Posted on 06/23/2008 1:55:16 PM PDT by Rufus2007
While Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama insists drilling for more oil in off-limits federal lands won’t help gas prices come down, there’s at least one thing that would: lifting tariffs on imported ethanol. Problem is, the Illinois senator’s ties to the powerful U.S. ethanol lobby would prevent him from doing it.
“I got to tell you – ethanol mafia is a powerful thing, Jim,” CNBC “Street Signs” host Erin Burnett said June 23, noting all the breaks the industry is getting from the U.S. government. “The ethanol emperors – or they are the mafia.”
“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer noted how much influence the ethanol lobby has over trade policy – to the extent it is causing prices to remain high – restricting the importation of foreign ethanol due to a federal tariff.
“[I] mean, I also believe if we took the tariff off of Brazil we could bring that price [of gas] down,” Cramer said.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessandmedia.org ...
Plenty of them ethanol welfare mammas on this site.
Burnett has been a bad girl and she needs to be spanked.
By me.
:D
Plenty of them ethanol welfare mammas on this site.
CNBC is a subsidiary of MSNBC so someone is going to be fired over that comment.
And our wonderful governor in FL has MANDATED that all gas in the state WILL BE 10% ethanol.
We’re being manipulated from every angle.
Yep, one too many.
Someone at Archer Daniels Midland Company is probably making a discreet phone call to Luka Brazzi right now. :)
Like to see her in Maxim myself......
I fix mowers and lately I have had to replace a rash of diaphragms on the carburetors of the 148-158cc B&S sidetank engines.
Five minutes of just setting on the workbench allows the removed distorted diaphraghm to shrink and curl up like an old vinyl 78 RPM record left on the package shelf in summer.
I know they recently doubled the alcohol percentage and I am quite suspect that this is the cause.
The price at the distributor just went up so I ordered 10 of them online for 1/6 the price and will use them as necessary.
The law of unintended consequences cannot be violated without penalty.
I’ll hold her down while you administer the swats.
I wonder where that extra h came from...?
Ethanol IMO is a scam. Just another scam. We are inundated with scams anymore.
The “Ethanol Mafia” would also move quickly to constrain of stop any research or development of ethanol from surprising sources, like used newsprint or old tires. Making ethanol from cellulosic crop material is also something that would probably be harshly suppressed, were it not for some encouragement from high up.
Without the tariff, the ethanol blender's tax credit would be providing subsidies for foreign producers. They essentially balance each other out.
From what I’ve heard, ethanol gas mileage is worse than without it and they clog fuel filters more quickly.
Thanks Gov Christ!
I went to buy Canola Oil and there was one that was $1 less than another. It was made by ADM. I spent the extra dollar to avoid helping those scumbags.
Good idea...ADM is just another welfare mother.
burnette is a bubble-head and quacks like a duck...i mute her and marear fatoromo
“The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
Hey, put your money where your mouth is and post a picture, I will determine if she deserves to be spanked or not, and by whom(Possibly by me, but you never know I might decide in your favor).
Ok, nice picture but I am afraid I am going to have to decide in favor of me doing the spanking, since I don’t really believe in spanking beautiful women I will decide on other appropriate punishment for this wrong doer. You, however, can’t have her:)
Do you really think the world suffers from a shortage of corn starch?
The same people who accuse ethanol producers of being a “mafia” will rush to defend the oil monoliths, which are orders of magnitude larger and have been crooked as a dog’s hind leg since before the Teapot Dome.
Wow! Erin seems so much more intelligent with her mouth closed.
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