No thanks. I prefer free markets, not corporate welfare.
In before the zot?
Sorry, I must respectfully disagree. The ends do not justify the means. Increasing agri-business is great, but we don’t need to do it in the most wasteful way possible.
Sorry, Darvin, but ethanol production is an idiotic dead-end designed to enrich the agri special interests. Ethanol is a scam of gigantic proportions, and the people that promote it are smart enough to know it. That, sir, is the definition of “GRIFTER”.
Dear, dear Darvin, let us NOT count the ways you are a fool, lest we have to hog every byte in Cyberdom.
Corn, at Best, is a huge waste of resources!
BTTT -for later refute of all this bullsh!t@
Shots of Pennzoil on me!!
“the number one crop in the U.S. happens to be corn which is also very suitable for making ethanol”
This is the point where I stopped reading this BS
Ethanol is corrosive, and costs you 1/3 of your power, torque, and fuel economy.
It also costs a ton more to produce than its artificially-subsidized price, so you’re really paying 6 or 8 bucks for every gallon of it forced into your tank (and actually more, since people don’t pay taxes uniformly and if you’re on this forum you probably work for a living and thus shoulder the burden).
Farmers are already incredibly subsidized, so it’s absurd to throw even more money at them. If the product were legitimate, it would stand on its own two feet in the free market where people vote with their pocketbook.
Drop the subsidies, and drop the asinine laws mandating ethanol in the gas we have to put in cars not designed for it. Let distributors who want to sell E85 in the mid-grade slot to anyone willing to pay its true cost.
What a joke. Burning our food for fuel , and as I’ve read, no economic benefits from it. No thanks.
"You see, the ethanol program has had some, shall we say, unexpected consequences. Yes, the price of corn has almost tripled just in the last few years. From around $2. per bushel, now up to around $6. per bushel. Why? Because of the demand brought on by the ethanol program. Ha! Our farmers, after decades of being in the red, are now solidly in the black."
That's your sales pitch? Meanwhile, worldwide, virtually all food items have risen significantly in price. I'm glad for the farmers, but for all the good it's doing anyone else, I'd rather just toss the farmers a pile of money. It'd be cheaper.
And did you know that, according to the Farm Bureau, only 1% of U.S. farms are corporate owned, by the way?
This is one of those deliberately tweaked statistics that is so clumsily stated that's it's laughable. Yeah, cool, dude, how many acres of corn growing land are corporate-owned versus privately owned? And why should anyone care? I'm not impressed or unimpressed by the use of the owrd "corporate" which is just a variation in the form of ownership.
Add to that the increased demand for corn exports. A somewhat rosy picture for our family farms as the U.S. is, by far, the largest exporter of corn in the world. And the U.S. Farmer is not the only beneficiary. How about the American taxpayer? Due to farmers opting out of government subsidies because its more profitable to grow, we taxpayers will also benefit. And grain exports help our nagging trade deficit that seems to never end:
Oh yeah, ADM and ConAgra are in this to reduce our trade deficit. Sure. Got it.
So there you have it. Look what the ethanol program has done for the U.S.! Just in this short time. This is a boon for the U.S. agri-economy, short and long term. Now do you understand why there is so much resistance to those wanting to end it?
We all love sound bites here, especialy when they are addressed to a sixth grade intelligence level.
And there is also resistance to the ethanol program, itself. Much of that resistance is coming from outside the U.S.
And much of that resistance is from inside the US, where higher food costs are squeezing consumers. There's also dirty rotten resentment of the subsidies taxpayers have to pay for this inefficicent fuel, having nothing to do with greenhouse gases which most people don't give a crap about.
Hey, if I drop a quarter in will you give the same speech again?
I don’t have anything against ethanol as a fuel, but it’s not worth it when the result is a net energy loss mixed with an increase in food prices.
Any gains seen thus far are an illusion from bad math skills or wishful thinking.
Wake me up when we do it correctly. Corn is the wrong choice for starters.
Ethanol was tried as an additive to gasoline in the 1970’s when I was living in North Dakota and was a miserable failure. Extremely poor performance and damage to engines doomed it then. The quality may have improved in terms of performance and newer engines are able to burn it today. However, the costs of producing that ethanol is prohibitive, and the costs of corn as a food product will take away any agri-business benefits. Sorry, but you can’t be more wrong on this issue.
Take that stuff out of the ethynol fuel that prevents people from drinking it. Then we can drink moonshine straight from the pump for $4 a gallon!
Actually we can produce fuel from coal for about 50 cents a gallon now. Of course we would need flex fuel vehicles to use them. I generally agree with free markets, but I would support one government mandate, that all cars have chips that allow them to switch between fuels. It only costs about $100 and would allow us to use other fuels in the event of an oil disruption. That makes it a matter of national secuirity, the only legitimate justification.
BTW I recently heard that Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on alcohol with the idea that fuel would be created locally, and the oil companies helped push for prohibition to eleminate the possiblity. Don't know if it's true or not, but I would like to find out if there's anything to it.
With a few hundred years of oil in California, eliminate the subsidies for ethanol and we won’t have to put up with the garbage!
There is no global warming!
If you want to look for alternatives, and no reason we shouldn't, I'm quite intrigued with the prospects of algae.
Hey, I’m all for the Corn Ethanol program. That is at least if we can store the lightning in charcol lined wooden barrels of course.
Shame to waste such good stuff on a car......
As long as you don’t mind inflation, water depletion, food riots, death by starvation, and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest to grow crops that corn displaced, I guess ethanol is great idea!