Will Algore ever stop this insanity?
Look at the enviros in the Democrat Party.
Now look at the only other place where liberals are totally in charge, the public school system.
Taking them all together, I think things are working out just like the nutballs want it to: a dumbed down, malnourished population that never travels more than fifty miles from their birthplace.
Welcome to the new serfdom!
AL EAT WORLD. RAAAWRRR!
“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” Matthew 16:26
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36
“For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?” Luke 9:25
Eliminate world hunger...feed the obese to the starving.
This article is a load of crap.
There were hungry people long before ethanol became in vogue. I suspect that corn is not a huge part of their diet anyhow.
We have sent billions of dollars of free food aid to Africa and they are still starving.
Corn prices were $2.00 a bushel for most of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, not even keeping close to rising equal to the inflation rate.
Much of the corn consumed in America is made into corn syrup, which is consumed in Coke, Pepsi,RC and other cola type drinks. From the looks of the obese population, cutting back on that consumption might not be a bad thing.
Kelloggs buys corn for say $5.00 a bushel. 56 pounds. Sells approximately 70 boxes of corn flakes for $4.00 a box.
Thats Kelloggs making $280.00 a bushel from the farmers $5.00.
And the article complains that farmers are getting wealthy??? Looks like the consumer’s end is where the mark up is, not from the producers side of the financial picture.
Farmers traditionally sell their grain to brokers and have no control over the price they recieve. They are unable to pass on increases in fuel, fertilizer, transportation and equipment, and increased property taxes. Even the cost of storage has to be accounted for. Many years farmers made no money, and the crops rotted on the ground because there was not enough demand. The government subsidy kept them afloat. But now they are making some money and the subsidy is no longer available to grow corn. In fact, pressure from the EU and the Worldly fair traders on government subsidys is causing those subsidys to be reduced or eliminated so the rest of the World can “compete” on a fair and equal pricing system.
A farmer friend told me last week that it costs $178.00 an acre “JUST FOR FERTILIZER” to grow corn. A #50 pound bag of seed corn is $60.00 and plants an average of 3 acres. The tractor passes over the field at least twice before the crop is planted. Diesel fuel is $4.69 a gallon for the tractors. One more pass over after the crop germinates to keep the soil loose. One more pass over with the combine to harvest. Then the truck bill to the terminal.
Looks like a very substantial investment just to plant corn. And there are no guarantees that the crop wont be wiped out by drought, hail, flood, insects etc after the investment.
Another farm friend never even combined his corn crop last fall because the storage bins were full and there was no place to take the crop.
Corn prices will continue to go up because the cost of planting is too high. The planting expenses, and the fertilizer costs, are all tied into the cost of transportation and oil. If it costs over $200.00 an acre just to plant corn, without accounting for the other expenses like fuel, equipment, taxes, with no guarantees on income, most farmers are planting soybeans.
Also here in the midwest, there has been so much rain any corn planted from now on will have reduced yields.
“The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
The last time I posted this I got lambasted by pro-Cornballs, so here it goes again! (Donning FLAK jacket and helmet....)
Let’s be fair.
He was fat before he started his second wave of cashing in on environmentalism.
listen... warming, cooling, it was 50/50. so i took a shot!!!
Ohh WOE is me... whys everybody pickin on me???
