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Posted on 03/07/2008 9:57:20 PM PST by TBP
The rush towards biofuels is theatening world food production and the lives of billions of people, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser said yesterday.
Professor John Beddington put himself at odds with ministers who have committed Britain to large increases in the use of biofuels over the coming decades. In his first important public speech since he was appointed, he described the potential impacts of food shortages as the “elephant in the room” and a problem which rivalled that of climate change.
“It’s very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food,” he told a conference on sustainability in London yesterday.
“The supply of food really isn’t keeping up.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Of course we could stop feeding all our grain to cattle and become vegetarians ... but maybe that’s the ultimate plan.
The radical environmental liberals to the world’s poor...
“Let them eat biofuels!”
Don’t look at me. My car gets 8 miles per meal.
We have to protect the mosquitos of Alaska. Don’t drill in ANWR!
>>Of course we could stop feeding all our grain to cattle and become vegetarians ... but maybe that’s the ultimate plan.<<
I paid $11.99 a pound today for rib eye at Kroger but there is no substitute for good beef.
Whereas gasoline is still less than 50 cents a pound.
So I don’t think their plot although they will likely kill millions by starvation as they burn the grains poor people used to eat whereas I’ll work a couple of extra hours a week to pay for my food if I have to.
Ummm... there is a cost of finding, drilling, transporting, refining, transporting, storing, pumping gasoline.
http://www.planetark.com/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=47073
Although the European Union wants to increase biofuel use to stop global warming, Germany has started taxing biodiesel as the government said it cannot afford to lose the large tax revenue from fossil diesel. “The tax means that biodiesel is now more expensive than fossil diesel,” said Schrum. “As biodiesel has eight percent less energy content, this means no-one is buying biodiesel.”
He said that trucking companies have turned their backs on biodiesel.
“The market for biodiesel at petrol stations is dead. The industry is basically producing a small amount for blending.”
To reduce the impact of biodiesel taxes, Germany introduced compulsory blending of biodiesel with fossil diesel at oil refineries in January 2007.
The BBK says the 4.8 percent biodiesel blended content in fossil diesel would create demand for about 1.5 million tonnes of biodiesel annually.
But a high proportion of the biodiesel used for blending is coming from the United States and is being sold cheaply in Europe with the help of US subsidies.
ANWR has been gridded, studied and drilled. The oil is there. The wells are there but they've been capped. You think the oil companies would spend a GO-zillion amount of bucks to push and fight for a shot at oil without doing the research first? If they gamble and lose they're out billions and have a lot of very unhappy stockholders.
Transporting from Alaska is no big deal with the pipeline, I would think.
REFINING is the sticking point. This country hasn't built a new refinery in almost 30 years! We almost did but the liberals whined and cried and said it would take over ten years to realize any real results so folks gave up. That was 10 years ago when the price of gas was.....? Now, 10 years later as gas is getting ready to hit almost $4 a gallon ... and we could have been able to tell OPEC to go do you-know-what. The oil companies never really fought for refineries because that's not where the money is. As long as there is a knot in supply due to refining capacity, the cost stays high. Mark my words if we did suddenly build refineries, the big oil companies would just sell their oil overseas where they could keep prices high. UN-American you say? Well, you'd be right except that these big corporations don't see themselves as US companies. Noooooo they're citizens of the the "world."
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I heard a story on the news that said (I think it was) wheat production was down due to the farmers using more of their fields for corn as opposed to it. At this point, we have plenty of food to sustain the world. Unfortuantely, there is a good deal of waste which could be used to feed those starving. I can’t imagine trying to plant corn to run our vehicles and eat, along with all the other crops. The left is causing a good deal of it with their man made global warming scare. The enviros ought to have a global warming meeting outside in South Western Ohio tonight. If they aren’t froze and buried in snow by morning, they might change their tune.
800 Billion Barrels of Shale Oil In Western U.S. (Triple Saudia Arabia's Reserves)
How much are we going to put up with before people stand up and shout, "Enough!" Are we going to let a few envirosocialists fundamentally restructure society over a hoax?
I wouldn't have believed it a few years ago, but then I wouldn't have believed a Republican president would sign a bill into law that banned incandescent light bulbs.
On second thought, maybe the left would like world starvation. That would thin the population and improve the environment. Hmmmm.....
I like that! Ha!
Bush's fault?
I saw this professor interveiwed. What they left out of this article was...he said food shortages will in great part be due to changing eating habits. Primarily on the part of the Indians and Chinese, who are demanding more dairy and meat in their diets. There's a silver lining to every cloud, I immediately thought. Our Aussie farmers are going to love this development, they've been struggling to make ends meet for decades. It's indeed an ill wind that blows no-body any good...
Let them eat cake! Dairy and meat will always cost more than rice and noodles.
You mean changing to biofuels have unintended consequences for the world??
Funny that.
A video game came out recently titled Frontlines: Fuel of War. The premise of the game is America/European Union fighting the Russians/Chinese for the last remaining natural resources.
The game mentioned that the oil was being used for the military. Not the citizens of the countries.
Be ever vigilant
Let them eat grubs.
MIT has a story (Emerging Technologies for 2008) out on sensible ethanol technology .
It states that cellulosic biomass not food grains have the most promising future.
I am not sure of all the facts, but already the Airforce in a just a few years (announced in December) will be flying on this type or similar biofuel. This beat out Virgin's owner, most recent marketing hype, (Branson) on his trans ocean Virgin AA flight with no passengers on only 20% biofuel content.
http://www.technologyreview.com
Mining Pathways for Biofuels", Cellulolytic Enzymes and Ethanol from Old Tires and Garbage" Brazil is already making and exporting $$$ ethanol from sugar cane waste after the sugar has been extracted.
“Don’t look at me. My car gets 8 miles per meal.”
A quick search came up with numerous results that 1 tank of biofuel for an SUV (say 25 gallons?) has enough corn in it to feed a person for a year. (Not sure if “feed” means total calories, or just the amount of corn they would eat in a year). Regardless - the food to gas conversion seems awful lopsided. Not counting that it takes more energy to turn the corn into a gallon of fuel than the amount of energy in a gallon of gas.
Let them eat unleaded.
You’re preaching to the choir. My wife worked for Texaco Oil for thirty years at their world headquarters and knew many of the top echelon excutives.
The cartoon picture showed a starving little black child sitting on the bare bround about to eat a corn and here comes along big fat AL GORE who grabs it from the starving child saying "Hey kid, I'm important and I need this for my SUV!!"
There is a saying (i read the other day).... to paraphrase:
“Politicains are the only people in the world that can screw things up and then be ‘hired’ back to fix it.”
How come almost all of the IDPA web sites are so uninformative as to be worthless.
There are a gazillion pages of rules and regulations, but the shooting sites don't even post event dates or directions. The scores are meaingless if one doesn't even know what all the acronyms mean.
It appears to be a closed and unfriendly community.
Any ideas since I'm an avid pistol shooter and would have liked to shoot competitively.
As Tinky Holloway would say “ Don’t worry someone will do something”.
No, not even then. Just remember what the Soviets did to the Ukrainians while the N.Y. Times gushed all over themselves while giving the Soviets praise.
I’m kinda tired of those who think that the US should feed the
world for less than the burn value of grain.
BTTT!
Paul Ehrlich’s nightmare could come true, courtesy of the ethanol scam.
As I implied on another thread, the higher gas prices are probably making liberals euphoric. They'll never stop trying to block our efforts to obtain our own energy.
Did you see John Negroponte’s appearance before Congress regarding the State Dept budget of almost $100Billion to give away in foreign aid?
Think about all those 3rd world countries that spend most of their GPD to barely feed their people as it is and now they will only be able to buy 1/3rd of what they were getting with the same dollars so Americans can feel better about the environment.
It's a good thing we have the best military in the world because what we are doing in the name of "Global Warming" is an act of genocide and what has got to be the most justifiable reasons any country could ever have to declare war on the United States.
By reducing the energy content of a gallon of biodiesel they are reducing the mpg. Reduced mpg means more gallons bought. More gallons bought means increased tax revenue. Follow the money.
“Of course we could stop feeding all our grain to cattle and become vegetarians ... but maybe that’s the ultimate plan.”
Well that’s the PETA wing of the Democrat party’s plan.
Racist liberals have been trying to kill off “useless eaters” in the Third World for decades. They lack Hitler’s tanks and gas ovens so use more sophisticated schemes to muder people, i.e., DDT ban; environmentalism; denial of money for rural water projects.
Yeah...billions of people starving to death "rivals" a temperature increase of maybe a degree or so.
Envomentalism is the religious cannon of the socialists. Through it, they seek to control the world. Unless we stop them. "Global Warming" is their trump card (the greatest hoax of all time, but look at how the sheeple react.)
I was hoping someone would be less lazy than I and look up the stats.
Food to gas is the also biosphere to energy. As you point out, it's the least efficient. Because it's the least dense. Progress has been to more and more dense sources of energy. There's a reason we grew in power exponentially when we went from horse/hay to horsepower/oil.
thanks for your reply.
Except that for him, I don't think it was a nightmare.
As if liberals care about that!
This biofuel thing will be abandoned only when LIBERALS literally start to die of starvation.
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