Food or Fuel?
So, would you rather eat or drive? I mean, if you had to make a choice, would you really not eat in order to drive your automobile? Or to have your “I gotta have one of those” delivered by FedEx?
Think that’s far fetched? If you’re one of the lucky ones living here in the Empire, I suppose it is far fetched. We’re not starving. But if you’re in Sudan and depending on food from other countries, well, it’s pretty damned realistic. The corn used to produce the ethanol needed to fill a 12-gallon Prius tank could feed a person for Sudan for six months.
Today’s New York Times ran two stories on the front page of the business section titled “The Price of Growing Fuel.” The story discusses what ethanol production, and the government’s insistence upon it, is doing to food production and pricing. Incidentally, in the same section, there’s a story about a U.N. report that shows how much the world’s food supply is shrinking.
Some of us, a very small number of us, have been pontificating about how corn ethanol is a loser and will always be a loser. It takes more energy to produce it than the energy derived. The costs are too high. The New York Times article provides several examples and quotations that essentially make the same point, but also attempts to leave the door open for additional debate quoting sources as saying “we’ll rise to the challenge,” “we still have a ways to go,” “it’s certainly a challenge, but an achievable challenge.”
Can’t be done, guys. Sorry. I know a lot of investors and Wall Street types are counting on the hype, but there’s no substitute for oil. Sugarcane has more promise, but we can’t grow enough sugarcane for it to make a dent.
It’s a ridiculously stupid plan in a world of shrinking water supplies, peak oil and global climate change, because each one of those significant issues are going to have a magnificent impact on food production and availability. Yet, we’re apparently going to modify production to grow increasing yields of one of the most environmentally intensive crops on the planet. And not for food. For fuel.
Our entire species deserves one of those “Darwin Awards.”
Great points. BioFuels are not the answer. Taking food out of peoples mouths, is simply not the answer.
Consider really how much pollution enters the environment when you drive a car as opposed to riding a horse. What comes out of the tailpipe of a Prius is much less polluting than what comes out of a horse.
Consider how filthy cities used to be before the internal combustion engines came along. Cities used to be knee deep in manure from all the horses. Now we have smog instead of manure. Which would you prefer?
Mexico and the Sudan need the corn. We need to find ways to drive more miles on less oil… or perhaps electricity driven cars generated from hydrogen.
This society will only care about their own comforts so I don’t think most will even consider ethanol takes food out of peoples mouths. The attitude is: “So long as my Ford Mastadon rolls, I don’t care where the fuel comes from”.
Just some additional thoughts…
already, two thirds of the grain production in the world goes to feed animals, which are then eaten. so we are already doing this with corn, only to use as fuel for cows, while people all over the world would be happy to eat far less grain than a cow needs. it really makes no damn sense. grrrrr.
A follow up on alternative fuel sources…methane.
http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/001844.html
Not sure if this will work or help…but yet another thought….