Posted on 12/06/2008 9:03:41 AM PST by jay1949
I say let’s set up a good old fashioned competitive market for civilian energy needs, by a national policy that all vehicles sold in America go-forward have to be in some way “flex fuel”.
Either gas/ethanol, plug-in hybrid or perhaps diesel/vegetable oil. Just so long as the vehicle can run on at least two sources of energy.
Then let’s dedicate our domestic oil stores, to our military.
This would be a win in so many ways:
It would bring our trade deficit down.
Help our auto industry. Strengthen our currency.
Power American innovation.
Enrich farmers (corn farmers in the midwest, and sugar cane and even kudzu in the south)
And perhaps best of all - it would halt our financial support of (and military strengthening of) the following regimes hostile to America:
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Iran
Venezuela
Finally. It would help remove from our children’s future, a large and growing source of probable military conflict over strategic resources, with the nuclear-armed world’s next superpower:
China.
Before ethanol, MTBE (Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether) was added to gasolint to increase octane (since tetraethyl lead had been banned.) When underground gas tanks leaked, MTBE got into groundwater, giving it a bad taste & odor. A number of states decided to ban MTBE and require 10% ethanol instead. If Missouri drops ethanol in gasoline, what will replace it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether
I disagree. What you say would be true if it came from existing surplus. If the government imposes mandates, and adds incentives which lower ethanol production costs and raise its prices, you get side effects in the production of corn, such as elevated prices in corn, elevated prices in other food substitutes, farming of marginal land, rises in fertilizer prices, etc., etc.
I don't have anything against utilizing existing aging surpluses by converting them to ethanol, and indeed, we should have some corn surpluses to carry us through bad crop years. But, what's been done in the ethanol area over the past few years is insanely bad policy.
“I say let’s set up a good old fashioned competitive market for civilian energy needs, by a national policy that all vehicles sold in America go-forward have to be in some way ‘flex fuel’.”
It’s nice to see the creative mind at work, finding ever new ways to use the Broken Window Fallacy.
My point, which probably wasn’t well made by me, is that agriculture has made enormous improvements in methods of production, and, most importantly, genetics in the last few decades. Witness the doubling of yields on that little piece of MN dryland farm.
In 1985, the year I left farming total corn production was 7 billion bushels. This year it was (I think) 14 billion bushels.
We now stand at the edge of increased production that will see doubling of crop sizes not every 20 years, but every 10 years. Use of genetics will allow crops to yield higher quality grain on poorer soils using less water than ever before. What will we do with 30 billion bushels of of high quality #2 corn in 2020?
The lowering of the Ogallala Aquifer and others is not the problem, it is part of the solution. Economic pressure from farmers who are now paying more than twice to raise water to ground level is encouraging researchers to develop new low water use genetically modified corn and other crops.
Changes in production methods, primarily low till and no till farming methods have eliminated the danger of 1930s type dust bowls.
These counties, all of whom have leaders the people deserve, have had 200 years to follow in the footsteps of a country that has been more succesful that any other in the entire history of the world at feed itself.
They've chosen not to.
LET THEM STARVE TO DEATH
Meanwhile, we can drive around in our food powered SUVs.
They've made their choice, let them live, OR DIE, by that choice.
Who am I, OR YOU, to interfere?
How is government mandate competition?
How are heavy government subsidies competition?
If allowed, the USA’s oil industry could become a net exporter of oil, but is prevented by the federal government; how is that competitive?
Do you work for AIG or farm corn?
Sugar ehtanol is cheaper, actually produces more energy than it uses to make it, and doesn’t run food prices up so much. Yet we hvae a ban on the importation of sugar ethanol and we subsidize corn ethanol.
Typical liberal, Big Government “thinking.”
Bourbon and rye whiskey?
I understand the sentiment. But, the reality will end up being that the rest of the world will say the U.S. is to blame for their plight and how are we going to take care of it. Of course, the response to that will be to send more tax dollars in aid to those countries.
Instead of those countries following our example...we do everything we can to becoming more like them!
Who is John Gault?
Ethanol stinks. We drive pass a new ethanol plant on our way to work and back. A purple cloud hangs over the highway. It stinks like moldy bread.
Ethanol is subsidized, it does not keep fuel prices down. If the real price of it was added to the cost of gas we would be paying even more at the pump. As it is we pay anyway in increased taxes due to subsidies.
There are several other things wrong with what you say but I will simply state that the real solution for energy independence in this country is to drill our oil and use it. We have Billions of barrels yet untapped but we refuse to use it. Also there is the matter of oil shale and coal that we should be tapping but don't.
Not only that Bozo is seriously considering bankrupting the coal industry and ruining the product that produces half of our electricity while demanding that electric cars be built.
Talk about one stupid idea after another, ethanol, over taxing fuel, failing to drill, imposing idiotic enviro laws on our energy industries, refusing to build nukes and now ruining the coal industry. Oh, yeah, the dems have the way to go all right, but the point is their way leads to hell and not to any useful destination.
Oh, yeah, one more thing, no we don't get tired of bashing a stupid idea, and ethanol is stupid. Using our food for fuel when we have so much oil yet untapped in this country is simply stupid, no other word for it. Yes, we grow it alright but we can't eat ethanol and we grow it with a reduction in food stores and an increase in food prices.
Ethanol is $1.40 right now; gasoline is $0.90; both are per gallon wholesale prices.
Aren’t the ethanol companies going to go bankrupt rather quickly now if the prices for gasoline stay low? I don’t see how anyone can make any money with the manufacture of ethanol under current conditions.
Sugar, eventually.
In the end it always comes down to stronger bootstraps...
Putting corn in your tank is as stupid as drinking Drano for a laxative.
It is no factor in keeping prices low, in fact, it is exactly the reverse.
Take off the farm welfare subsidies, and ethanol will disappear overnight.
BioDiesel, now that is an entirely different story.
Yes; however it will be next year that the massive shutdowns will likely be seen. The industry was worried that the high prices of gasoline was a threat to the profitability of ethanol due to remaining runup on corn futeures in June.
There is no such thing as a controlled bubble-burst.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you posted, but we shouldn’t base foreign policy on whether or not they are going to like us. The more we help, the more they hate us. And we certainly should judge whether or not we are going to use ethanol on anything anyone else says.
Screw’em. I like Walter Williams approach, cut off aid to any country that bad mouths us, and refuse to restart it until they have publicly praised us for at least two years. And that includes praising us inside the UN.
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