I suspect Dan that back in the 19th Century you would be asking why the government was subsiding the railroads. Hell you think there would be airlines today without government support back in the early days. Alexander Hamilton would approve of the Biofuel support the same the government in his day directly or indirectly supported new industry in America.
Did you oppose the Interstate System? Damn government boondoggle. The two lane highways are good enough, just going to make the trucking companies rich off the taxpayers. Etc,etc.
The water usage is absolutely bogus. The plants use 4 gallons water per gallon of ethanol and most of the water is recycled. 90% of the corn farmers don’t irrigate their crops. The needed water comes from rainfall.
Think about it, if it took 1,700 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of alcohol then the old moonshiners would have to be getting truckloads of water every hour to make any decent amount.
Budweiser’s St Louis brewery makes 13 million barrels of beer a year and a barrel holds 31 gallons. So about 403,000,000 gallons of ethanol times your figure of 1700 gallons of water to 1 of ethanol and that equals 685,100,000,000 gallons of water needed to make the beer.
Does that sound reasonable? Don’t to me.
Swiss— The people against ethanol all tell tall
tales about it. Like they bitch about subsidies
and no actual cash is paid now.. Just a tax credit to
BIG OIL. They tell about all the water use, but they add in what rain falls on each bushel of corn. Kinda crooked.
We here get 1 ft of precipitation in summer, which is
43,000 cu ft water per acre = 320,000 gallons falling on an acre in summer and you have 200 bushels per acre,
so for each bushel you have 1600 gal falling, but it is
always there, most of it soaks in and repenishes water
table, same would be there whether raising corn or pot
or peas. Those bogus scientists throwing out all the crap
is bulls$$$$, and an investment magazine puttiing out an article with out even acknowleging the critical role
investors has in driving up prices is really crooked.
But it along with all other crappy propaganda gets
results for their clientele, IE drives the speculating
price on options on farm products. Real crooked bunch
of skunks...Ed
Yes I would. But I can understand why some people who have been sucking on the federal tit for years would think that government is the source of all life.
Federal involvement with railroads can be argued because it makes it easier to get the right-of-way but there is no reason that a product such as ethanol would need a federal subsidy if it were truly a competitive product.
Yes, I would have opposed federal subsidies to the highways on the grounds that it will be used as a precedent by other rent-seekers and parasites feeding at the public trough. Marvelous infrastructure like the Internet have been built without public funding.
Hell you think there would be airlines today without government support back in the early days.
Back in the early days of aviation, a guy named Samuel Langley wasted a lot of taxpayer money trying to build an airplane. It took a couple of bicycle mechanics, spending their own money to do the job right.
Government just gets in the way and wastes money.
90% of the corn farmers don’t irrigate their crops.
Good farmland with good rainfall has not been sitting idle just waiting for someone to grow corn on it. I would wager that most of the new corn farming in the last few years is being done with irrigation. And if we have a dry spell, and that is very possible, we will be in serious trouble if we have become dependent on ethanol.