thanks
As many posters have elluded to, this issue is complex, and is not an isolated one. I’ll try to summerize what is causing this, and many other forms of, waste in this society. The politicians appoint their friends from multi billion, multi national corporations to run agencies that are suppose to protect us, such as the FDA, USDA, etc. but instead protect the interests of the few corporations in charge. The mainstream media is owned by 3 corporations. Therefore, we don’t have access to unbiased information to make informed decisions. So, improving this, or any other situation that involves waste, destruction, violence, etc., etc. has to come from citizens in the community. I have been a community grassroots activist for over 20 years, and have distributed information to countless people, so they have the information to make change. I have been to countless protests on the street, alerting citizens about ways in which we can make this a better place to live.
So, if you feel that you have a good idea on this, or another issue, organize with friends, family, etc. and share this information. Get a table and leaflet at a free speech zone at a publicly funded college or university. Protest at a politicians office. Don’t wait for the system to make the changes, because it won’t happen. Also, take a sober, critical look at your life, and see if you can make changes that can help to improve the situation. In the case of the automotive fuel crisis, what kind of auto are you driving? Can you walk, or consolidate trips, etc. I’m not supposed to ramble, so I’ll cut it at this point. I know most of us “don’t have the time” but we can make the time if we make it a priority.
The bottom line issue is the amount of carbon that the oceans and atmosphere can absorb. Continuing to add geologic carbon into the biologic carbon cycle is not sustainable. We must learn to cease adding “fossil fuels”, aka geologic carbon. So is it ethical to use edible biologic carbon to go about? It is a trade off. Ethics dictate food first. If we must zip about we must do so only very efficiently, and without geologic carbon. Our challenge is to manage biologic carbon sources such that everyone can eat, be warm and housed. Next we can move about reasonably while rebuilding a healthy biosphere. To get there each of us must embrace this critical goal and as a market member, insist on it. Shop the solutions. My home is entirely off of the grid. Solar and wind provide for our electric needs. Dead wood from the forest left to rot will produce methane (much worse for the atmosphere than CO2) so we warm our selves only with already dead wood. Our wood lot captures carbon. Our car runs on waste vegetable oil and B100 biodiesel, 49 mpg. Our garden and orchard feed us and we trade with our neighbors for eggs, cheese, milk, fish and honey. This may seem extreme, but we must change our thinking. Your solution will look differently but must be based on this same principle, no geologic carbon. Insist on it.
I find this issue to be very emotionally charged. Many people are picking on ethanol when it is but a pimple on a decomposing corpse. The question that should be asked is why American industry uses such Rube Goldberg type schemes in it’s industrial and agricultural processes. Why produce corn at all is the best question to ask. Cattle cannot digest starch like humans can, they digest cellulose best. Starch is akin to cattle poison, it messes up their digestive system and the less healthy cattle require pharmaceuticals to survive this bad diet. So, why feed cattle corn? I don’t know the complete answer but the reason that I have come up with is to enhance centralized control of agriculture. A monoculture farmer is much easier to squeeze profit from than one that produces a variety of products and limits outside inputs and dependence on the middle man. Farmers today are price takers not price makers, this is a direct result of monocropping.
Now, time for inconvenient facts that many of you will refuse to listen to given your emotional opposition to ethanol. Ethanol is made from sugar or starch (which is a more complex sugar and needs processing to break down into simple sugar). Sugar is a stored solar energy product produces through photosynthesis. In the case of corn ethanol is produced only from the starchy (remember, cow toxic) part of the kernel; the fats and protein (more cow friendly) are left after the ethanol is extracted. This leftover product called distiller dried grains with solubles (ddgs) is an excellent feed. In fact cattle get fatter faster from this feed than from whole corn and with less health problems. This is but a small example of what can be done with the leftover mash from ethanol production. All of the people posting here are assuming that corn is destroyed when used for ethanol production, this is most definitely not the case.
Yes the current agricultural scheme is unsustainable and is going to crumble from it’s dependence on fossil fuels. The fact that ethanol is produced in a stupid way from this system does not mean that it is the only way ethanol can be produced. Ethanol is nothing more than a chemical manifestation of solar energy. I urge the non-emotional among you to do more research on how ethanol can be produced without monocropping corn or other grains. Think about how long people have been producing ethanol; in fact it has been produced for thousands of years before the discovery of fossil fuels. I ask the Pimental followers, how is this possible with a negative nroei?
sugar prices are currently at 27 cents per pound.It takes ~13 pounds of sugar to make one gallon of ethanol. This makes the feedstock cost 3.56 for that gallon of ethanol that only sells for 2.00. Brazil has put things in place (subsidies) to make their system work in light of this fact.
corn costs ~4.00/bushel. You get 2.8 gallons/bushel (http://www.icminc.com/pdf/PerformanceGuarantees.pdf I also found lots of other good info on ethanol at this site). This is 1.43/gallon in feedstock costs. plus you sell 17 lbs of distillers grains from that same bushel at 0.05/lb giving you another 0.85. The reason we dont make ethanol from sugarcane is that we dont have an excess of it. We have an excess of corn. Take a look at how many BILLION bushels of corn we have to carry over each year.
We also currently produce about 14 billion gallons of ethanol and it is all used. So like it or not you are most likely using ethanol as this is 10% of the total gas supply. If we removed that you would see gasoline prices jump quickly
skyrocketing grain prices were caused by speculators in the marketplace. When the stock market took a dive these people started trading commodities and drove the prices up. by the way, corn prices have been down for months now with no effect on food prices…I wonder why that would be? Maybe because food prices were not driven up by corn prices.
Wow,
Some of you all (like this jkinser) are really not informed properly. It is difficult to understand where you get your information from. I did ten minutes of research and found a company ICM that guarantees energy use numbers in writing for ethanol production http://www.icminc.com/pdf/PerformanceGuarantees.pdf. From my estimation ethanol has 84,000 btu/gallon and this company guarantees 30,000 btu/gallon produciton costs and half of that isnt even for ethanol production, it is for drying the animal feed. This company has built over 100 plants and is still in business with this guarantee. This should shut up the ignorant folks who still think the energy balance is negative.
Given water shortages and the amount of water needed to make the fuel, and world wide hunger using food crops to make fuel is downright antisocial.
Yes, but the right ones are. Have any of you ever researched the current corporate food industry?? If you have, then you will come to the conclusion that ethanol and the likes of corn and soy are a. not ethical at all weather it be food or fuel, b. not even close to sustainability, using on average 12 carbs to net just one single carb for consumption being a food, and forget about making ethanol fuel, c. any of you ever hear of something called “blue baby alerts”? google it d. what about the “dead zones” at the end of our rivers and streams going in the ocean because of the nitrate run-off from growing the GENETICALLY modified corn and soy. Vast areas in our oceans that an algae is literally consuming all oxygen in the water that when native wild life in our oceans go into suffocate and die e. the list is just goes on forever and companies like Monsanto are destroying our environment and our farmers lives, practically doing business the Mafia way.
You want an easy ethical bio-fuel, bio-diesel may not be perfect, but it is here and now with no changing of infrastructure to make transport and sell/dispense. You make it using rendered veggie oil, and can run in ANY DIESEL engine WITH NO MODIFICATION. I have personally tested bio-diesel on diesels ranging from 70s-80s era mechanical injection, to the brand new common rail blue-tech diesels available today. No modification needed, and the cars/trucks I have been personally monitoring have 60K plus miles running on B100. No problems, and the MPG are practically the same. You want an ethical bio-fuel, start using bio-diesel made from rendered veggie oil. Or better yet if your diesel is a mechanical injection, run straight veggie oil. Until the manufacturing process of algae is better refined, bio-diesel is the best way to go. The particulate matter from the exhaust using bio-diesel is not carcinogenic, no sulfuric gasses are emitted, and the nox gasses are less than using petroleum based diesel.
I don’t have the time or interest in reading all of the replies as they are ones I’ve heard before.
First off, I’m absolutely 100% pro-ethanol. I live on our family farm which is located 10-mins from an ethanol plant. Those of us who live by this plant recognize this plant as another way to market our corn. Without this plant, the corn we do sell would be transported by truck 60 miles to a barge loading terminal to take the corn down the river. This would certainly eat up more diesel fuel than the ethanol that is produced by the plant.
Do any of you know that ethanol was good enough for Henry Ford and his Model T? The only reason why ethanol didn’t take off was that the Big Oil monopoly,Standard Oil, artifically deflated the price of oil to corner the fuel market.
For the cattle farmer complaining about how ethanol has increased the price of feedstuffs, I can sympathize but that’s all you’re going to get from me. Maybe if you would plant enough corn for your cattle you would be able to maintain your costs. Have you ever though about using the dried-distillers grains for your cattle feed?
For those of you that say that farmers are producing more corn on more acres, you are sorely mistaken. In 1998, the American farmer grew 7 billion bushels of corn on roughly 80 million acres. In 2009, the same farmer grew 12 billion bushels of corn on roughly the same amount of acres. Do any of you realize that on the average every 1 minute in America 2 acres of prime farmland are lost due to development??
Someone mentioned David Pimental and his studies that have shown that ethanol is enegery-negative. Have any of you ever taken a look at his studies and compared his to the thousands of other studies that have shown ethanol to be energy-positive?
Do any of you realize that the Big Oil companies receive more subsidies from the federal government then all of the farmers put together?
Thank you for your frank, “tough luck, more money for me” summary. Raise feed prices? Tough! Result in much more intense farming, with higher fertilizer runoff and ever-increasing dead zones in our rivers and sea shores? Tough!
And if big ag. would give up the ethanol per-gallon subsidy, I’d have no problem with it (trying) to compete.
Those interested in facts (including several university studies detailing corn-based ethanol’s failings) can find them here:
Ethically produced biofuels are ethically defensible.
Diverting loads and loads of corn crops for fuel, especially after accepting a lot of subsidies, probably isn’t either the wisest or most ethical of decisions. Of course, biofuels can be made from lots of stuff. Soy beans and corn seems to be popular in the US. Here in Europe, we see a lot of rapeseed being used. Rapeseed is better for biodiesel production in that you get more out of it and it isn’t quite the hot commodity that corn is but it’s offset by the fact that a fair bit of fertilizer gets dumped on it. NO2 isn’t a very friendly gas, greenhouse-wise.
WVO is just part of the picture. No, it will never meet all of anyone’s energy demands whether used straight or used to help make biodiesel… but better to use it for fuel than to haul it to the dump! WVO producers used to pay to have that stuff hauled away. Now they get paid for it and good for them.
Sustainable, reasonable crops should be grown in reasonable locations to help ease the burden (financial, geo-political, etc.) of petro-based oil. This doesn’t mean clear-cutting rain forest to plant and harvest palm trees and palm oil via what is not-quite-slave-labour. They ought to be able decreasing energy dependence and encouraging more thought about how to run cars.
Same can be said for hybrids: it is a bit stupid to ruin a landscape digging up nickle or other minerals for batteries. These aren’t really sustainable but at least they are highly renewable.
Hydrogen might be - some day - a great choice, too. Or a combination of cars run on traditional fuels, hybrids running on traditional fuels (or their bio-equivalents) and electrical systems and, at some point, hydrogen.
Don’t forget about LPG (CNG isn’t really efficient enough!), either. I know there is either no or VERY little info about LPG in the US but in parts of Europe it is fairly popular. My last car, a 1998 Citro?n Xsara (with a 115 bhp 1.8 litre petrol/gasoline engine) had a $1200 USD kit which included a 35 litre/9.25 US gallon (7.7 UK gallon) tank. It was nearly as efficient as running on “regular” gasoline/petrol (about 2-5 percent less efficient) but quite a lot cheaper. Less polluting, too.
Why can’t we see a mix of this? Too much trouble? Think again - LPG wasn’t very common over here up until 10-15 years ago. Where did all the stations come from? They were built or modified, of course and now, here in Poland of all places, you can find LPG at least half of the fuel stations. Some stations are LPG-only as those start-up costs for those stations is very low. Many, existing stations added an LPG pump and storage tank. As we should expect existing stations to do for hybrids (10-20 minute quick/intense battery charge stations) and for hydrogen-users.
A single solution is probably the easiest way to go from one very troublesome dependence to another. When we can run our vehicles on a variety of fuels and/or it is easy and common to have a choice between electrical/battery, traditional fuels + biofuels, hydrogen and LPG… then we will see the petro-oil producing countries have to finally start thinking sustainably, not just about fuels and food stuffs, but they’ll have to start thinking about sustainable policies and politics!
The down-side is that figuring out what kind of car to buy will fairly complicated, as will fill-ups… but who said life was supposed to be easy or simple?
The premise of the question is wrong. Of course biofuels are ethically defensible. The question you want to ask is 2 fold.
- What is the Highest/Best use of a productive acre?
a. Is there enough of that product on the market, if so move to crop 2 and so on. - Should the government be pushing and subsidising just a segment of a specific product (corn-based ethanol)
Prime forestland can produce more ethanol-diesel-gasoline than the corn farmers and do so in a more ecologically sound and sustainable manner. The problem is the government has decided that Corn is the politically correct way to go. Not all corn farmers are evil, not all of them get subsidies, but because of those that do, that is where the market is. If the government put the same money and effort behind forest based fuels (and Iowa moved their Presidential primary to the end) as they do corn, corn wouldn’t stand a chance.
There is also switchgrass you can convert to ethanol which as a forester I know very little about. But I do know you could convert all the food crop acres back to food grade corn and have more than enough switchgrass acres to pick up the raw material needs for the same amount of ethanol production.
The problem is, we DON’T live in a free-market. There are subsidies going to corn ethanol that aren’t even being close to being matched in other ethanol sources (forest biomass, switchgrass, …) If the government got out of the market, it would be free and correct itself. You would have more food grade corn being grown and less corn for ethanol.
Amy-
You are a little off. There are different subsidies along the chain that have an even stronger effect than just an extra subsidy for ethanol. The government has helped created a false market through incentives and tax treatment for corn-based ethanol the growers have chosen to fill. Which is much more effective than adding extra subsidies to ethanol grade corn that a free-manufacturing-market would then have the option of utilizing.
Texases-
Very astute and wise. Check out biofuels from the forest and switchgrass. No need to convert acres of land to algae growing tubes or anything else. Although I do feel Algae-Gas will fill a niche and serve a purpose as the solution to some problems not specifically associated with creating fuel as a primary function, I don’t feel it will drive the market.
Manage what comes naturally and you increase the value of what is natural. Make biofuels from forest and what do you get… more forest.
aigphoto-
I thought you said we live in a Free-Market…
You gave proof we don’t live in one in your conclusion. Corn is subsidised to make it competitive, Corn-ethanol process is also subsidised and propped up to make it a competitive alcohol producer. At many points along the line they get enough help to edge out sugarcane. Converting a starch to a sugar and then on to alcohol is inherently a more expensive process than growing sugar to start with and making ethanol straight from it.
Also your drug parallel is a non-sequitur in regards for market/money. If those countries weren’t nearly lawless and had a detection/eradication program half as effective as what we have (not that ours is effective), you would see a different picture.
Catfish-
Careful. Even though it is a racket now as you point out, biofuels can be completely ethical. If we could get the gov’t out of it and let switchgrass, forest biomass (look up “Range Fuels” in Soperton, Georgia and Denver) or even sugarcane into the picture, it would look exponentially different.
Corn based ethanol is a net negative for energy input/output. For those that don’t understand… we are using more energy units (you could use Btu for example) to create corn-ethanol than we are getting out. I have seen recently only a few studies that show a slight net positive… not good enough for me. If you through an extra 50 miles from farm to refinery, that may kill the ratio right there. Ethanol ranges from 0.7 to 1.3 or 1.5 (terrible to not good). For comparison, for every unit of energy you put into extracting and refining crude, you get 15 units of gasoline energy.
To the best of my knowledge, all the other potentially viable sources of ethanol are net energy positive regardless of how you figure it.