Burning Food in Cars – an ‘anti-human ethos’

The post sounds like a gross exaggeration: The US has food coming out of its ears; it can afford to set aside a percentage of the farmland for ethanol.
No, I don’t care about starving Biafrans or whatever the latest tear-jerking famine story is.

Nothing illustrates the anti-human ethos of the Greens better than their support for “biofuels”.

Not true.
Their support for DDT ban have sentenced half a million people to death every year.
But biofuels come close, though.

Very well said! For us in the industrialized world, who pay around 5-10% of our budget on food, doubling food prices is an inconvenience, but not crippling. For the poorest in the world, who might spend 50% of their income on food, it’s a really BFD.
And it’s starting already. The so-called Arab Spring was sparked in part by rising food prices.

“Up to 10% ethanol” is such a wonderfully ambiguous phrase. Imagine pouring “may contain some milk fat” fluid onto your breakfast cereal.
After a protracted email exchange with Shell Canada, they admitted there is no way I can know what exactly I am buying at the pump as the ethanol dilution of gasoline is a federally mandated amount of their total national sales volume.
What you actually pump at any given time and location is “mystery mix” with an unknown energy (and thus mileage value) content of lower value ethanol.
Makes you wonder why they bother with the weights and measures inspectors calibrating the pumps for accurate volume delivery over a range of temperatures.

The US farmer lobby paid for this legislation to go through and it wants its money’s worth. To get it repealed you need to find somebody with deep enough pockets to outbid them, which would be difficult. That is what you get when your government is for sale. You guys might want to look at fixing your democracy sometime. In case you haven’t noticed, it is broken. At the moment you’ve got the best government … money can buy.

Joe Guerk says:
July 22, 2012 at 12:41 pm
“The post sounds like a gross exaggeration: The US has food coming out of its ears; it can afford to set aside a percentage of the farmland for ethanol.”
Yes, we (US) have corn coming out our ears. Which we used to sell in poor regions of the earth at bargain prices. Now we burn it, and they pay higher prices or starve.
” No, I don’t care about starving Biafrans or whatever…”
Exactly the point. Thank you.

I have to say that I think this is a bit excessive. Lots of states in the United States (at least) do not have an enormous amount of cropland growing food. In fact, in North Carolina we have rather a lot of cropland growing tobacco, that is to say, growing something even more useless and bad for mankind than biodiesel crops or corn from which ethanol can be made. There’s little profit in people trying to grow food on the land — first of all, the US has an enormous surplus of food grown on the farm and has for years to the extent that it has been subsidizing farmers for many decades not to grow food; second some of the land is too dry, too depleted by a couple of centuries of growing tobacco, too acid, to support growing more food that merely drops the price of food to where the farmer can’t make a living at it any more. In NC a lot of farmers grow tobacco because it is a high return crop. Corn isn’t.
Maybe pot would be, but of course hemp has a huge number of uses (not just smokability) — it can be made into paper, clothing, rope, and yes, alcohol or biodiesel. It grows fast and could easily be a major cash crop to replace tobacco on all accounts. Too bad it is restricted at best, illegal at worst, to grow.
People grow all sorts of things besides food. They grow trees to make into furniture or paper or houses. They grow grains like barley for the sole purpose of making them (at a ruinous loss relative to their food value) into beer, which is hardly a necessary nutrient. Well, maybe it is, but not as far as nutritionists are concerned. They grow hops just to put into the barley-wasting beer.
Asserting that there are people starving now because there are other people growing corn not to feed hogs but to turn into ethanol is an egregious claim, at least in the US. First of all, there are hardly any people in the US that are starving. Second, you’d have to show that somebody would farm food on the land being used to grow ethanol precursors, that the food thus grown wouldn’t cause farmers to go out of business by dropping food prices to where the market corrected itself right back to the current level of competitiveness. Third, you’d have to show that the food thus grown, openly sold on the free market, would prevent somebody else from starving because see first, hardly anybody in the US is starving and there are already programs galore that would feed them from our incredible surplus of food as it is.
Anything but free market prevention of starvation puts you right back into the government intervention seat. Should the government subsidize farmers not to grow anything to keep small farmers in business at a reasonable profit? Should they subsidize them to grow a big surplus so that the surplus doesn’t drive prices down to where they go out of business, or rather, so that they don’t go out of business as the price inevitably goes down? Should they subsidize some other crop that at least makes the farmer earn a living while keeping too many of them from growing food in a country where efficient farming means that one has to grow a huge, corporate amount of food to be profitable (on a good year)? Should they subsidize nothing, in which case it is very unlikely that one single person will be saved from starvation (or vice versa) in the free market, where if anything the free market is likely to drive people out of farming altogether and then drive prices up with even less food being grown?
The point is that markets are complex. Government policy and intervention have been involved in the manipulation of markets to accomplish goals held to be in the public interest from the very beginning of this country, with the very first tariffs and protections, with the very first taxes. You are perfectly within your rights to argue for or against the public policy decision that encourages farmers to grow crops that can be turned into fuel, but if you are going to claim that people are starving because of it, you’ll have to show me the people, and if you claim that world food prices are increasing, you’ll also have to show that the would be being propped up at this “increased” level without the benefit of fuel production otherwise.
Personally, I might even agree that mandated ethanol in gasoline is a questionable practice, and yes, it is bad to run in my boat even with enzymatic protections (although that is largely due to the way the motor is designed and built, not anything intrinsic or unfixable). I have moderate doubts that with current crop hybrids one can ever — or at least easily — establish a steady state biofuel basis for even the 1/3 or so of energy consumption that runs cars.
However, that’s now, this year. Next year somebody may genetically engineer a seed crop with 3x the oil production and the resulting biodiesel may be cheaper than the regular kind without subsidy. Or Iran could succeed in building a nuclear device, use it on Israel, which retaliates by nuking the entire middle east into a radioactive wasteland for the next 100 years, and the resulting rise in prices might make biodiesel and ethanol and gasoline made from coal enormously profitable, whereupon our existing limited capacity to keep things going with it might be all that saves civilization while it adjusts. And finally, while I know it is never welcome on this of all sites, it is the simple truth that the warmists could be right and evidence finally accumulates that convinces even me, even you, even Anthony. Honesty requires acknowledging at least the possibility, even if you think it unlikely.
Then the question is one of hedging one’s bets. By maintaining a moderately profitable biofuel industry, the government paves the way for scaling things up or down as future evidence dictates. If temperatures start dropping radically with no change in aerosols, perhaps because of the solar minimum, perhaps because of nonlinear negative feedbacks kicking in we know not of, a lot of supporters of the CAGW hypothesis will change their minds, including many climate scientists. Scaling down is easy. If temperatures start going up radically over the next decade, with over a 0.2 C bump consistent with the supposed 2.8 C climate sensitivity on doubling CO_2 to 600, scaling up is easy too. The current level of production is arguable, but as a hedged bet it isn’t insane.
Now if they’d just legalize hemp and openly encourage its investigation as a possible biofuel source, no matter how it turns out it wouldn’t be a total loss…;-)
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Joe Guerk says:
July 22, 2012 at 12:41 pm
The post sounds like a gross exaggeration: The US has food coming out of its ears; it can afford to set aside a percentage of the farmland for ethanol.
No, I don’t care about starving Biafrans or whatever the latest tear-jerking famine story is.
We have had this discussion on a previous thread.
There is every chance that next year the US will be importing wheat from South America as long as their harvests don’t fail. It is already importing corn.
“Grain prices set records as U.S. drought, food worries spread
CHICAGO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Grain prices pushed to record highs on Thursday as scattered rains in U.S. Midwest did little to douse fears that the worst drought in half a century will not end soon or relieve worries around the world about higher food prices.
Government forecasters did not rule out that the drought in the U.S. heartland could last past October, continuing what has been the hottest half-year on record.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-20/news/sns-rt-us-usa-droughtbre86f1d4-20120716_1_grain-prices-moderate-drought-national-drought-mitigation-center
and
Soybean prices set an all-time high; wheat, corn rise as crops crumple in blistering heat wave
The price of soybeans hit an all-time high Wednesday as a devastating heat wave continued to pound crops in fields.
Soybeans for August delivery rose 44.5 cents, or 2.7 percent, to finish at $16.835 per bushel. Wheat prices ended at the highest level since the spring of 2008 and corn prices are pushing toward their all-time high set in June 2011.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/markets/soybean-prices-set-an-all-time-high-wheat-corn-rise-as-crops-crumple-in-blistering-heat-wave/2012/07/18/gJQAvqtDuW_story.html
and
World grain price surge triggering defaults
(Reuters) – Grains suppliers are starting to default on previously agreed sales to major importers, including top wheat buyer Egypt, rather than deliver on contracts that are now losing money because of the huge rally in prices sparked by the U.S. drought.
The worst drought in more than 50 years is wilting crops in the U.S. Midwest and sending prices into overdrive, with corn alone surging by around 50 percent in the last month. Soybeans have also hit record highs, with wheat not far behind.
Crop downgrades in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan as drought followed a bitterly cold winter have added to global price rises, stoking fears of unrest especially in Middle Eastern countries, where high food prices can trigger political protest.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/19/us-grain-market-defaults-idUSBRE86I0EZ20120719
Its rapidly becoming not Biafra you need worry about but the USA. Supermarkets only hold 3 days of food the reserves ‘grain mountain’ has largely gone. see:
Spotlight G-20: Grain Reserves and the Food Price Crisis
With the U.S. government announcement last week that this year’s corn crop is expected to be much smaller due to an extended drought, agricultural commodity markets are yet again headed for high and unstable prices this summer. Is the world better prepared for the shortfall then it was in 2007? Certainly, the United States is not. To cite agricultural journalist Alan Guebert:
Indeed, according to CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation), there is not one teaspoon of sugar, one pound of peanuts, one slice of butter, one wheel of cheese, one bushel of wheat or even one chickpea in USDA’s pantry. CCC has nothing—nada, zip, goose egg—to release into the marketplace to slow or moderate what’s certain to be fast-climbing food prices in the coming months.
Other headlines
Russia grain harvest downgraded due to Black Sea weather – Reuters
Drought to cut Serbia grain harvest, drive up prices
Brazil ships corn to drought-stricken US
Argentina sees grains windfall from US drought
and on and on…..
And people pump grain based ethanol into their vehicles to run less efficiently.
I know _you_ don’t care but in the time you took to read this about a dozen children died of hunger.

People complain about how the process for making biofuels is inefficient, but trust me- you don’t want to see an effecient version. If that happens you could get the price of fuel and food to equalize (with the gap equal to the cost of the refining process. That would be bad. The only version of biofuels that is intelligent is one that converts residual plant waste. Even converting non-food crops is bad because you are increasing the demand for land to grow crops.
Joe Geurk
“The post sounds like a gross exaggeration: The US has food coming out of its ears; it can afford to set aside a percentage of the farmland for ethanol.”
The problem is that for the last 70 years the US government has subsidized agriculture to the point that we now determine world food prices. Demand is increasing (from population growth) and the US is reducing supply. The result is a price shock even though the drop in quantity is small, because demand for food is highly inelastic.
Now, in a market economy with a baseline set up this would automatically correct itself, but we don’t have that. Poor countries have diminished capacity to ramp up food production, poor people don’t have enough buying power to change food habits (if food becomes more expensive for first worlds we can simply eat less meat) and they have become dependent on US food because are subsidies allow us to dump agricultural products.
Essentially this is a food version of the 2001 California energy crisis, where shutting down a few plants caused electricity prices to spike and capped prices for the plant owners keep them from expanding.
I think the larger green organizations have come around and realize this is a bad idea, but it is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon. It is sort of funny- unlike almost all other political controversies in the US, this has an obvious answer… but one that won’t be embraced because a small group massively benefits (American farmers) and the rest of the population (despite statements of spreading democracy, the faith, complaints about collateral damage or anything else) doesn’t seem to care about foreigners. It isn’t an American problem- agricultural subsidies exist in the Eurozone and Japan. I’m not sure if they also embrace this specific stupidity, but if they don’t it is probably due to a lack of convertable crops.

Studied this at horticultural college. The fossil fuels required to plant, maintain and harvest the biofuel crop used much the same energy that the crop produced. Good earner though when the subsidies are taken into account.
Next thing will be to subsidise Photovoltaic panel schemes on productive farmland as photoynthesis is considered bad for the planet.

http://archvillain.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/not-this-again.jpg
The U.S. meets ALL domestic needs plus fulfilled ALL corn export demand and still adds to the surplus.
Almost every claim in the orig post is either wildly inaccurate or an outright lie. This is nothing more than a completely unsubstantiated and undocumented “drive by”
IMO this type simplistic activist comment simply does not deserve a response here. Little more than an advocacy “commercial” with no exhibited desire for discussion.