Posted on 03/30/2007 6:21:51 AM PDT by Uncledave
It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.
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So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats.
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Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year". According to the UN food and agriculture organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.
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Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.guardian.co.uk ...
Now to those who so piously argue that we should not burn food, O wonder if you have the same objections to all of the non food uses of corn we have all around us? Maybe you bought into the people are starving lament. If they are, they are starving while ships of grain rot in ports due to bad governments, not due to a shortage of supply.
We could do that now! The conversion process isn't rocket science. But a lot of those former dumps now have houses on them............
Researchers in Oregon recently looked at what environmental gains ethanol subsidies deliver for their own state, and concluded: not much http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2007/Jan07/biofuels.html
For one thing ...
the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by switching to corn-based ethanol was calculated to be more than 200 times higher than other existing policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For example?
For comparison, the authors calculated that the net energy benefits from increasing automobile fuel efficiency by one mile per gallon would be equivalent to three or four corn ethanol plants or 13 biodiesel plants
*** This post http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/12/62217/913 by Julia Armstead tells us about how the president of Ugunda is razing rain forests to grow palm oil and sugarcane. The price of cane being driven up by ethanol production.
Destroying rain forest carbon sinks to grow food for your people is forgivable, destroying them to feed the forests to our cars is not.
This place is home to some of the last of the wild mountain Gorillas. Uganda: Govt to Give Away Nine More Forests
http://allafrica.com/stories/200701050807.html
>> I suspect in the future, perhaps very far into the future, we will mine long abandoned trash dumps for the resources buried there.
There's folks working on it: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18328/
Here's a firm in CT that's among the leaders in it:
http://www.startech.net/
I really don't think this problem lends itself to national solutions. Different regions have different needs and assets and will rightly approach the problem as they see fit. There is no reason why the corn bet should have to argue against the wind belt. Get the feds out of it and let the market decide.
So they are not destroying the rain forests to grow cheap beef for Wendys anymore? Or destroying the rain forests to plant coffee? They are always destroying the rain forests for something or another.
I don't drive all that much - probably a lot less than the average and yet my family uses 10 - 20 gal of motor fuel a week. We cook, and go through about a quart of cooking oil every couple of months. Some is eaten and some is discarded. If I saved, filered, chemically purified the leftover oil for about 20 years, I might get enough run my old diesel for about three days.
Yes, that's not a lot, but multiply that by millions of households. A lot of waste going down the drain, or dog...........
Well said. What a shame that some folks here can't see any problems with this.
Wilfull ignorance can never be conquered.
We go thru about a gallon a month...........
Multiply BOTH sides of the equation by millions of households. Then of course you have the 2nd law energy requirements to collect it.
The same article said farmers were planting 5 million less acres in soy beans. Everything from yogurt to steak is going up on this BS.
And if you were to convert this to diesel, you'd get what, an extra 3/4 gallon of biodiesel which is about 1/2 gallon of gasoline energy equivalence? Not to mention the cost of the catalysts, equipment, your time.
Making biodiesel with cooking oil waste is a perfectly fine hobbyist pursuit but there's no scale in it.
Increases in the cost of high protein feed (such as alfalfa hay) have a much more significant effect on the costs of dairy operations than increases in the price of corn. The anticipated increase in the price of milk this year is an increase based upon a 2006 baseline. In the year 2006, the average all milk price in the United States was $12.90 per cwt, which was a financial disaster for the industry (following upon the year 2005 which was merely a bad year for the industry with the average all milk price at about $15.14 per cwt). The expected increase will bring the wholsale price of milk back to about where it was in 2004, when the price of corn was about $.65 per bushel lower than it is today.
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