Biofuels are actually a well-crafted means of creating an artificial scarcity of BOTH fuel and foodstuffs. Biofuels would only make sense as a means of reclaiming what would otherwise be a waste product, that would have to be disposed of anyway.
Generation of kerogen from industrial organic waste material, such as slaughterhouse offal, waste from timbering and wood milling processes, discarded paper waste, and organic roadside trash of all kinds, can be done by Thermal Depolymerization, or or the waste can be converted directly to electric generation through a Plasma Waste Disposal system, developed by Startech.
Take trash and make something out of it, by either changing the organic waste into kerogen, similar to the crude oil pumped up from the earth, or burning the mixtures of organic and inorganic waste in a plasma, and using the resulting products (gaseous diatomic hydrogen and carbon monoxide, plus inorganic molten glass-like slag) to power an electrical generation plant, and provide a perfectly satisfactory aggregate for roadbuilding or concrete production. Both these methods have the advantage of being carbon-neutral, that is, no fossil carbon is mined or extracted from the earth to change the balance of CO2 in any significant way. All the CO2 that is formed comes from other CO2 that was only recently sequestered.
Biofuels manufactured from foodstuffs diverted from the normal farm to market commerce, only cause the overall costs of the food AND the fuel to rise. Economically and as a way to preserve resources, it is no solution at all.
What scarcity? Show me a scarcity in any grains. There’s no scarcity in grains. Grains have gone up in price, just like gasoline and diesel fuel, but if you’ve got the money, you can get all you want.
What people don’t seem to want to understand is that we’re in a commodity boom cycle. Since 1984, we’ve been in a commodity down cycle — and people, having short memories, thought that oil would be $20/bbl, gold would be $300/oz, corn would be $2/bu... forever.
Well, in 1999, the new commodity boom cycle began. These cycles last usually between 16 to 18 years. Commodities take a run up to a new plateau in prices, which finally encourages new production to come online, which then forces prices back down, and inefficient producers out of the market.
This is what happens to US domestic oil production. This is what happened to many family farms in the 80’s. This is what happened to a lot of copper and gold mines.
All these malthusian whiners are full of manure. Biofuels are a way of removing surpluses from the world markets and turning them into something useful, rather than just turning them into stuff that is ultimately detrimental to the producers — consistently low prices that are below the price of production, which causes them to ask for more subsidies, which creates more over-production, which causes them to ask for more subsidies....
Consistent oversupply with prices below cost of production is also detrimental to the consumer in the long term. The typical American would be much better off if we removed high fructose corn syrup from the market and put cane sugar back in. People’s caloric intake would drop significantly.