It's the Obamacare, stupid!
One-half gallon of oil in the form of pesticides per bushel of corn would cost $2 to $3 per bushel. If this were true -- and it clearly isn't -- it should be enough to illustrate to literally anyone that the price of petroleum is quite literally the ONLY thing driving corn prices. And this idiotic piece of agitprop -- from a hydrogen "energy" advocacy site -- also shows the guy in the encounter suit spraying chemical fertilizer, a sight that I've never been privileged to see, what with me *growing up on a farm*.
- The Bum Rap on Biofuels [2008]
- Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed [2008]
- Oil Price Pressure Driving Global Switch to Biofuels [2006]
Maybe the cartoon was fostered by folks trying to grind an axe for other impractical fuels like hydrogen, but still this does not look like a claim that 1/2 gallon of oil goes solely into pesticides for a bushel of corn — but that it goes collectively into all the activity involved in producing the bushel, harvesting it, and processing that bushel into ethanol a la Arthur Daniels Midland. And the poison suit simply is a caricatured way of showing this ain’t watering the corn... gee whiz the whole operation isn’t located together either, are we going to quibble about this too.
Sunken, it is you that has posted the agitprop here.
The cartoon does not say 1/2 gallon of pesticides. The 1/2 gallon of fuel includes working the soil, harvesting the crop, and transporting it.
Ethanol is a waste of useful land.