Gasoline alternatives will boost CO2 levels and aggravate global warming.
Of course. fucking corn mafia
The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behavior seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.
I can’t believe Obama is believing the ethanol nonsense.
“fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels like E85, a fuel formulated with 85% ethanol, represent the future of the auto industry. It is a future American car companies can attain if we start making some tough choices now.”
The average Iowa farm has the potential to feed 3500 people per km2. But planted with nothing but corn — and with almost all of that corn going to ethanol production and the feeding of animals — the same land can only feed 744 people per km2.
On all the ethanol and similar nonsense.
The biomass industry—selling ground-up tree pellets to European power plants—is an economic boon to the South, but experts worry its growth is terrible for the planet. Will the Biden administration decide it’s climate-friendly?
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%
Subsidies kill.
2022-03-06:
But whatever the (slim-to-none) merits of that argument in 2007, its merits are 0 in 2022, when the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. And though ethanol may have some small environmental advantages over gasoline, those arguable benefits are nullified by ethanol’s terrible toll on world food output.
It may take some time and government assistance to rotate US farmland back from corn-for-fuel to food crops. But unfortunately, the war in Ukraine may last for a long time. If food-importing nations in Asia and the Middle East could be assured that more American wheat, barley, and sunflower oil would be heading their way in 2023, and that more corn would be available for animal feed rather than burned up as automobile fuel, wiser US farm policy could even help consolidate global support for Ukraine.
Ending the ethanol mandates and subsidies will boost world food supply. More food supply will reduce price pressures. Less pressure on food prices will remove a Russian weapon of intimidation.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 