal.” Putting barley, corn or other grains into cattle is criminal in the minds of many UN-like pecksniffs. I like my beef, I like my beer and I like whisky. I’m simply not going to stand for any pinhead telling me that enjoying beer is taking the “food out of the mouths of children” in some third world dung heap.
I’d agree with setting up a trust fund for bounties, if the idiots who sit in Congress would actually read the US Constitution and understand what it means under Article I, Section VIII, Para 11, “...letters of marque and reprisal...”
What is, IMO, “criminal” is the policies (or lack there of) enacted by our Rats and Rinos in the Congress and signed into “law” by Bush the Younger.
The effect such “policies” have on others outside our borders is a horrendous unintended consequence (or perhaps not so unintended if what I understand about the radical greens is true) that can mean starvation in some countries so that the eco-nazis can have their little victory. Preventing our oil companies from drilling in certain areas is a MAJOR thing for these freaks and this last so-called energy bill was a big victory for them. That the populations of some nations may be decimated by starvation (due to their own governments’ actions as well as ours) may just mean to the freaks fewer bodies to “interfere” with nature and the alleged earth goddess, gaia...
Let’s not forget Bob Dole and his unholy alliance and shilling for Archer Daniels Midland.
NO ONE IN CONGRESS IS CLEAN!
I did not see the 90% figure in their info. #1CTYankee, is there a source on that?
Thanks!
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