Posted on 05/31/2011 1:44:23 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Sarah Palin was asked Tuesday about the sticky subject of ethanol subsidies, and she said that not only they should they be squelched but that all federal energy subsidies should be eradicated.
"I think that all of our energy subsidies need to be relooked at today and eliminated," Palin told Real Clear Politics at a coffee shop in Dillsburg, Pa. "And we need to make sure that we're investing and allowing our businesses to invest in reliable energy products right now that aren't going to necessitate subsidies because, bottom line, we can't afford it."
Ever the maverick, Palin was responding was in direct opposition to Mitt Romney, who last week in Iowa, came out in favor of government subsidies for ethanol, the fuel produced from corn and other farm products.
"I support the subsidy of ethanol. I believe ethanol's an important part of our energy solution in this country," Romney told a supporter from West Des Moines on Friday.
Neither former governor has officially stated his or her intention to run for the GOP nomination for president; however, Romney is expected to throw his hat in the ring later this week.
One former governor who has committed to running is Tim Pawlenty. In fact, it was in his statement announcing his candidacy that he also backed the elimination of ethanol and other energy subsidies. Unlike Palin, however, Pawlenty wants to take it slowly.....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
Ethanol costs way more in energy than in liberates in the tank.
Mitt is clearly pimping his opinion out to corn farmers.
Sarah, on the other hand, stands on principle.... again.
The corn is needed for food and feed, isn`t that right? Also if we grew corn for fuel in every field possible, would not be enough ethanol to make a difference... But the cost of corn for food/feed is to high because it`s going to fuel at a loss to taxpayers via subsidies.
Hey I am open to correction, tell me where I am wrong.
Love that Sarah has done this, she can call the rest of them out in the primaries after Iowa
No doubt. Which is why I referred to the decision as heartbreaking.
It was gonna hurt, no matter what they did.
yes they are.
Maybe they will put the phosphates back in my laundry detergent!
LOL
(1) No one is questioning Sarah Palin's eligibility. ASA Vet is answering a question no one is asking.
(2) No, Daisyjane, spamming threads is not a gentle form of communication or persuasion. It is a sledgehammer approach.
(3) ASA Vet, maybe many people want you to keep it up, maybe not. I have zero way to verify that. But, even if I am only a minority of one, it is VERY annoying to me. Due to my current job and circumstances, about 80% of the time I can only access FR and post here via my cell phone. I'm not stupid, and don't need a brick wall to fall on me to get your point. Yet there it is, all too often in my face unbidden no matter what the topic of the thread. It takes up precious space on my small cell phone screen, and long ago ceased to be informative or interesting. Just the opposite for me, as I absolutely loathe seeing it now. At this point all you're doing is dishing extremely stale spam to the choir. Far better to add something fresh to the overall discussion regarding Palin and other potential GOP presidential candidates.
Granted, as is sadly too often the case these days, you can "shoot" the messenger, in the case me. Or you can take a more constructive approach. That's up to you. This is my one and only try at sharing my perspective with you on this matter.
Free market baby. Free Market.
Add me to those wishing it would stop.
You’ve made it 53:11
**Go look at how much water a damn golf course uses. It is absurdly more than any irrigated crop in the US, acre for acre.**
They have to be irrigated like crazy. Even here in the midwest, they ADD sand to the courses during construction so the ground will not get muddy and rutted when used after a heavy rain. But the sand helps it dry out and will cause the grass to wither without the irrigation.
The greens are given an occasional spreading of fine sand to hold down the thatch which makes the ball roll so nicely. But the extremely short grass gets cooked by the sun warming the sand.
And the pesticides per acre is absurdly higher on a golf course (Hey you golfers! Be sure to wash your hands after handling your golf shoes. Especially if you’re the nail biting sort).
The fertilizers are really laid on heavy for the thick (dense) greens and tees to survive and thrive while being mowed so short. Walk by a pile of plugs taken from an aerated green and take a whiff; the ammonia makes it smells as bad as any comparable pile of farm manure.
Most golf courses also employ many illegal immigrants (I used to deliver sand to over 100 courses. Many of their maintenence depts had a manager and an assitant that could speak english; the rest only spanish).
Ethanol...yeah it shouldn’t be subsidized. Neither should airlines, the ‘arts’, abortion (the BADDEST of all), etc.
And "Mine, baby, Mine."
America's coal resources can power us for hundreds of years. Obama promised to shut down the coal industry just before elected in 2008.
All the electrical plant workers, miners, and transporters in southeast Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia went ape-sh_t, but the media wouldn't report it.
We've got the energy here, Jim. Let's use it. Mine, baby, mine!
The government shouldn’t be in the business of manipulating markets.
Defense, police, transportation, and commerce. Those are the only legitimate functions of government that I can think of off the top of my head.
Well, we eat field corn in limited ways:
- corn meal
- grits
- corn squeezin’s (aka whiskey, corn likker, etc)
- High Fructose Corn Syrup, which I believe we could do without.
- corn chips
- etc.
As you see, there’s not a huge direct consumption, but it is there.
We sure as heck don’t eat field corn as corn on the cob. I’ve done it, but boy is it *tough*.
Yes. I do not by any means minimize the sacrifice the farmers made. I have a friend who was trying to make the case: Well, their stuff is are insured, they have crop insurance, blah, blah... I told her (she’s always moved about & rented & never owned property beyond a car) that she doesn’t understand that even if you can get every dollar in that insurance back, if you have put your life into a place, there is so much you can’t get back. There are things that money can never really compensate.
That’s why I think this guy is a hero:
(Skip the 1st 1:30 — the report has so many facts wrong
that it’s not even funny.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W0WEE3V2I0&NR=1
I’m only about 30 miles away from Birds Point: The levee blast sounded like medium loud thunder here! I intend to drive around the floodway area maybe in August of the next 2 or 3 years and see how things are going there. I know there’s not anything I can do to help, but maybe I can be there in spirit for people who sacrificed so much to help people in the area I’m in.
(Sorry, all, to go OT & mushy, but it seemed important to say...)
Interesting info. I did know that food prices fell as a % of family income for some time (partially credit Earl Butz, right?). But I didn’t know the exact numbers. I wonder how much of the decline came from increased farm productivity, and how much from subsidies? And how much more in taxes did taxpayers shell out to fund the subsidies?
I assume that at some income level it goes negative: Ie., the tapayer pays more taxes either directly or indirectly to pay for the farm subsidies than they get back in lower food prices. So at some point it becomes another way to transfer wealth from higher income citizens to lower income persons (citizens or not.) Right?
As for “user friendly” - I’m really appreciating that right now, as my wife is gone for an extended period back home visiting family — you get the picture, I’m sure! :-)
You are right on the falsehood of ethanol being useful for emissions control in automobiles. If anyone asks me “how to get farmers to get ethanol out of our gas tanks” I tell them the real culprit here isn’t the farmers, it is the EPA and the environmentalists.
The whole sorry episode of how we arrived at ethanol in our tanks is thus:
1. EPA decides that smog is caused (in part) by unburnt fuel in open-cycle or carbureted auto engines. To this end, they decide that adding an “oxygenate” to the fuel (a substance that has an abundance of oxygen molecules in excess of the carbon and hydrogen molecules that could eat up all the oxygen on their own, leaving the surplus of O’s for use in the combustion of gasoline) is desired.
2. The first oxygenate is MTBE, what was effectively a waste by-product the refiners had laying about in oil production.
3. ChemE’s and hydrologists tell the EPA to NOT go down this road, as MTBE is highly volatile and VERY mobile in soil. If you have a tank leak of (eg, diesel), the diesel tends to reach an equilibrium in the soil and stay relatively immobile. Pour some MTBE on top of that spill from 30 years ago and *straight* down it goes, into the water table. The ChemE’s and hydrologists told the EPA and environmentalists this in the early 90’s, to no avail. MTBE starts getting blended into fuels in urban areas, starting in the home of all envirowhacko nonsense, California.
4. Over the years, the predictions of ground water contamination come true - in spades. Google (or otherwise search) for “MTBE” and “ground water.” Prepare to be shocked.
5. So the EPA starts casting about for a oxygenate that has less (not “no” but “less”) mobility in the soil. American farmers, who at that time were suffering under crushing low commodity prices, step forward and say “How about ethanol? We have this HUGE surplus of corn (and in the mid-90’s, they were not lying - we had huge carry-outs, crushing low prices, etc) and we can turn this into ethanol pretty cheaply, add this to the gasoline and there you go. Oxygenate.
BTW - ever wonder why methanol and ethanol burn with a pale blue flame, even if all you’re doing it lighting up a puddle? You can get oil products to burn with a pale blue flame if you force-feed the fire more air or O2, but you don’t need to do anything other than light up a puddle of alcohols and the burn with a blue flame. Why is that? Because the combustion throws off an excess of oxygen for the combustion’s requirements, that’s why. When you’re casting about for an oxygenate, start with anything that, in a puddle, burns with a pure blue flame.
5. This works for awhile, first getting rammed down the throats of urban gasoline markets. Yes, ethanol is hygroscopic and therefore will add water to your infrequently used tanks of gasoline (eg, boats, small engines) and yes, it varnishes up faster than pure gasoline. I’ll grant people ALL those complaints about ethanol in gasoline. They’re all true. So are the issues with seals and rubber.
But...
6. Detroit, never failing to exhibit their crass stupidity and ignorance of fundamental engineering, just wants to shove ethanol into cars as tho it is gasoline. Detroit takes no effort to use ethanol as what it could have been - a huge booster of engine efficiency.
Let me bore people for a sec with some engine engineering: One of the limiting factors of gasoline engine efficiency is the low compression ratio. At higher compression ratios, gasoline engines with spark ignition go into “pre-detonation” (which many people mistakenly call “pinging”). In the old days, you used to pay mucho dinero for higher octane gasoline to solve this pre-det problem. High octane fuel also, like ethanol in gasoline, has a lower amount of BTU’s per gallon - ie, you’ll get lower MPG in an engine that does not require high-octane gasoline by using it. You get more “power per gallon” in lower octane fuel.
But in the old days, we used to increase octane by adding TEL - Tetra Ethyl Lead. Us old farts here will remember leaded fuel. In aviation fuel, they used to add toluene and other aromatic hydrocarbons to increase the octane. Those old WWII fighters had terrific effective compression ratios - way the heck up there once you put in the high-boost setting on the blower or closed the gate on the turbo. WWII avgas was up near 130 octane. Even today, avgas is 100 octane “low lead” fuel - just for Cessna or Piper bug-mashers. Toluene, however, is toxic like benzene, just not as bad as benzene, so the addition of toluene for Mom, Dad and Junior going to the shore or mowing the law is right out.
Enter ethanol, which has a test octane of 129. IF (and that’s a huge if) Detroit had their head somewhere other than their nether regions, they could have used the oxygenate mandate of ethanol to boost the efficiency of gasoline engines. Ferrari has done this with one of their fire-breathing engine of about 500HP - on E-85, they get more MPG and more HP with E-85 than normal gasoline. How? Boosting the compression ratio, probably by changing the pistons or cylinder heads. Detroit, however, makes no such attempts.
7. But do we even NEED ethanol in our gasoline any more? No. With “closed cycle” electronic fuel injection now the overwhelming majority of the US auto fleet, no, we no longer need ethanol or MTBE in our gasoline. At all.
Really, we don’t. The only cars that really benefit from additional O2 in the fuel are the open-cycle (eg, throttle body injection) systems or cars with carburetors. OK, so your classic 50’s Chevy will smoke a little bit. So what? How often do you pull that beauty out of the garage? Four, five times a year? This is not a frequency, nor is the ownership rate of such old cars, sufficient to justify the policy of adding oxygenate to fuel any more.
8. So now corn *and* oil prices are zooming upwards, thanks in part to China, thanks in part to Ben and his Magic Federal Reserve Helicopter, which looks a little like a CH-47 “Chinook,” only about the size of the Queen Mary. If you ever look up and see something that you think is a UFO with rotors, scattering little bits of confetti on the wind? That’s Ben. He’ll be the little bald guy on the jump ramp on the rear, flinging paper out of a big burlap sack.
Now we’re in the worst of all possible worlds: We have crappy gasoline which many people hate for the increased maint expense, but which adds nothing other lower mileage than we otherwise would get on modern cars (because Detroit has their head up their buttocks), we have a bizarre economic policy of effectively paying oil companies to do this to us, and farmers no longer need this subsidy, yet they get blamed for it, even tho with the prices in the commodity markets, no one needs the blenders’s credit to create an ethanol market.
Oh, and we have supposed “free market supporting” pols who stump based on this insanity.
For me, someone who has traced out the full map of this insanity, it is maddening. I really don’t like farmers getting the bad rap, when it really isn’t their money people are talking about with the blending credit per gallon, even tho I am in favor of eliminating ag subsidies (provided we have sound trade policies to go with it, and that does not mean “free trade” as we now have it). I’m resigned to the fact that Detroit is staffed with morons and retards for engineers (and I say that as a retired engineer) and there’s nothing we can do about that, either.
What can we do?
Want to eliminate ethanol people? Get rid of the mandate for oxygenate. I think this is possible, when coupled with a push on the issue of food prices. Show that ethanol has little efficacy any more in terms of clean air, while adding somewhat to food prices. Get rid of the oxygenate mandate and the issue goes away as soon as oil prices come down and corn prices are still high. Poof, the ethanol plants will close up or mothball quickly.
Yep!!!
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