191–200 of 257 posts
Big agriculture lying about the public benefits of ethanol is irrelevant, food security is more important in the event of a crisis that prevents agricultural imports than any negative externalities of turning corn into ethanol.
Lobbyists are responsible for all of the harm that Americans at large come to. Eco damage, car crashes, toxic chemicals in food, the drug war, wars in the Middle East, lack of public housing, the world's most expensive health care, union-busting, even heart disease. If you can think of it and it hurts lots of Americans, lobbyists were behind it.
I think this takes too much responsibility off the politicians swayed by lobbyists and the corporations paying lobbyists. Don’t get me wrong, lobbyists have been middlemen in a lot of disastrous policy, but they’re not really the source of the problem.
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The corn varieties grown for industrial ethanol production are mutually exclusive with the corn varieties grown for human consumption; you cannot use one for the other. They might as well be corn vs soy beans.
I believe they grow field corn for animal feed as well as for ethanol. Technically some processed foods also use field corn. While there are a number of varieties of field corn, I don't believe any are exclusive to ethanol production and could be used in other capacities.
I grow corn. I grow it to be sold. Whatever the buyer decides to do with it — be that feed it to animals, turn it into tortilla chips, make sweeteners, create plastic for 3D printers, produce ethanol, or even burn it in their furnace — is up to them.
I read the whole article and I still don't see how Big Ag misled anyone. I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the author is trying to differentiate between growing corn for food vs growing the same corn for ethanol. I assume the entire reason the lobby exists is that farmers want to grow corn for food and ethanol. But the researcher lost interest before proving anything around there. Maybe ethanol is actually…
The corn varieties grown for industrial ethanol production are mutually exclusive with the corn varieties grown for human consumption; you cannot use one for the other. They might as well be corn vs soy beans.
Not exactly. You wouldn't normally eat "industrial ethanol corn" off the cob, which is what you are probably trying to suggest, but it is often used in other corn-based food like tortilla chips, and, of course, its most infamous use: High-fructose corn syrup.
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That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid. Other crops are more efficient (Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
What crops are those, and do they grow in the same climates and soils as corn does at the moment?
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Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
No they aren’t. Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral. Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon. Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon. But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
What I'm not saying is you need to bury the corn to use biofuels.
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Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky. The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some…
It was just meant to be a humorous hyperbole in agreement with the parent but seems like folks didn't get it.
I know the general public should never be expected to subsidize enthusiasts, but E85 - available in many places for under $3/gal - has many of the same performance characteristics as $20/gal race gas for performance automotive enthusiasts. I'm all for the peaceful and orderly dissolution of the entire US federal government, as involuntary taxation under implied threat of violence is theft, but until then, thanks for…
It's been a long time since I dabbled, but from memory the likes of E85 is good for fixed load use (eg. drag racing) but not great for variable load (track racing cars, motocross etc) because petrol has a wide range of evaporation points compared to the much narrower range of E85.
It also lets the engine run cooler despite burning hotter precisely because of those evap characterisics.
That's not to say there are no downsides. It's less energy dense so you need larger injectors or a higher duty cycle, you get less mileage, it's extremely hygroscopic, it has different corrosive properties, and a different stoich ratio so most vehicles need some amount of modifications and tuning to properly utilize it.
But all in all, it's wildly economical alternative to traditional high performance fuel.
We've known for decades that it requires more energy to produce corn ethanol than is delivered in the ethanol produced. A lot of the necessary inputs are petroleum-based. This is not news. What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.
It is my understanding that environmentalists never pushed for biofuels at scale. Biofuels make sense at a very limited scale where you use waste to produce fuel, eg pressing sawdust into wood pellets, or making biogas from manure.
But in normal human fashion we took what is a decent idea at limited scale and thought we could make it an even better idea if we scaled it up to ridiculous proportions. And in normal human fashion, instead of realizing our mistake in not applying some moderation, now we're convinced that what is a bad idea at ridiculous proportions must be eliminated entirely...
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i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in > Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an…
If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’. It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into eth…