Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 06/27/2011 9:45:00 PM PDT by JerseyHighlander
Robert Rapier invests a lot of effort in an attempt to discover what is going on with USDA reports of improving ethanol EROEI. The USDA is obviously being hammered by congress to make their giveaways to corn growers look less stupid. My bottom line is this:
1. USDA is obviously under pressure to fiddle their accounting to make subsidized corn ethanol look as good as possible.
2. Some of the tricks are just laughable, like subtracting byproducts from the inputs to form a new “input” definition that obviously inflates the “return” = output/”input”. Wouldn’t it be nice if our investment returns were done the same way, sigh:-)
3. Even after all the finagling the returns are weak and do not come close to justifying the enormous tax transfers subsidizing the corn growers.
(Excerpt) Read more at seekerblog.com ...
Subsidizing the corn growers? Wow, completely missed that, here I thought that it was 58 cents a gallon for each promised gallon of ethanol! So the distillers are not getting paid, it’s the growers?
Fun aside, really, this isn’t a failed program, the failed program is mandating the addition of ethanol to gasoline to supposedly make for cleaner burning fuel. But when gas mileage goes down, you’ve cut the efficiency. And when the fuel starts attacking the parts in the car, you’ve cut the efficiency even more.
I’m all for someone deciding to do this on their own, but there’s no need for my tax dollars to go around to pay for it. I mean, I could object a whole lot less if my money was going to pay for some new engine design or whatnot, but subsidizing the day to day operations of something that converts food into an unneeded fuel additive, that I’m quite loud on objecting to.
Make all the ethanol you want, make sure the market is open so that any country that produces it can import it into the United States... (hi, Mr. Sugar ethanol, long time no see...) And keep it out of my car.
who do we export most of our ethanol to? Mexico. We are subsidizing Mexico, not American farmers.
Looking at the debt ceiling and budget battles, I wanted to point out once again on FR one of the glaring monstrosities of the Federal Government.
This program benefits Republican states, yet the Democrats refuse to cut the mandates or the subsidies. It’s the quintessential example of failure of the government system we suffer under today.
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