Gotta admit, it is funny, in a sad sorta way. Thanks!
I was on a bicycle website today. Someone there writes, “I spent half my money on bicycles and women. The rest, I just wasted.”
There used to be a 49.5 cent per gallon blend tax credit that got passed on to the consumers. That trained them to see E-85 as “much cheaper than gas.” Especially since E85 came along right as we were hitting $2/gallon gas for the first time ever.
Perceptions take a long time to change absent catastrophic intervention. While you might immediately re-evalutate your opinion of a friend who murders someone, you’ll be much slower to change your opinion of something that isn’t quite so harshly changed.
After all, people still think Hyundai is about half a step above Yugo despite them being at least where Honda was in the 90s from a quality perspective. People still see ethanol as a bargain despite the fact that they’re in actuality paying more for it than they would for normal gas.
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That was likely sorghum @B.L.E
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sorghum-syrup-grain-super_n_6063016
An update of the old joke about the guy who inherited a million dollars, went to the big city, returned years later, penniless. Someone asked him what happened to all his money, he replied, ‘I spent part of it on women, part on wine, the rest I just frittered away.’
I heard this joke more than 30 years ago.
There’s a lot of cane grown in Florida and Hawaii. There’s a huge tariff, about 50¢/pound. Look at commodity prices: there are separate prices for domestic and world sugar. Reagan hated the sugar tariff when he was first elected but the Fanjul brothers, Cuban-American sugar magnates powerful in the Republican party in Florida, changed his mind. So much for the free market. Cutting cane is notoriously dangerous; they hire anybody. Criminals on the lam work in them.
Most of the sugar in the US is beets, which can grow even in North Dakota.
I don’t like the idea of more ethanol in any case. Ethanol has 4% to 5% less energy in it than gasoline from what I have read. Thus your fuel mileage suffers at least a little bit with the addition of ethanol. Is it worth it? I guess it depends on how much less E90 or E85 costs than pure gasoline to determine if it is worth it.
Not in Hawaii any more:
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'"I guess I’ll just keep farming until the rest of it’s gone”.
I heard this joke more than 30 years ago.
It actually happened about 30 years ago and was on the local TV news!!!
I would think you could skip the refined sugar step of the process and just ferment the cane sap directly into alcohol and maybe that tariff wouldn’t apply. But wait a minute, don’t tariffs only apply to imported products? How would that interfere with cane ethanol production in the U.S.?
+1
When I visited Hawaii, circa 1998, the landscape was already scarred by the rusted hulks of old sugar refineries that hadn’t been used for… a long time. We were told that farmers in Hawaii were planting crops with a much more lucrative return per acre than sugar cane, and that they were beginning to turn to growing coffee plants.
Two decades later, there is even less sugar production, and even more coffee production, in Hawaii.
It’d be nifty to grind up the whole cane and ferment all of it, but fermenting fiber is difficult. I know they grind cane into cane juice in the field (seen it myself bicycling through central Florida) and burn the bagasse. I think cane juice would be the best stock to ferment. Bacteria die at about 12% alcohol, so you don’t want it too sweet.
I don’t think we turn cane into ethanol, only corn. I was on a sidebar, explaining why there was still sugar agriculture in the US. Lifesavers (the candy) are no longer made in the US because of the sugar tariff. They’re made in Canada and imported. They can’t be made with corn syrup instead.
It’s to subsidize the farmers our politicians have been screwing over for decades.
Yes, but those family farmers are now largely gone, only to be replaced by HUGE corporate farming companies. If the family farmers of olden days had powerful lobbyists–as the corporate farm companies do–they might not have gotten screwed.
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A farm news program this morning mentioned a significant increase in farms being delinquent 90days+ and an increase in bankruptcies and suicides across the mid west and south west. And I noticed that the market price for ethanol was $1.22. Obviously that is a significant market for farmers to keep up with.