People keep listing foods they don’t eat to be used as fuel. I’m not sure that matters at all. If a farmer grows beets, he’s not growing corn, beans, etc. Those high-demand items, which are in everything, will still dramatically increase in price. Farmers will grow what brings the most profit. If that is fuel, people will starve. Why can people not get that? There are simply not enough farmers or farmland available to grow food AND fuel without starving people. I suppose clear cutting for timber is bad but clear cutting to grow gas is OK. What kind of civilization burns it’s food?
Look, I hate to keep piddling on the parade of all y’all malthusians out there, but here’s another factoid to throw on this “food vs. fuel” debate.
About 100 years ago, about 50% of all farmland planted in the US was for fuel. Fuel for draft horses. As timothy hay. Horses were used in ag production for everything from tilling the land to pumping water. Where do you think the term of “horsepower” comes from? It wasn’t just a wild idea of an engineer to say “I think we’ll call a unit of 550 ft-lbs/sec a ‘horsepower’ just because it sounds cool.”