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End the Ethanol Rip-Off

nytimes.com

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Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#91

Post by developer1 »

Kalium wrote: post #86
curun1r wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, as a result, we've created the nightmare situation where we fill the animals we eat with antibiotics since we feed them foods that they're not adapted to eat. Not only are we helping to create antibiotic-resistant superbugs but the antibiotics in food also reduce the beneficial gut bacteria that we need to be healthy. There was a time when people didn't eat meat with every meal...many people believe it's actuall…

> There was a time when people didn't eat meat with every meal. Yeah. There was also a time when 8-year-olds did a full day's work in the mines and malnourishment was the norm. You should think about the complexity involved in eating a healthy vegetarian diet before you start being dismissive of it. Meat is easier in some significant ways.

You're putting words in his mouth. He never said to not eat meat. He said not to eat it at every meal. You don't need to eat sausage and bacon at breakfast, a rack of ribs and half a chicken at lunch, and a 1/2 lb steak at supper to get your daily intake of meat-provided nutrients. The sad truth is that far too many people eat meat at every single meal, and it's just not natural for us. Balance.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#92

Post by bcg1 »

001sky wrote: post #46
lutorm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all those points. All I'm saying is that if you argue that using corn ethanol as fuel is bad because it's "burning food", then you have to confront all the other ways in which the agricultural system is not really about making food.

cattle food is going into the food-system as a subsidy for human food... ie it is making high-quality proteing cheaper.... on the other hand, ethanol just makes people food more expensive....and it sucks as a fuel anyway (engineering reasons)...

sucks because of "engineering reasons" - wow, thanks for the comment

Corn-fed beef is not high-quality protein, it is usually feed lot beef laced with antibiotics, andreline and cortisol.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#93

Post by ck2 »

Congress only passes about 200 bills per year and declining.

This kickback is never going to end and if it got close, someone would just put an anonymous hold on the bill until it died.

But if you want to waste taxpayer money by renaming post offices after dead presidents, they are all for that.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#94

Post by bcg1 »

imsofuture wrote: post #37

Plus, ethanol is bad in cold weather climates. As I understand it, it can phase separate and put a bunch of water in your tank (basically).

This is true but actually not as much of a problem as self interested make it out to be.

Other than the propaganda reason (i.e., to make people think "85" is the octane) the reason that it is called E85 is that it is only 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. Ethanol by itself it not volatile enough to start an engine in cold climates so they spike it with gasoline.

Also you're correct it can phase separate but you could just as easily blame the gasoline for that problem as the ethanol... and if you tend to drive your gas tank down to near empty it reduces the problem even further.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#95

Post by lucaspiller »

hueving wrote: post #51
maratd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could feed way more people if you ate the corn We're already eating too much corn, no thank you. If you check the label on the packaged goods you buy, corn is pretty much in all of them in one form or another. We should grow less corn, let the cows eat grass, and have people eat people food (which might occasionally include a corn on the cob).

There isn't enough grass to 'let the cows eat' while sustaining affordability for lower income people. That's why they switched to corn, much better density of calories.

If that's the case why can other countries like the UK feed cattle on primarily grass? Admitidely the population is lower, but so is the amount of grazing land as I understand.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#96

Post by AnthonyMouse »

yason wrote: post #79
fennecfoxen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more poor people in the world who are farmers who benefit from this, or are there more poor people who purchase food who will suffer or starve?

Hunger has never been a problem of production in particular but of distribution. For decades, there's been plenty of food for everyone on this planet; it just hasn't been distributed, by politics or by markets, evenly and probably won't be in any time soon. It doesn't necessarily mean growing vegetation to produce ethanol fuel is a good thing but not doing so wouldn't make things effectively better either. On the oth…

> Hunger has never been a problem of production in particular but of distribution.

The price of food is not about hunger. There are people who literally have no food because the place they live has no infrastructure to transport food; that's what causes hunger.

But there are still billions of people in poverty who live in urban areas. Those people don't go hungry, because food is available for sale and food is what a hungry man buys with his first dollar. But that doesn't mean the price of food doesn't affect them -- it makes all the difference in the world to them. Because if not only the first dollar but the second and third dollars have to go to buying food then they will, but that means they can't go to obtaining shelter or medicine or education.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#98

Post by bcg1 »

The food vs. fuel argument is total propaganda anyhow. As mentioned above, most US corn is used for cattle feed ... and incidentally is only DIVERTED for ethanol production. Even if it wasn't, over 90% of the corn produced in the US is GMO corn that is probably unfit for human consumption anyhow (I suspect GMOs are the tobacco of the 21st century, but only time will tell).

The by-product of large-scale ethanol production is large amounts of dried distillers grains (DDGS). The starch that is consumed during distillation is not nutritional for the cows anyhow, and the DDGS are sold as a HIGH QUALITY feed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains).

That said, large scale ethanol production is not the best way to produce fuel, especially when it could be quite easily distilled on site where it is harvested to greatly decrease the energy input for producing the fuel. It is not a coincidence that many large ethanol plants are owned by oil companies... this would be like Microsoft buying Red Hat, adding dependencies on ActiveX to the kernel, and then claiming that their studies show that Linux is total shit.

Also, whether or not you have a law, they'll still add ethanol to the gas to increase the octane and act as an oxygenator, so I agree that tax subsidies and mandates need to end... also wars, political corruption, the income tax, and mass surveillance, but you have to start somewhere I guess.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#99

Post by minthd »

mrbabbage wrote: post #16

Further reading for the interested: - "All studies indicated that current corn ethanol technologies are much less petroleum-intensive than gasoline but have greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline. However, many important environmental effects of biofuel production are poorly understood. New metrics that measure specific resource inputs are developed, but further research into environmental metrics is n…

It looks like there's a company, prottero that makes sucrose by bacterias,using a special bioreactor, at less than half the cost, much smaller area and probably much less environmental harm. So it might be that ethanol will be green, or at least greener.

http://www.proterro.com/

Another nice benefit is that sugar is a very useful input in many bio manufacturing industries.And many of those products are much more controlled than what nature offers(like healthy dairy fats for the food industry by solazyme), so if available at the right price, they could be quite important, and low cost sugar could be helpful here.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#100

Post by kissickas »

lutorm wrote: post #22
maratd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could feed way more people if you ate the corn We're already eating too much corn, no thank you. If you check the label on the packaged goods you buy, corn is pretty much in all of them in one form or another. We should grow less corn, let the cows eat grass, and have people eat people food (which might occasionally include a corn on the cob).

I agree with all those points. All I'm saying is that if you argue that using corn ethanol as fuel is bad because it's "burning food", then you have to confront all the other ways in which the agricultural system is not really about making food.

Additionally, sugarcane-derived ethanol is far more efficient than the corn-based stuff we use in the US. I've seen numbers ranging from 3x to more than 7x more efficient than corn-based ethanol, which would mean that the use of ethanol could actually be a net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, unlike what we get from using corn.

No reason to demonize sustainable, renewable fuel - instead, we should look at the agriculture subsidies that "protect our farmers" and see how they're hurting everyone (including the farmers, affected arguably more than the rest of us by global warming) in the long run.

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