Biofuels are mandated in many countries...all the EU. Shame we can't bring in the sand-oil from Canada or sugar-ethanol from Brazil. Seems the corporate farms like Archer Daniels Midland have Congress in their pockets. Either that or the eco laws are getting in the way; like they are with that solar developement in government lands.
Posted by peter at July 5, 2008 03:01 PMActually, biofuels (ethanol,biodiesel) were mandated because they are considered "alternative" or "renewable" energy sources.
Tell me: How are those labels working out for us so far?
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August 31st 2007
Growing corn to produce ethanol as a fuel for cars, not only does not reduce the amount of green-house gas emissions, but adds to the hardship lives of ordinary peoples.
Lands are used to grown higher price corn, instead of wheat and other grains. As a result the supply of foods to the people will reduce. Cattle and poultry will have less food, so the supply of meat, milk, and eggs will drop significantly. This problem will worsen by the increasing demands of the surging population day by day, and will raise the cost of everything. This is already happening, as BBC reported on August 24, 2007, that the price of wheat has increased 120 per cent since last August.
Capitalism is more concerned about feeding its cars than feeding the people and guarding the environment
From:
http://democracyandsocialism.com/InBrief.html
You set a global monetary policy that supports the export of government subsidized monoculture agribusiness products while suppressing monetary support of indigenous farmers (World Bank IMF policy).
Force people to buy your price-supported corn and they are at your mercy. It's like Mexico and our corn exports. After NAFTA we sold government subsidized corn cheaper than their own producers could grow it. Of course, being so close to the US it caused a flood of out of work farmers coming to the US to look for a job.
The World Bank must immediately lend support to small scale agriculture world-wide and stop it's G8 enabling sales tactics.
Shame we can't bring in the sand-oil from Canada
It's a shame, but we do. They are our largest importer of oil and that Alberta black goo is a chunk of it.
sugar-ethanol from Brazil.
And lift the republi-con tariff on Brazillian ethanol? Puh-leese.
Tell me: How are those labels working out for us so far?
As labels, not well at all. In practice, pretty damn good. It's like "Drive 55 and save 20%." As a label you get nothing. In practice it works.
Posted by phidipides at July 5, 2008 06:29 PMThe wild kudzu vine growing all over the south is a weed from which oil can be produced...and so are the seeds from the hemp plant. Both are weeds. Both can grow about anywhere. So if an alternate for oil drilling is desired, why is nobody paying attention to either plant?
Posted by BAJ at July 5, 2008 06:45 PMThe imbalance between supply and demand for corn could just as easily be blamed on carnivores, who feed tremendous quantities of corn to cows, pigs and chickens. In general, these animals serve as protein concentrators, and very inefficient ones at that. Animals in feedlot-like conditions have essentially no need for the starches in corn, and most of these are converted into methane and CO2 and emanated out each end, or stored as fat. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of the proteins consumed are retained with the animal, who is eventually whacked and parts of it are eaten by carnivorous humans. What a screwed up system....
To drop corn prices (and soy, wheat, etc) a bit, grow more food, and engage in less carnivoring. However, prices still need to be increased significantly from a few years ago, due to the rise in ammonia and diesel fuel prices. And since demand is outstripping supply, many farmers might now be able to claw themselves out of debt, caused by years of low prices, when supply was greater than demand.....or is that allowed?
For what it is worth, converting most of the starches and sugars in corn into ethanol might be better than converting it into large amounts of methane in feed-lot animals who have very few needs for energy foods like starch and sugar. Or into corn syrup/sugar, because our national diabetes levels are still not high enough for who knows what. And you might start concentrating on protein, and how large amounts can be made without huge dilution by starch and sugar, or how protein can be concentrated without feeding grains to animals. Food without protein is truly empty calories....
Dave B
Posted by Dave at July 5, 2008 07:31 PMObama Camp Closely Linked With Ethanol
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: June 23, 2008 NYTimes
Daschle Uses Senate Ties to Blaze Path for Obama
By CARL HULSE and JEFF ZELENY
Published: February 5, 2008 NYTimes
Daschle’s unusually early endorsement of Obama last February gave the newcomer desperately-needed instant clout among insiders who were resigned to the inevitability of Hillary Clinton, but praying for an alternative.
Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to achieve “energy security” while also slowing down the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.
Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.
“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”
The time has come for Congress to rethink ethanol, an alternative fuel that has lately fallen from favor. Specifically, it is time to end an outdated tax break for corn ethanol and to call a timeout in the fivefold increase in ethanol production mandated in the 2007 energy bill.
I'm not buying the argument that Bush's EPA caved into the environmentalists and thus put a stop to renewable energy-producing programs on public lands out West. It just doesn't make any sense. Something else, therefore, must be happening, with the environmentalists (like they often are) being used as scapegoats for some hidden Republican plan.
An alternative bio-fuels source is cyano-bacteria, which can be irrigated by salt-water, thus not affecting fresh-water supplies.
Out West we have a whole lot of public lands that are arid and relatively close to a huge salt-water source (The Pacific). Cyano-bacteria would grow perfectly there.
Plus, if one combines solar or wind farms to supply the energy for converting the sugars produced by cyano-bacteria into fuel, then we'd have a win-win situation, with every step of the process being renewable...with any excess electricity generated by these cyano-baterial wind-solar farms going into our nation's electricity grid, decreasing the need for more power plants, including coal-fired ones.
Oh, I know what would happen already. The oil companies, corn growers, coal-fired and nuclear power plant builders would scream bloody murder and pump a whole lot of lobbyist money into the coffers of members of Congress to try to stop any of our public lands to be used to actually, well, help the public.
Which, no doubt, is the real reason behind the Bush administration, and the EPA, supposedly "siding" with environmentalists in blocking energy farms from being erected on public lands out West.
Posted by The Oracle at July 6, 2008 05:16 AMI'm not buying the argument that Bush's EPA caved into the environmentalists and thus put a stop to renewable energy-producing programs on public lands out West. It just doesn't make any sense. Something else, therefore, must be happening, with the environmentalists (like they often are) being used as scapegoats for some hidden Republican plan.
The environmentalists are correct in their concerns, but they are doing nothing different than expressing their concerns. The use of public lands for massive corporate renewable energy projects should be reviewed for their impact on those lands. These aren't mom-and-pop projects. These are huge corporate projects. There will be public investment and the energy will feed into the national grid. It is rational to question how the land will be used, what will happen when the life of the project ends, and can the energy produced be fed into the grid.
And just so you'll know: The moratorium was on new applications. That moratorium has since been lifted because the public, you and I, made a big stink about it...and I assume the energy corporations greased the palms of the congress weasels. The review process did not change beyond ceasing the new applications.
One neat idea I saw was that in areas where there was no grid you use the electricity to make hydrogen to fuel hydrogen powered locomotives. That just tickles my fancy!
Posted by phidipides at July 6, 2008 09:53 AMBack when the whole biofuel thing started gaining attention, I didn't really think about rising food prices, but I did think "great, while some countries suffer famine, we're going to pour food into our SUVs." I thought about war over food instead of oil and just how it would make us look in general hogging food for non-food use. I'm no economist. I don't know how the markets work. But if it was a no-brainer to me that this would be a problem, it really ticks me off to hear the "no one could have anticipated" blah blah blah stuff. How stupid are these policy makers?
Posted by CG at July 6, 2008 02:54 PM