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

I kinda miss my old car… I had it tuned perfectly for Mohawk 94 octane ethanol blend, and it ran 12 seconds. Not bad for a 1987 street car at 3500 feet. In fact, my new car, a 2008 SRT4, is also happiest with lots of ethanol and higher octane, but that’s because it’s a turbo and can efficiently use that kind of fuel. I don’t notice much variation in mileage at all from fuel, but that’s mostly because this little pig of a car is about as aerodynamic as a brick with spoilers.
On the subject of rants, my 1987 Daytona Shelby Z was a piece of cake to modify. I completely rewrote the engine controller with more accurate fuel calculations than the factory was able to do, and had it to the point where highway mileage was in the 40-45 MPG range. The 2008 computer is security locked thanks to the EPA and it’s virtually impossible for me to increase its efficiency, thus reducing emissions. Thanks, EPA. I despise your draconian meddling with my car. I have never once achieved 30MPG on this car, and usually even highway is in the 25MPG range.
21 years of Progress, as defined by the EPA, is using almost twice the fuel with the associated emissions increases for a similar weight and performance car.

rgbatduke says:
July 22, 2012 at 1:49 pm
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…
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I am afraid you are a bit behind the times by a few years. The USDA/FDA put in new regulations on curing of tobacco and most of the farmers I know got out of tobacco.

Jul. 16, 2009
Congress made history with a vote on tobacco in June. But it wasn’t the kind of history that growers wanted to be part of. By big margins, both the House and the Senate voted to give the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over the tobacco industry, a power no federal agency had ever had…. “Growers expect a continuing escalation of add-on regulations from FDA, especially since the FDA will be funded by the user fee,” Bunn says. “Since current FDA programs are under-funded, the tobacco user fee will provide a windfall of resources to expand the bureaucracy of FDA.”
http://southeastfarmpress.com/management/tobacco-growers-wary-fda-ruling

The guy across the street had just put in new (federally mandated) curing barns only to find out a few years later they were now obsolete and he had to invest in entirely new buildings. He gave up and now grows corn, cotton, soybeans and wheat. Tobbaco is just not worth it.

… says Blake Brown, North Carolina Extension agricultural economist.
There are three reasons:
• Increased regulation, and increased cigarette prices caused by that regulation, will lead to lower U.S. cigarette consumption.
• Harm reduction technologies will likely reduce the amount of tobacco in each cigarette.
• The emphasis on harm reduction typically shifts demand toward smokeless tobacco products, and they historically have used little burley or flue-cured tobacco.
But all this is very difficult to express in reliable numbers. “We don’t know how to quantify the effects of regulation,” says Brown. “Much depends on how stringent the regulations are written and how quickly they are put into force.”

Gail … I absolutely agree that small farmers get the shaft. The middleman and manufacturers make majority of profit with a fraction of the risks. The consumer however does not want to pay for farmers to make a decent year to year living.
In the end though the big companies like ADM can overall help all farmers. Their goal is to receive maximum price at minimum costs. Every farmer benefits from better prices. Every farmer benefits from improved crop yields, better seed, better farming methods and the like. And they are extremely efficient at farming – which does offset to some extent their incessant drive for higher prices.
Were I a smaller farmer I would be a proponent of the ADM’s – a rising tide raises all ships. They certainly have many negatives but at end of the day higher prices and improved yields and efficiency are good for the farmers aren’t they?

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.
As you say, markets are complex, and in the long term anything can happen, but the argument is that at least in the short term, supply curves are upward-sloping. An increase in price is needed to expand production of a given crop, because more marginal land needs to be brought under cultivation and there needs to be a price incentive to switch from other uses. A corollary of that is that a reduction in production of a given crop (for example due to the abolition of a biofuel mandate) will generally produce a fall in price, because only the most fertile land stays under cultivation.
Third, you’d have to show that the food thus grown, openly sold on the free market, would prevent somebody else from starving.
The mechanism for that, given that grains are internationally traded, is that the fall in price described above would allow people on very low incomes to buy more food at market prices; it would also allow relief agencies’ food budgets to go further.

(1) If all subsidies for ethanol and gasoline went away farmers would still sell corn to distillers because turning corn into ethanol is profitable under current corn and ethanol prices (and has been for many years). If we made it illegal to do this in the US, either the price of corn would drop and our farmers would quit making it, or our corn would be exported to other countries that would then convert it into ethanol which they would then use to replace gasoline or possibly sell back to us.
(2) The reason for starvation is that people cannot afford to pay farmers for food. The fact that 1/3 or 1/4 (or whatever) of our corn is now being turned into fuel is a good thing. This means we produce that much more corn than we need to eat. So if we have a year where crops fail, the corn that we would normally turn into ethanol will be instead eaten as food. This could save millions of lives. If we outlawed the burning of food in vehicles this safety margin would disappear.
(3) The production of ethanol produces distiller’s grains as a byproduct. This byproduct is a food and (like the field corn used in ethanol) is almost entirely fed to animals but can be consumed by humans. People who make calculations showing that making ethanol uses more gasoline than ethanol produced fail to take into account this sort of thing.
(4) In general, what farmers and distillers do with their time is not the business of the US government or the people reading this thread. This is a free country and we are, individually, free to pursue our own goals. The expectation is that the free enterprise system will intelligently distribute efforts in such a way as to satisfy the needs of individuals. This is what is happening, leave it alone it will do fine without your ignorant “help”. This is not a Communist country where the government decides how many light bulbs and what wattages are to be produced. Production depends on prices and the price of ethanol is high enough that swapping corn for ethanol plus distillers grains is a attractive.
(5) If we suddenly stopped making ethanol the fuel companies would have to import it from overseas. That’s right. If ethanol were not present in your modern gasoline your modern gasoline would not work in your modern car. Your engine would knock to pieces because the reason modern gasoline mixtures have octane levels that are high enough to burn in your modern car is because of the ethanol.
(6) If the refiners adapted to the absence of ethanol by tuning their blends for higher octane fuels you would see the price of fuel zoom. Fuel that could not be burned in the 1990s is now burned by adding ethanol to it. This is in addition to the price rise you would get when the absence of ethanol suddenly meant that your car ran out of fuel. They have to get it somewhere and the more you want the higher the price goes up.

Another reason I say the CAGW hoaxsters are committing crimes against humanity. Al Gore, M. Mann and all the others have a lot to answer for.

Viv Forbes says:
July 22, 2012 at 2:25 pm
I don’t care who makes ethanol from what, as long as it does not rely on legislated markets, subsidies, price controls, tax breaks or deceptive or coercive marketing. Get government out of the equation and then we will see what works.
Viv Forbes
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This is exactly what they also do for the petroleum industry. If they also did what you wish for around the petroleum market you would see the prices at pumps sky-rocket.
I see lots of people here that don’t quite understand the whole industry and even less on what is going on biofuel R&D… there is more than ethanol. Some of us don’t even need subsidies to make profitable biofuel.

Carl says:
“If ethanol were not present in your modern gasoline your modern gasoline would not work in your modern car.”
Sorry….that’s as wrong as you can possibly be.

I would also add to the above – the US Corn crop fulfilled ALL U.S. animal feed demand as well. Including providing Distillers Dried Grain Solids which replace more than 1/3 of the corn used for ethanol with a higher quality animal feed.
The corn used for ethanol is generally not corn used for food but rather corn used for feed – a good share as noted above which is returned as high quality DDGS animal feed. Regardless, increases in the cost of corn have a nominal effect of prices of food – a few cents on a box of Corn Flakes for example.
Corn used for ethanol has a net positive energy balance – returning, at the low end, appx 1.6 units of energy for every 1 unit expended to produce.
Ethanol currently replaces appx 10% of the US domestic fuel needs – extending the supply of fossil fuels and reducing import demands.
The ethanol subsidy was ended now some time ago.
The “growers” subsidies, to the extent they even still exist, are paid to grow CORN – regardless of its use. These subsidies would be the same if the corn was being used for food.
Ethanol has clearly been proven overall to reduce emissions and greenhouse gases,
Corn used for ethanol does not require any more land, fuel, water, fertilizers etc than corn grown for food or feed.
If there was a demand for more corn, more corn would be planted. And if there was a true worldwide food shortage then certainly, to the extent it would provide any benefit, corn would be diverted from ethanol production.
The original poster is simply and completely clueless about the real facts regarding ethanol. The “Letter to the Editor” was nothing more than a thinly veiled activist attack based on a clear lack of knowledge on the subject. It was no better than the global warming proponents similarly ill informed and inaccurate screeds.