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End the Ethanol Rip-Off

nytimes.com

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Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#101

Post by microtonal »

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 should think about the complexity involved in eating a healthy vegetarian diet before you start being dismissive of it.

Lets not blow the difficulty of being a vegetarian out of proportion. Eating a healthy vegan diet is still difficult. Eating a healthy vegetarian diet is not. There are plenty of cook books describing varied and balanced vegetarian meals. There are plenty of restaurants that serve good vegetarian meals and many supermarkets (at least in Western Europe) also provide the necessary ingredients.

(I have been a vegetarian for 16 years now, almost half of my life.)

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#102

Post by SixSigma »

lutorm wrote: post #14
guscost wrote: post #2

I'm surprised and happy to see this in the Times. It's a good idea to avoid ethanol gas, on principle if for no other reason. Processing edible food to burn in your car (with all the implied market consequences) is kinda crazy. Here's a good resource if you're looking for ethanol-free gas in the US and Canada: http://pure-gas.org

The majority of corn produced in the United States is used for cattle feed (and the rest for things like HFCS.) If you think it's crazy to burn edible food in a car, it's about as crazy to use it to fuel cow metabolism. You could feed way more people if you ate the corn, but as it turns out, U.S. industrial corn production is pretty much for anything but eating.

Additional craziness, the subsidy means it's cheaper to buy corn than grow it! Thus making mixed agriculture farms rarer.

So instead of using cow slurry to fertilise crops the US uses oil based fertiliser and has millions of gallons of cow slurry in lagoons.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#103

Post by venomsnake »

littletimmy wrote: post #60
hueving wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not absolutely essential that lower income people eat beef. More importantly, the state should not be allowed to waste tax payer money on the ridiculous idea that lower income people must have beef to eat. Why on earth should my tax dollars go to a steak party?

social and society have common root. The great unwashed also like to eat protein and voting power.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#104

Post by nerdo »

wtbob wrote: post #63
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).

> If you check the label on the packaged goods you buy, corn is pretty much in all of them in one form or another. Well yeah: corn grows really well in the American Midwest; it's pretty cool that we're able to make so many products from it (kinda like the work George Washington Carver did with peanuts, which grow very well in the South).

It's also an efficient crop as it uses the C4 pathway, and as you've said can be reprocessed infinite ways, even as gas as you see here. Great for an industrialized market economy.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#105

Post by tim333 »

The corn ethanol rip off is kind of ridiculous. I still have hopes though that algae produced ethanol may be cost effective. There's a company called Algenol that's been trying for a while with genetically modified algae and projecting cheaper than oil ethanol next year for quite a few years now but you never know - they may get there one day.

( http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2015/01/26/worlds-larg... for example of their stuff)

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#106

Post by littletimmy »

stbtrax wrote: post #89
littletimmy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not absolutely essential that lower income people eat beef. More importantly, the state should not be allowed to waste tax payer money on the ridiculous idea that lower income people must have beef to eat. Why on earth should my tax dollars go to a steak party?

Pardon the pun, but your complaints are incredibly rarified. No one's having a steak party, they're eating burgers and tacos in between their long shifts because of lack of fresh produce and time to cook it.

The government cannot subsidize fresh produce instead of the beef industry?

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#107

Post by mjevans »

littletimmy wrote: post #106
stbtrax wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon the pun, but your complaints are incredibly rarified. No one's having a steak party, they're eating burgers and tacos in between their long shifts because of lack of fresh produce and time to cook it.

The government cannot subsidize fresh produce instead of the beef industry?

The average voter feels a burger/taco/burrito is tastier and 'American'.

The average voter probably has also not had /good/ experiences with salads that are actually tasty for reasons other than bacon. (Can we PLEASE stop adding bacon to /everything/ (at least as a default?); some of us just don't like the smokey taste.)

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#108

Post by talideon »

lucaspiller wrote: post #95
hueving wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might want to prefer population density over population as a metric: the population density of the UK is _much_ higher than that of the US. IIRC, this is true even east of the Mississippi.

Pasture is probably higher quality in the UK though, owing to the wet climate, which would compensate for there being less pasture.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#109

Post by pjc50 »

eastbayjake wrote: post #35
pedalpete wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered about this argument in an environment suffering from an obesity epidemic, often blamed on another corn product, high-fructose corn syrup. Having lived in many different countries, the cost of food in the US is incredibly low. I assume (and have heard) this is mostly a result of subsidies to farmers. All the while, US exports of 'corn based products', which I assume is also corn, has continued to…

I'm hopeful that normalized relations with Cuba will be the end of our crazy corn subsidies. If you want to make ethanol, sugarcane is 7x more energy efficient in producing ethanol compared to corn, and you can produce twice as much ethanol from an acre of sugarcane as an acre of corn[1]. And if you want to sweeten food and beverages, the same energy efficiency applies to cane sugar harvesting: you can get more sugar…

I'd always thought that the Cuban stalemate lasted so long as enough of the refugees from the revolution were alive and active in Florida politics, I hadn't realised there was a subsidy dimension to it as well.

Re: End the Ethanol Rip-Off

#110

Post by ArkyBeagle »

kissickas wrote: post #100
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.

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 a…

Ag subsidies seem to mainly stabilize price regimes. There would arguably be costs associated with increased risk of production if the subsidies were not in place.

They might be obsolete, but the fraction of people's time spent on food (both as producers and consumers ) continues to decline. It's also argued that the availability of abundant food is a legitimate public good.

Our levels of food security in the First World are recent. I doubt anyone from... say, 1850 would put food security in terms of a human right as we now do.

The irony is that petroleum products are an input into ethanol-corn production. How much I don't know; but the present subsidy regime nearly guarantees some measure of overproduction.

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