Search google for "bio fuel" and "boondoggle", 47,800 hits.
Biofuel boondoggle: US subsidy aids Europe's drivers
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0608/p02s01-usec.html
Even Communists Can See Through Biofuel Boondoggle
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/ago...21/agenda.html
Biofuels may harm more than help
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=businessNews&storyid=2007-09-11T162914Z_01_L11879479_RTRUKOC_0_US-BIOFUELS-OECD-REPORT.xml&src=rss&rpc=23&sp=true
The Facts About Ethanol
http://factsaboutethanol.org/
Will this infant industry ever grow up?
http://factsaboutethanol.org/?p=227
Note the tax subsidies that the company is getting.
Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political
Boondoggles
http://www.eroei.com/index2.php?opti...o_pdf=1&id=221
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce
nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a
gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate
all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by
biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by
2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much
larger revolution that could entirely replace our
21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich,
the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all,
we can tell those greedy sheiks to **** off. As the king of ethanol
hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about
ethanol is good, good, good."
This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bull****. Ethanol
doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current
ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline
consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn
crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and
raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing
acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple
crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out
of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global
warming.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve
America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political
boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in
America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between
1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as
much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies,
including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a
study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found
that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about
half of ethanol's wholesale market price.
But as a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy
density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn
more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty
tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing
pipelines and must be distributed by truck or rail, which is
tremendously inefficient.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar
cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the
fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine
sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than
the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an
energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn
ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy
source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas,"
says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared
Energy Blog.
The ethanol boondoggle is largely a tribute to the political muscle of
a single company: agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. In the
1970s, looking for new ways to profit from corn, ADM began pushing
ethanol as a fuel additive. By the early 1980s, ADM was producing 175
million gallons of ethanol a year. The company's then-chairman, Dwayne
Andreas, struck up a close relationship with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas,
a.k.a. "Senator Ethanol." During the 1992 election, ADM gave $1 million
to Dole and his friends in the GOP (compared with $455,000 to the
Democrats). In return, Dole helped the company secure billions of
dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. In 1995, the conservative Cato
Institute, estimating that nearly half of ADM's profits came from
products either subsidized or protected by the federal government,
called the company "the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare
in recent U.S. history."
But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of
land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in
Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University
of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out
that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than
450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a
year.
Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry
and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the
first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog
farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix,
french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds
of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world.
In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food
riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork
prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and
Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other
biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry
worldwide.
Dave, the world is your oyster, just crack the shell...
Dave Hinz wrote:
On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 10:40:01 -0400, ATP* wrote:
"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 08:47:12 -0400, ATP*
wrote:
The major problem with corn based ethanol is the energy input to make a
gallon of ethanol, which is very close to a gallon of fossil fuels.
You'll be providn' a cite for that claim, right?
I can't help but notice that you have dodged this request for a cite.
Land use
issues, corn prices and pollution from agriculture are all just
additional
nails in the coffin, as far as I'm concerned. Let's admit that the whole
program is just a big give away to agribusiness and get moving on other
alternative energy sources, including nuclear.
Call it what you want, I don't care, but when you have to lie and
distort about it to make your points, it weakens your point of view's
credibility.
When you have to include insults and personal attacks in every post,
Sorry, but you have misrepresented me several times by claiming I'm
saying things I have not. And, if you take "lie and distort about it"
to be a "insult and personal attack", it makes me wonder how an actual
insult or personal attack would look.
you
have ZERO credibility. Address the issues, if you can.
I've asked you for a cite. Can you provide one? I asked you how me
growing corn instead of something else is, as you claim, bad for the
environment. I must have missed your substantive response to that
question too.