Posted on 09/13/2013 1:49:26 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
The government mandated blend of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline is a full-fledged disaster and neither Congress, nor the Environmental Protection Agency shows any indication of either repealing or abandoning it.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said, “A strong candidate for the most expensive policy blunder of recent years would have to be the mandate to blend corn ethanol and other biofuels into the nation’s gasoline supply. Last month even the Environmental Protection Agency essentially acknowledged that the program is increasingly unworkable and costly to consumers. The EPA just won’t do much to fix it.”
Some future historian will calculate how many trillions this nation wasted when it passed a law in 2007 that was supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to save the Earth from global warming and to provide a domestic energy source to compete with OPEC oil.
Implicit in that calculation will have to be the millions, if not billions, of automobiles whose engines were ruined by ethanol. Another element of the calculation is the way the cost of food at home and around the world was increased needlessly by requiring approximately 42% of the U.S. corn crop be used for ethanol production. It is more than the amount of corn used to feed livestock and poultry nationwide.
Only an environmentalist would think it was a good idea to burn food as fuel instead of permitting corn to be used as part of the nation’s food chain and for export.
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
Ethanol debate continues...
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
I believe Junior Johnson said it best ... Corn is good for two things ... Eating and Drinking.
Ethanol is corporate welfare for flyover states. ADM and other agro giants make a fortune off of it. Don’t expect Midwest republicrats to do anything but fight to expand its use.
“Implicit in that calculation will have to be the millions, if not billions, of automobiles whose engines were ruined by ethanol.”
Billions of automobiles? I am all for taking ethanol out of our gasoline, but I have a hard time taking this writer seriously when he suggests that billions of automobiles may have been ruined by ethanol. If he means to have this refer to US automobiles, that would mean about three automobiles per capita, including every man, woman and child. That is absurd.
So 100 years from now...etc.
Possibly he meant dollars or cents or value. Ethanol is corrosive and attracts moisture. It ain’t good for an internal combustion engine.
If (really big word) the U.S. was ever allowed to start producing more oil and build refineries, we would have the gasoline we need to run our vehicles and the corn to feed the world.
From the stuff I read, the bottleneck isn’t the availability of oil.
It’s the refineries.
We’ve had what, four, five, six of the biggest in the world go offline in the last few years because of explosions/fires?
And I’m not picking on the oil companies, but why would they give a crap? They have a captive market. They can charge whatever they want, pretty much.
OK. I see what he seems to be saying. If we keep up this ethanol nonsense for x number of years we will have ruined billions of automobiles. I like to use hyperbole when debating issues as appropriate, but I think this is not a proper argument in this case. It is also the straight-line fallacy regarding trends.
Why stop at 100 years? Let’s push it out to a full millennium. “By the time we enter the next millennium, 100 trillion automobiles will be ruined by ethanol.”
There are good arguments for ending this ethanol policy, but this seems like a weak one to me.
..Obama issues an Executive Order to the Sun...
....to increase it's magnetic field....
and make a good crop of sunspots before elections in 2016....
(PhysOrg.com) -- Sunspot formation is triggered by a magnetic field, which scientists say is steadily declining. They predict that by 2016 there may be no remaining sunspots, and the sun may stay spotless for several decades.
The last time the sunspots disappeared altogether was in the 17th and 18th century, and coincided with a lengthy cool period on the planet known as the Little Ice Age....and lasted 400 years.
Good luck surviving with no electricity and GE modified seeds.
I am still in favor of bankrupting the jihad. Whether we do it through fracking, biofuels, electrics, or some other technology is secondary. As a practical matter, some combination of increased domestic oil production and biofuels is at the moment the cost effective method. As to food vs. fuel, raw calories today are cheap. The farmgate price of the commodities in your grocery basket is about 14 cents on the dollar, an all-time low. Americans today spend less than 10 percent of disposable income on food, split roughly in half between foods purchased for home preparation and food eaten away from home. That too is an all-time low.
Calories are cheap; what people are paying for today is convenience, better taste and nutrition, and availability through a global marketing system that gives us 24/7 access to the foods of the world. (Someone needs to tell Team Obama that local foods won't give you fresh fruits and vegetables in midwinter, or variety.)
Would food be cheaper if we removed the ethanol mandate? Most of the studies suggest that the effect would be marginal. The ethanol buildout was feedstocked from increased production, not by shorting traditional food and feed markets. Yes, the U.S. is coming off a bad weather cycle, which has given us three straight years of declining corn production (for the first time in U.S. history). But we are probably headed for a record harvest this year, and trend yields continue to increase. Farmers expect the national average yield to exceed 200 bushels an acre in the relatively near term (10-15 years), and nobody in the bidness will raise much of an eyebrow if you project 300 bushels an acre in another generation.
And it's not just in the U.S.; places like Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine are ramping up, and the world's #2 corn producer, China, is capable of doubling yields as well with full application of existing technologies. (With average farm sizes of about five acres, China faces major social barriers to farm modernization, but that will change as the population becomes urbanized.)
By the way, I do not think corn ethanol is the long run solution. My expectation is that third generation feedstocks, very likely algal or microbial, will eventually become price competitive. The question is when. This is one of those big game-changing developments that could pop out of the labs at any time ... or it may be ten years. A lot of smart people are working on it, and the chemistry is not hard. It's just a matter of getting the price points down. When that happens, the Arabs will have to go back to pounding sand.
Native American Indians to build refinery in North Dakota.
Delvin Cree: North Dakota tribe breaks ground on oil refinery www.indianz.com › News › Headlines
May 9, 2013 - Delvin Cree: North Dakota tribe breaks ground on oil refinery ... 25 miles west of New Town, will be the first new refinery to be built in the U.S. in 30 years. ... Editorial: Take pride in Native American Day in South Dakota (9/10
The Ethanol hasn’t seemed to harm my car, but it tore the hell out of my boat , and my jet ski, despite my having spent a fortune on products that fight it.
Converting food to energy should be a crime.
Same here. Weed eaters and chainsaws too. Ethanol is most hard on 2 stroke motors of all sizes and types, it dilutes the oil differently than gas. It is next hardest on small gas engines on mowers, etc. I've not really heard of anyone having trouble with a car engine. I've heard of older tractor and car engines with rubber gas lines failing, but not the engine itself.
I continue to believe that burning food instead of pumping oil is stupid beyond belief. Only a moron destroys food.
I agree. Hard to see man staying on top of the food chain by using our food for fuel.
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