It’s spelled Khrushchev.
At any rate, about 40% of the US corn crop is now used to make ethanol in order to dilute your gasoline (which gives you higher gasoline prices, lower mileage, and more engine wear). (By comparison, 45% of US corn is used to feed livestock, half of what it used to be, which is why meat prices are rising.) It would be difficult for a minor climatic change to produce a worse result than that!
Ref: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/20/its-final-corn-ethanol-is-of-no-use/
The moral is that socialism is a much more dangerous threat than minor climate change. Further, the damage from socialism is a certainty, whereas the future of the climate is uncertain.
Would you want the same people who run our government messing with the Earth’s thermostat, even if they really could? These are people who cannot balance a budget.
:: It would be difficult for a minor climatic change to produce a worse result than that! ::
The damage is real.
A top-down management policy predicated on the concept of “climate change” can easily do this type of damge as well as much more.
Climate change doesn’t actually have to happen in any real form, just that policy base is enough.
I apologize for spelling error...
I agree about the corn...I do not buy ethanol unless no choice, because it lowers mileage.
No these people have no clue about why we are having the climate issues, most weather comes in cycles anyway.
“The moral is that socialism is a much more dangerous threat than minor climate change”
And that is what Republican politicians should be saying in every ad. This should be a non stop war against the left.
Yes, 40% of the U.S. corn crop now is used for ethanol, but this has been accomplished while still meeting traditional food, feed, and export demand. The ethanol buildout was feedstocked by higher production, and corn yields continue to increase. People in the business expect national average yield to reach 200 bushels an acre in the mid-term, and higher down the road. The current winners in the annual corn yield contests are commonly over 300 bushels an acre, which is ten times the average yield at the end of WWII.
From the farmers' standpoint, a bushel of corn converted into ethanol and DDGS is significantly more valuable than the same bushel sold as feed. Prices are volatile, but just to toss out some ballpark numbers, if commodity corn is $4.75 a bushel and the same bushel converted to ethanol and DDGS is $7-7.50, the choice is pretty clear.
From a motorist's standpoint, ethanol reduces the cost of gasoline by providing a cost effective competitor to petroleum (which is why the oil industry hates ethanol). At a 10% blend, ethanol will reduce mileage because its energy density is lower than gasoline, but at higher blends, the mileage penalty would disappear because the octane boost would more than compensate. But that would require evolving towards E30 or E40 blend levels, which is a long term proposition. If third generation feedstocks (e.g. algae) hit a suitable price point, however, I would expect this to happen fairly promptly.