It just goes to show you that sometimes, consensus in science amounts to a “whole lot of nothing” as this story from Robert Mendick in The Sunday Telegraph tells us.
Growing crops to make “green” biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices, IPCC admits in dramatic U-turn
The United Nations will officially warn that growing crops to make “green” biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices, The Telegraph can disclose.
A leaked draft of a UN report condemns the widespread use of biofuels made from crops as a replacement for petrol and diesel. It says that biofuels, rather than combating the effects of global warming, could make them worse.
The draft report represents a dramatic about-turn for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Its previous assessment on climate change, in 2007, was widely condemned by environmentalists for giving the green light to large-scale biofuel production. The latest report instead puts pressure on world leaders to scrap policies promoting the use of biofuel for transport.
The summary for policymakers states: “Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity.”
Full story (subscription required)
Al Gore and Palm Oil is a prime example of one such mess that once looked like a good idea: Al Gore’s palm oil train wreck gets worse
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Babies don’t count. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10717566/Aborted-babies-incinerated-to-heat-UK-hospitals.html
Think advisor Holdren will have the courage to tell his boss that green energy sucks and he is wasting our money?
Of course we already knew it.
Well… you may be right but that “fusion ship” has been about 10-15 years from port for the last 40 years or so.
The public pronouncements not withstanding, I’ll believe it when it happens. It being an actual, commercial grade, working, fusion powerplant – not a lab experimental machine that has greater than unity gain.
@A. Scott
By your arguments, we could end the ethanol subsidies, end the ethanol fuel requirements, and nothing will change in the acreage of corn of all types (in fact it should continue to increase as it has), and agriculture prices will also hold firm or increase.
If this is so, then we should eliminate the subsidies immediately. They have done their job. All changes in land use are permanent. If you grow it, people will buy it.
Of course, I don’t believe any of that for a minute. The subsidies exist for a reason. Follow the money.
I don’t know anyone that claims ethanol is “carbon free” …. that said overall emissions are lower, and the fuel is cleaner burning. But even it was’t – it is RENEWABLE … that fact alone is a huge positive benefit. We SHOULD use our fossil fuel resources, but using ethanol extends that supply.
“Much of the energy” is not lost. The net energy yield is in the 1.6 to 1 range for corn ethanol … 1.6 units of energy are produced for every one unit of energy expended in that production.
Every bushel of corn makes appx 2.7 gallons of ethanol. In addition there are several pounds of corn oil, corn meal and other co-products. AND every bushel of corn used for producing ethanol also creates Distillers Dried Grain Solids – a high quality animal feed. One bushel of corn used for ethanol, in addition to the other co-products, also produces enough DDGS feed to effectively replace appx 50% of the corn used to produce the ethanol.
Sorry again, but stating that ethanol “isn’t even economic” is uninformed and outright false.
What “subsidies” Stephen? The subsidies for ethanol were ended several years ago.
Ethanol costs less than gasoline. E85 costs less than E10. In my market I currently pay $2.49 for E85. E10 is $3.59 … a 31% spread. E10 has appx 111,400 BTU, while E85 has appx 81,600 BTU – or an appx 26% spread.
Even after accounting for the lower btu (and MPG) of E85 – I save 5% using ethanol.
But that isn’t the real story – since my ACTUAL MPG only drops about 18% using E85.
A. Scott, March 24, 2014 at 7:01 pm
do you have a link to the dollar value breakdown of the various products that come from a bushel of fermented corn?
i don’t care about starving babies or co2 – just interested in the real numbers. thanks.
p.s. an ‘ethanol mandate’ may not be a literal subsidy, but it sure acts like one.
Subsidies, tariffs, reformulation limits still exist
http://www.taxpayer.net/library/article/corn-ethanol-subsidies-are-alive-and-well (Oct. 16, 2013)
Ethanol costs less than gasoline. E85 costs less than E10. In my market I currently pay $2.49 for E85. E10 is $3.59 … a 31% spread.
Yea, E85 is priced lower than E10 and E15 because demand for it is low and must be priced low to move it. Supply and Demand.
Current prices E85 in Germany per liter:
E85: 1.10 Euro(~4.15 Euro/US Gal.or 5,72 USD)
E10: 1.50 Euro(~5.67 Euro/US Gal.or 7,81 USD)
HighOctane 1.55 Euro(~5.86 Euro/US Gal.or 8,07 USD)
The reason is, of coure, that the pricing is spoilt by enormous taxation. And it shows where others are going to end up if they don’t stop govermental overregulation. So, E85 is one mean to make a saving.
“The fusion ship” is nearing port and will be available long BEFORE the Thorium ship can arrive.
No one is developing Thorium reactors, except possibly some third world countries dabbling with it.
Sure, there is a lot of paper studies and propaganda for it, but it will take a minimum of thirty years to license a commercial fission Thorium design, after someone starts in earnest to spend the multi-Billions needed to do so.
Fusion is already at the doorstep and has generated a lot more MW, than all the paper thorium designs ever suggested. ITER is more an Engineering exercise to build a pre-protype commercial Fusion power plant, than it is a Scientific experiment.
Much as I would love to believe you, I’m afraid you’ll have to give some basis for these claims. First fusion — we are now a few weeks in from the first claim of positive net energy production from non-weapons fusion projects, and this “break even” really was “got within a factor of 100 from break even” when one actually accounts for the full energy budget of the event (they left out the energy needed to run all of those lasers, duh…). It isn’t even a light at the end of the fusion tunnel, it is more like a will of the wisp, retreating every time you advance to pull you deeper into the swamp.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve been waiting on fusion for most of my life, think that we’ll eventually solve the problem, and that at some point it will alter human civilization permanently. It’s just always been ten years in the future, sustained, for most of my lifetime, making me doubt any claims that fusion is around the corner until we turn the damn corner and fusion is here now for some empirically realized value of now, not for now in five years, or ten years, or ninety years. I could die of old age, literally, before fusion’s “now” arrives. Pretty easily, actually.
Second, Thorium:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Current_projects
I personally do not consider China, the US, Israel, Canda to be “third world countries” at this point, and while India might be so considered, India has a massive educational and scientific infrastructure, is a long-standing global nuclear power, and has (like China and the US) cone-head quantities of thorium ore that is easily mined and mixed in with rare earths that are as valuable as the thorium.
Note that there are first world players in this list — including the US and Canada — even though the US’s “official” effort can best be described as anemic, especially compared to next-year-in-Jerusalem fusion, or climate science, or all sorts of other things that haven’t got anything like as high a potential ROI. Hence my suggestion that we divert (say) 1/2 the current climate science budget directly into LFTR development. If it succeeded, it would do more to solve the “CO_2 problem” than all of the measures taken to date, and it would do so without any further need to subsidize it or encourage it. If LFTR can be brought to the table as a mature, cost effective technology capable of producing energy (as projected) for 2.5 cents/kw-hour, the US would convert its power production base to LFTR in as little as a decade, as this would absolutely crush competitive energy sources.
Note also that the US built functioning, exothermic (that is, more than break even) thorium reactors that produced net energy decades ago (in the 60s), way back at the beginning of the nuclear age, when the NRC was still the AEC and the DOE wasn’t anything at all. If it hadn’t been for the urgent need to produce plutonium for cold war MAD policy bombs and warheads, we might never have developed pressurized water reactor technology at all. Even not having been actively developed for fifty years at this point, it is decades ahead of fusion out of the box in terms of the little work that WAS done back in the 60s.
At the moment, I think it is basically certain that both India, China, and the corporate interests in the US will build at least small prototype LFTR or other MSR projects — 10 MW scale, for example — before 2020. That is decades earlier than anybody even fantasizes being able to build a 10 MW sustained fusion plant. The US has lots of Thorium. India has lots of Thorium. China has lots of Thorium. The world has 4x more Thorium than it has Uranium. While there are technical problems to be solved, there are enormous advantages (on paper in some cases, sure, but many of them have been proven in the various prototypes built dating all the way back to the 60’s) to e.g. LFTR over pressured water reactors — higher efficiency, zero risk of meltdown, lower risk of nuclear proliferation, substantially less nuclear waste production, cheaper more abundant fuel…
Personally I think LFTR will beat fusion by decades or more unless there is a real conceptual breakthrough in fusion.
rgb
Not to worry about tortilla prices in Mexico because of corn cost. they eat mostly flour tortillas.
Dale … Mexican’s eat mostly corn tortillas made with white corn ….
Ethanol costs less – which is why it’s priced less. The fact ethanol costs less also helps keep the price of gasoline lower.
As to your claim ethanol still receives significant subsidies … FAIL.
Your alleged REAP subsidies – the only thing ethanol gets is $2.9 million – just 2.8% of the total REAP $103 million in subsides – for some agricultural ethanol blender pumps. FAIL..
As to your claimed Bioenergy Program for Advanced Biofuels Fact Sheet – corn starch ethanol is specifically excluded. FAIL.
Your “Alternative fuel vehicle refueling property credit” is a TAX CREDIT, not a subsidy, is available for “ANY fuel at least 85 percent of the volume of which consists of one or more of the following: ethanol, natural gas, compressed natural gas, liquified natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, or hydrogen” … along with bio-diesel blends and electricity. It is not an ethanol subsidy – period. FAIL.
gnomish … the primary co-product from ethanol production is Distillers Dried Grain Solids. There are many places you can check DDGS prices – but generally they sell for slightly more than the raw feed corn itself. Although DDGS co-product produces does not amount to physically 50% of the original corn, because of its higher feed quality and value it replaces appx 50% of the corn used to make ethanol.
From a USDA report:
One bushel (56lbs) of corn wet milled provides:
32 lb of Starch or ….
33 lb of Sweetener or ….
2.5 gal of Fuel Ethanol plus; 12.4 lb of 20% Gluten Feed, and; 3 lb of 60% Gluten Meal, and; 1.5 lb of Corn Oil
One bushel (56 lbs) of dry milled corn provides 2.8 gals ethanol, plus 17.5 lbs of Distillers Dried Grain Solids high quality animal feed. But DDGS, because of their higher nutritional values, is equal to between 125% and 150% of a comparable straight corn feed. In other words 1lb of DDGS is equal to between 22 and 26lbs of feed corn when used as cattle feed.
DDGS prices:
http://www.grains.org/index.php/buying-selling/ddgs
Solazyme, Inc. (SZYM) has done ground-breaking research on the topic, as described in a 35-page research report to the California Energy Commission, dated July 2011. It is titled “Production of Soladiesel from Cellulosic Feedstocks” [biomass]. Its penultimate paragraph–second in importance to the abstract–claims “tremendous progress in strain engineering and xylose metabolism.”
The link is http://energy.ca.gov/2013publications/CEC-500-2013-019/CEC-500-2013-019.pdf
Here’s the report’s abstract:
“Solazyme, Inc., is a renewable energy company focused on producing renewable fuels, chemicals, and foods using proprietary algae grown in high‐cell density fermentors on a variety of sugar feedstocks. The research described in this report sought to determine if Solazyme’s technology is transferable to sugars derived from cellulosic biomass. Cellulosic feedstocks contain a mixture of sugars made up primarily of glucose (60‐75 percent) and xylose (25‐40 percent), a sugar first isolated from wood. Most microorganisms, including algae, can metabolize glucose but not xylose. In addition, cellulosic feedstocks are generally enriched for compounds that can hinder the growth of most microorganisms, including algae. To address these issues, Solazyme adopted a parallel processing approach for algal strains focused on three principal areas: discovering new strains capable of metabolizing xylose, genetically engineering existing strains to metabolize xylose, and evolving strains to become more tolerant of inhibitors present in cellulosic feedstocks. From the standpoint of cellulosic sugars themselves, efforts were focused on the removal of inhibitory compounds, or substances that can slow or stop the necessary chemical reactions. This report demonstrates that algal strains have been discovered that are capable of using xylose as a carbon source. Researchers showed strains can be successfully engineered to metabolize xylose and produce oil from this sugar alone. Researchers successfully evolved strains to tolerate some of the most abundant inhibitors present in cellulosic feedstocks and developed methodologies to remove those same compounds from cellulosic sugars. The initial results were applied to larger‐scale fermentations using these new strains grown on a variety of cellulosic feedstocks, producing oil‐rich biomass. Finally, researchers produced and purified algal oil derived from cellulosic feedstocks. This project benefits California through the development of advanced alternative fuels which reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence upon imported energy and increase California’s energy security, and potentially provide California with new jobs in the rapidly expanding field of alternative fuels production.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026863/china-going-for-broke-on-thorium-nuclear-power-and-good-luck-to-them/
Chinese going for broke on thorium nuclear power, and good luck to them
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Energy Last updated: March 19th, 2014
The nuclear race is on. China is upping the ante dramatically on thorium nuclear energy. Scientists in Shanghai have been told to accelerate plans (sorry for the pun) to build the first fully-functioning thorium reactor within ten years, instead of 25 years as originally planned.
“This is definitely a race. China faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task”,” says Professor Li Zhong, a leader of the programme. He said researchers are working under “warlike” pressure to deliver.
Good for them. They may do the world a big favour. They may even help to close the era of fossil fuel hegemony, and with it close the rentier petro-gas regimes that have such trouble adapting to rational modern behaviour. The West risks being left behind, still relying on the old uranium reactor technology that was originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s.
The excellent South China Morning Post trumpeted the story this morning on the front page of its website.
………………
The project began with a start-up budget of $350m and the recruitment of 140 PhD scientists at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. It then had plans to reach 750 staff by 2015, but this already looks far too conservative.
The Chinese appear to be opting for a molten salt reactor – or a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) — a notion first proposed by the US nuclear doyen Alvin Weinberg and arguably best adapted for thorium.
This in entirely different from thorium efforts in the West that rely on light water technology used in uranium reactors. The LFTR has its own problems, not least corrosion caused by the fluoride.
…………….
The Chinese are currently building 28 standard reactors – by far the biggest nuclear push in the world – and working on several research and development fronts at once. This is to break what it calls a “scary” dependence on imported fuel, but also to fight pollution.
The Hefei Institute of Physical Science in Anhui has just finished building the world’s largest experimental platform for an accelerator reactor that burns nuclear fuel with a powerful “particle gun”.
Professor Gu Zhongmao from the China Institute of Atomic Energy cautioned against too much exuberance on so-called fourth-generation reactors. “These projects are beautiful to scientists, but nightmarish to engineers,” he told the SCMP.
http://finance.yahoo.com/mbview/threadview/;_ylt=AnXKLHwV5zYDgxatwtF.Xi_eAohG;_ylu=X3oDMTB2dWRlcHBhBHBvcwMyOARzZWMDTWVkaWFNc2dCb2FyZHNYSFJVbHQ-;_ylg=X3oDMTBhYWM1a2sxBGxhbmcDZW4tVVM-;_ylv=3?&bn=c10002c2-6bb7-382c-aa81-0634d94f9dbf&tid=1395725967593-287cf15b-897b-4e19-8767-b6e602fbb583&tls=la%2Cd%2C3%2C3
Solazyme Assigned Another Patent: Nucleic Acids Useful In The Manufacture Of Oil
Abstract
Novel gene sequences from microalgae are disclosed, as well as novel gene sequences useful in the manufacture of triglyceride oils. Also disclosed are sequences and vectors that allow microalgae to be cultivated on sugar cane and sugar beets as a feedstock. In some embodiments, the vectors are useful for the purpose of performing targeted modifications to the nuclear genome of heterotrophic microalgae.
Fossil fuel is a general term for buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth’s crust over hundreds of millions of years. Fossil fuels are a finite, non-renewable resource.
Increased demand for energy by the global economy has also placed increasing pressure on the cost of hydrocarbons. Aside from energy, many industries, including plastics and chemical manufacturers, rely heavily on the availability of hydrocarbons as a feedstock for their manufacturing processes. Cost-effective alternatives to current sources of supply could help mitigate the upward pressure on energy and these raw material costs.
PCT Pub. No. 2008/151149 describes methods and materials for cultivating microalgae for the production of oil and particularly exemplifies the production of diesel fuel from oil produced by the microalgae Chlorella protothecoides. There remains a need for improved methods for producing oil in microalgae, particularly for methods that produce oils with shorter chain length and a higher degree of saturation and without pigments, with greater yield and efficiency. The present invention meets this need.
Post-Mortem for the Ethanol Tax Credit
May 5, 2012.
Contains a chart of Ethanol Price crash at the start of 2012.
Archer-Daniels Midland was caught by the Justice dept. In a price-fixing scheme some decades ago. They conspired with a Japanese firm to fix the price of an amino-acid hog-feed supplement, lysine, I believe. One of their employees reported their crimes. This is a criminal company that has evidently bribed their way through Congress, as I understand how our system works.
philjourdan says:
March 25, 2014 at 6:13 am
@A. Scott – there are only so many acres to grow corn. White, sweet, or feed. More for one means less for another. Seems the one using obfuscation and lies is you.
=======================================
No, he’s using facts.
Why would anyone grow food corn for a non-market? The starving African and Mexican tortilla memes are as crap as the polar bear memes. Bioethanol is an industry. Iowans and Nebraskan farmers aren’t a f-kin charity for world poverty, nor do they have much, if anything, to do with the global warming fr*ud any more.
Why don’t you “food vs. fuel” guys get this ?
Disclaimer: I’m not in the industry, but I follow it because I’m in a related field for which price of feedstock is important.
Sorry Phil, you are wrong. No one is growing them to give away. But when you pay more for feed corn, that means there is less white corn. The price goes up to balance the supply and demand. As it has. That is a fact. It is not speculation.
So yes, less of one is sold, but not because of lack of capacity, but due to ethanol makers being willing to pay more than the poor can afford.
Econ 101. You may not like the law of supply and demand. But then I know of no law, natural or man made, that cares whether we like them or not.
concerning power generation by nuclear reactors: the evidence is in and there is no such thing as a safe nuclear reactor.
PCT Pub. No. 2008/151149 describes methods and materials for cultivating microalgae for the production of oil and particularly exemplifies the production of diesel fuel from oil produced by the microalgae Chlorella protothecoides. There remains a need for improved methods for producing oil in microalgae, particularly for methods that produce oils with shorter chain length and a higher degree of saturation and without pigments, with greater yield and efficiency. The present invention meets this need.
This sort of thing is indeed what I was thinking of — I’ve seen a couple of videos covering some of the technologies under development, although obviously a lot of it is hidden as it is worth a vast fortune if/when fully successful. I don’t think that people appreciate the power of PCR and gene splicing — it isn’t just about “breeding” as in selectively evolving things such as chlorella (which IIRC has long been known as and used as a (possible) food source, a (current) over the counter diet supplement, and possible way of using biology to sidestep what is otherwise a costly and difficult organic chemistry synthesis problem. Chlorella can be grown in a slurry in e.g. tubes or ponds with high surface area, uses sunlight as efficiently as high sugar crops such as sugar cane, and some strains produce high fractions of lipids instead of sugars or starches. Some strains just run on water, sunlight, CO_2, and trace nutrients/fertilizers. Others can “digest” available starches, or can be twinned with other species as part of a processing chain that could for example utilize the raw cellulose that is often “waste” as far as energy production capacity is concerned when growing oil crops such as hemp or rapeseed.
Fermentation followed by distillation, frankly, sucks, and I say this as a home brewer who is quite fond of the fermentation part. But if one were to (as the stuff above says) wet-mash a slurry of not only corn kernels but the entire corn plant, or an entire crop of fast-growing bamboo or hemp, and use sunlight and bioengineered chlorella strains to convert (say) 50% or more of the complex carbohydrates present into pure biodiesel that requires nothing more than centrifuging and filtration before being poured into a tank and used, well, that’s pretty nifty. It’s the distillation of alcohol to the anhydrous level required for use as fuel that sucks, you see — alcohol is hydrophilic and will actually pull water in out of the air (and it does this, right in your gas tank, hoorah hoorah, over time in a humid environment). Distillations require heating that is a pure loss against the energy you hope to recover, followed by extracting the last little bits of water with quicklime pellets created by calcinating limestone at enormous temperatures (and releasing almost half the weight of the limestone as CO_2 even if you do the calcinating with a giant magnifying class instead of by burning coal in a kiln).
Separating oil from lipids, on the other hand, is largely a matter of doing nothing, as lipids are hydrophobic, have a different density, and typically rise to the top and float there. If one bioengineered an algae such as chlorella to produce a directly utilizable mix of unsaturated fats (so one doesn’t have to refine the oil at additional expense) mechanical separation and filtration are cheap and easy and don’t require much energy at all compared to the fuel produced.
There are lots of places that could grow fuel stock for such a process without impacting national or international food production. North Carolina, for example, could really use a high-value crop that can grow on its relatively poor red-clay soil in place of tobacco in a hot, usually humid summer climate. Hemp would be a good choice — basically a weed but with lots of industrial uses. I’m guessing that a wide range of possible fuel stock crops for a chlorella-based process might work as well, in addition to the solar farming of chlorella itself. Lots of the otherwise poor US Southeast would be similarly blessed with the sunlight and water to make this process run, leaving the breadbasket midwest and California alone. Internationally this could be a blessing for Africa and tropical wet-zone climates.
This isn’t enough to show that this is economically feasible or profitable — early days for that. But it has a lot of promise, where IMO ethanol was a non-starter from the beginning and only works as well as it does because of massive investment to achieve economy of scale plus prohibitive fuel taxes and arm-twisting that regulate gasoline prices so that they end up competitive. Take away the visible hand of government, and see how many fuel ethanol companies survive. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect that the answer would be “none”, not without some sort of “help”.
I agree, Roger, that it is high time that we break the “hegemony” of carbon-based fossil fuel producers not because I think it is immoral to produce energy and make money at it, not because I think CO_2 is an enormous risk, but because it is dirty, expensive, a waste of precious pre-synthesized organic molecules of enormous value UNburned, and not a suitable basis for a steady-state world civilization with a high global standard of living, the only kind of world that might one day transcend war, poverty, and widespread preventable human misery. It is also good to prevent any single corporate interest group from amassing enough wealth and structural dominance that they become a political factor at the expense of the people they serve, a tail wagging the dog, and this has long since been passed with e.g. oil companies (I would still love to see the minutes of Bush’s meeting with the oil companies in the weeks leading up to the Gulf war, the ones he concealed citing presidential privilege — I’m certain that they were completely innocent. Aren’t you?)
So I’m all for solar (sustainable forever, basically), thorium (sustainable for at least 1000 years, long enough maybe to solve the fusion problem sigh), fusion (sigh), biodiesel IF it is sustainably profitable without subsidy and ecologically no worse that oil wells, conservation measures based on clever technology that are themselves life improvements (faucets that go on only while you use them, toilets that flush themselves, lights that only go on when there is somebody there to see the light, heat that goes on only when somebody is there that needs to keep warm). A lot of this stuff has positive ROI just because the resources saved cost more money than the device with any reasonable amortization.
To be perfectly clear, I think that a lot of the “green” agenda is just peachy keen and good practice and part of ethical stewardship of the planet. I just don’t like selling it on the back of bad, or uncertain, science. It brings out the rats and the con artists and causes economically insane decisioning, and frankly it enriches the very interests (fossil fuel producers) it is intended to “combat” in some unsubtle way.
rgb
Bullpoop. Typical uninformed attack. Making accusations completely absent ANY semblance of fact.
Corn growers grow to demand. US corn growers have been and continue to be the worlds primary corn supplier. The US has supplied as much as 60% of all world corn exports for many years, and while several countries have increased their corn production the US still supplies more corn than all of the rest combined. That includes WHITE corn exports, where Mexico and Guatemala, along with many others, import US corn to reduce their local white corn prices.
I posted the ACTUAL acres planted above. Including showing the total acres planted in ALL field crops – which have been largely unchanged for years. I also showed planting for white corn, which was the topic (regarding tortillas in Mexico), showing white corn acres planted are also unchanged.
AND I posted links to the USDA Crop Production Reports, and the Field Grains Yearbook, which contains ALL of the data – so anyone can look up the data for themselves.
I will repeat what I said above – you or anyone else are free to post any actual facts showing that corn grown for ethanol has had any significant negative effect on any food crop production.
@A. Scott – so you were attacking the others? That can be your only explanation since I merely turned your words back onto yourself.
I made a statement. The facts are called limited resources, and the laws of supply and demand. And the facts are the corn prices in the past few years. You deny they have not gone up? be my guest. That will only prove your words apply to yourself.
The facts are:
#1 – Increased demand for Corn
#2 – Limited acreage to grow corn.
#3 – More of one type means less of another.
#4 – The law of Supply and Demand says when you have a shortage, prices increase to balance demand with supply.
Now take your bull poop and stick it where you want to. And if you do not want to be attacked, do not attack. It seems you like to whine like Mikey Mann – dish the poop and whine when someone tosses it back at you.
mpainter says: March 25, 2014 at 8:20 am
concerning power generation by nuclear reactors: the evidence is in and there is no such thing as a safe nuclear reactor.
__________________________________
Concerning power generation: the evidence is in and there is no such thing as a safe powergeneration.
The most deadly form is coal power, followed swiftly by oil, gas, wind and solar. And way at the bottom of the list, with the least fatalities, is nuclear power.
ralph