Just remember, it’s all about saving the planet:
Barto is more sad than angry. He is a leader of a Dayak Kanayan community in a remote part of the rainforest in deepest Borneo.
Gazing out over a vast expanse of freshly planted palm oil plants, he says: “This is our ancestors’ land which we have had for years, and now we have lost it.”
The publication also said 48 to 52 per cent of Canada’s total corn-seeded area and 11 to 12 per cent of the wheat-seeded area would have to be used – all this for Canada to reach its domestic biofuel target of 5 per cent of the national fuel consumption by 2010.
The pasta crisis is the latest in what may soon be a regular rise in global prices. In January, Mexican consumers were hit with a tortilla crisis, as grain prices doubled and tripled the cost of tortillas and caused riots in some places. Beer prices in Germany ticked upwards in May partially due to the increased production of biofuels.
cross-posted @ Cjunk
I came across an article on a new plant they are looking into instead of corn. Who Knows?
Poison plant could help to cure the planet
The jatropha bush
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2155351.ece
at least corn can be turned into food. But likely, it’s some hybidized version aimed at producing ethanol rather than human nutrients.
Better take up gardening and forget about the lawn!
I like it. Bio fuels errodng the rain forest.Greenies finally getting their way and expecting farmers to grow something other than corn.Think about it,IT DOESNT MATTER IF CORN IS GROWN OR ANOTHER CROP,THOSE ACRES ARE OUT OF CORN PRODUCTION AND THE CORN WILL STILL BE IN SHORT SUPPLY!
Just maybe it is the farmer’s turn to get a decent
return. With fuel and fertilizer costs three times
what they reasonably should be we are having to work on our land base capital. Just out today to town and noted two more auction sale signs for big outfits that have hit the wall. Getting an off farm job and putting the wife out to work brings home more at the end of the year than trying to keep a five million dollar farming operation going.
Scary stuff for sure. Wouldn’t want farmers to be able to make a decent living would we?
Ze Germans vill not stand for zis !
It’s not about farmers making a good living; it’s about energy production destroying food production. The first to suffer will be the world’s poor … as usual.
Typical of the leftards: absolutely no notion of basic economics. Bunch of poster children for the law of unintended consequences. Any first year economics student could have predicted the downstream effect of bio-fuels. Guess the enviro-tards are a lot dumber than first year economics students. If we’re lucky, the first food riots will end with enviro-tards strung from the nearest lampposts. It’s herd-culling time again.
I think they could make a powerful fuel from HORSERADISH
Oh noes, not another spaghetti crisis!
Funnies aside, the answer to renewable energy is not in taking over food crop-growing land. Hemp might be an answer, but the association with pot seems to be unsurmountable.
Biofuels mean more money for Canadian farmers and less money for Persian Gulf terror-monkeys. ‘Nuff said.
“Biofuels mean more money for Canadian farmers and less money for Persian Gulf terror-monkeys. ‘Nuff said.”
Spoken like a true economic illiterate, JP. Well done. You probably voted for PET back then too – he was another economic illiterate.
Please give me permission to kick your ass the first time you complain about rising food prices – which will inevitably happen when more and more farmland currently producing food crops is diverted to fuel crop production. You know, basic supply and demand… If you take two minutes to inform yourself, you’ll find out just how important corn is to modern food production – it’s more than just nibblets with your fried baloney.
Oh my God, frankenfuels!
bill d cat says….
Ze Germans vill not stand for zis !
well cat your right. they are cultivating rape seed for there bio-fuel production. downside is that the government is already taxing them which will make the biofuel and oil based fuels cents apart and the population is staying with the oil based products for now anyway.
the same will probably happen here, the taxing part i mean.
I just can’t figure out the logic…grow fuel crops instead of food crops….hmmm….I just don’t understand…
GinW — The idea is to replace evil-empire fossil fuels with federation-friendly crops. As I understand it, the energy required to create the crops exceeds the usable fuel energy produced; so it’s ultimately impractical but makes everybody feel-good — which is pretty much all we can expect these days.
PM Harper, instead of creating an Environment Minister in charge of Global Warming, should cut to the chase and create a Minister of Feeling Good. Carbon-credits would be way up there. We still get to pollute (if you consider C02 a pollutant), but we get to feel real good about doing it.
Just think, after all these years the book FAMINE, which predicted mass starvation, was 30 yrs ahead of its time.
Just where is the farmland for growing both food and fuel going to come from.
Oh well, the enviroidiots will be able to drive, looking for something to eat. They wont even be able to hunt as all guns will be destroyed. Back to the bow and arrow.
If one could grow non-THC marijuana, it could be grown on ‘waste’ farmland (not one acre taken out of food production) and it is an excellent source for bio-mass. No chemicals or fertilizer needed, cheap, and plentiful. But then again, if it makes sense, lets NOT do. Sigh.
this is great , every year we can try to grow what Mother Nature took 100 millions years to create.
there will never be enough, get a brain greenies.
Mr Paul Decker, it’s called hemp. Imagine if you could grow hemp down the median strip of all the 400 series highways in Ontario or between the runways and taxiways of the nation’s airports. All those plants sucking up the CO2 and pollutants from all those cars and truck, then in the end producing biodiesel.
I find it interesting how many on here suggest environmentalists think ethanol is the answer, it is not. Though much cleaner out of the tailpipe, ethanol from seed to pump produces more CO2 and other pollutants for a negative amount of energy produced. It reduces the global capacity for food production and increases food staple costs for those who can least afford it. We need to be focused more on locally produced biodiesel from sources like hemp. As Mr. Paul Decker correctly pointed out, it doesn’t require the fertilizers of other crops and is happy growing in marginal lands.
Ok some people don’t like the connection with marijuana. Legalize it, pot use is a victimless crime.
http://www.hempcar.org/petvshemp.shtml
Using a food crop for auto fuel – really bright. Claiming this will reduce our dependency on foreign oil is lunacy.
We will have inefficient fuel, and expensive food.
Places like Mexico have already seen the price of corn meal triple.
Corn does NOT make efficient fuel. And, it is NOT easy on lots of things in cars (it is corrosive!). This is really intelligent. But, the poor farmers will make money on it! Uniformed lunacy!
It is true —- in general it takes more fossil fuel to grow biofuels than they are worth as an energy source. Oil companies love ’em.
So why the hype ?? Simple — greens demanded it and our beloved media promoted it as a way to “bypass” the oil companies.
Hemp doesn’t require the fertilizer that other crops do ?? If so, it is the only plant that is a perpetual motion machine. Magic. Heard that before.
Legumes source much of their nitrogen from the atmosphere but even they reguire phosphate, potash, sulphur, and all the other micro nutrients from the soil and/or fertilizer.
There is no free lunch. Except for those promoting a scam. Think Gore.
“Hemp doesn’t require the fertilizer that other crops do ?? If so, it is the only plant that is a perpetual motion machine. Magic. Heard that before.”
I didn’t say it requires no fertilizer, it doesn’t require the same amounts of fertilizer after constant hemp growth without rotating. In addition to fertilizer, hemp is much more resistant to pests meaning less pesticide use than other crops.
Meanwhile in B.C., our green Premier, Gordon Campbell has ordered 20 Ballard Hydrogen Fuel Cell buses for Whistler – just in time for the 2010 Olympic games. He has decided that Vancouver/Whistler should be the terminus of the ‘hydrogen higway’ with California as the southern end.
Never mind that technology is still seriously lagging – he wants to be first (and I’m a Campbell supporter, BTW. We could have purchased 178 Orion VII diesel/hybrid buses that are 35% more efficient than previous diesels and 90% cleaner in terms of particulates – for $488k each.
Instead we get 20 hydrogen buses for $89,000,000 or about $4.2 millon dollars each. Yep, that’s hhow I like to see my tax dollars spent.
I think that with any new industry starting up (the biomass energy industry) there are going to be some wild fluctuations before the market starts to stabilize.
I found it was very easy to go to the NYBOT site and check out all the futures and prices on ethanol, corn, RBOB (gas capable of being blended with 10% ethanol), gas, sugar, types of crude oil, etc – and see the pricing trends – and try to understand what’s happening. In fact, I think ethanol used to be part of the sugar market before being broken out separately.
The ethanol industry is here – and like all industries they are going to be looking at cost, processes, new ideas to stay competitive. (A very interesting company is BIOX – they’ve successfully shown that their patented processes are very efficient and actually work in their big prototype plant in Hamilton – in fact they can use biomass from slaughterhouses to produce ethanol – maybe they’ll start competing for cattle).
For example, if you look at corn right now it is priced at about 3.20/bu. This is down significantly from mid-June when it spiked to over 4.30/bu (and it averaged around 3.80 to 4.20 for most of this year). This is a drop of about 25%. (I remember reading an article in January from the BBC talking about this Mexican stuff and how corn had spiked up over 4.13 – to a 10 year high – causing Mexicans to pay up to 25% more for corn for tortillas, etc. – well the price is back down.)
I’m no expert on this future stuff but when I was in the US for May and June there was a noticable difference in 10% ethanol at the pumps. In May there was no 10% Ethanol gas at the pumps – or if there was it was infrequent and not the lowest cost gas. In mid-June 10% ethanol gas was everywhere and the real shocker was that it was the 89 octane stuff and it was significantly cheaper than the 85,86,87 octane stuff. I thought this must be a marketing ploy to get people to use ethanol (or some gov’t mandated thing to ensure that ethanol was at the pumps in June). However, I ran into this knowledgeable guy in Idaho and I asked him what gives with this price inversion. He said just look at the futures. Apparently, all the gas distributers had hedged on RBOB which was significantly cheaper at the time than gas (because the US gas refineries were still not all back to full production and pre-mixing of ethanol) and thus resulting in the low costs compared to ordinary gas.
Now after the widespread introduction of ethanol gas in June the prices for corn have come down significantly.
Ethonol has another disadvantages. It is too corrosive to send through the pipelines and thus has to be trucked to the final destination for mixing (This adds a lot of cost). It also may be corrosive in your engine.
Will the use of ethanol lessen our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, yes or no? If yes, then paying more for food is a fair tradeoff. If no, if ethanol is just a sop to the greenies, then forget the whole thing.
Biofuels – an incredible economic waste
Ethanol is half burnt ethane. it energy value is much reduced even for transportation being essentially half water , half hydrocarbon. not a good choice in terms of efficiency.
there will never be enough, get a brain greenies.”
very true on both points cal.
fact is, like pretty much any resource, water, land, oil, hard drive space and CPU cycles, the demand grows to meet the supply. the biofuels (biofools?) garnered in this half-baked leftoid scheme will be quickly gobbled (….bUUUURP!) up and no savings of any kind, eco- or financial will be realized.
FUEL YOUR CAR WITH CORN SQUEEZINGS
Here are some interesting things. (There are a lot of arguments and disagreements all over the place when you google ethanol energy efficiency – but most numbers do match up with Canadian and US Agri and Energy Department calculations.)
Here are some numbers – this is energy yield per unit of energy input (this can be btu or anything you want).
gasoline ~ .8 (it takes about 20% more energy to produce than it creates)
diesel ~ .85
corn ethanol ~ 1.35 (produces about 35% more energy than it takes to create – hard to believe and controversial)
biodiesel ~ 3.20 (big gain – uses soy and things like that)
sugarcane ethanol ~ 2.75 (currently a big difference compared to corn – can be 8 to 10 times more efficient)
Brazil (which already drives the global sugar markets) is expecting to produce 20 b litres of ethanol this year (that’s about 127 million barrels(oil) ). The cost of Brazilian ethanol is about half the cost of US produced ethanol (although the US cost is moving down). Also, a lot of industry and cars use alcohol exclusively for energy and there is alot of research going on to improve this so that Brazil is completely energy self-sufficient.
On the upside, if food and fuel become so expensive that we cannot afford to eat as much or drive as much … we might just wake up one morning and realize that are not the fat lazy bastards who drive around in circles shopping for trinkets and eating at drive through fast food places.
That may encourage us to find new and better things to do with our slimmer trimmer bodies and legs.
I know that it is the consumer life style that provides so much wealth for everyone, but maybe too much of a good thing eh?
We are a world in rapid flux, we may have to make changes and some of them are bound to be good for us.
ccon, if your numbers were correct, then no one would have developed petroleum. I think you have chosen a bad source, or have misinterpreted the numbers.
HORSE RADISH is potent stuff and then theres dilithium crystals
Hey, wait a minute. If Mexicans are supposed to pay reasonable, market prices for tortillas, and Germans want to pay for beer what it should cost and no more, and Canadians don’t want to get reamed at the cash register when they buy bread – then just HOW are WE supposed to make a living?
Signed,
Lazy Assholes with Political Connections
On the upside, if food and fuel become so expensive that we cannot afford to eat as much or drive as much … we might just wake up one morning and realize that are not the fat lazy bastards who drive around in circles shopping for trinkets and eating at drive through fast food places … That may encourage us to find new and better things to do with our slimmer trimmer bodies and legs.
Yep, government-imposed economic hardship builds character. Did you ever see a fat North Korean?
I think cconn has his numbers bass-akwards.
petroleum comes out of the ground in saudi arabia for around 3$ a bbl. in terms of energy we dont burn SFA to turn oil into gasoline. I think the shrink in the refining process is about 15% and the shrink in lifting wordwide about 5%, .
there are 85 millllllllllion bbls per day of oil used. someone may have noticed before cconn that it used more than that to make it.
cal2,
cconn used sources that are flawed … State of Minnesota?
Anyway the more common numbers can be found here:
tinyurl.com/2f6ryj
Smarter than a greenie: “Typical of the leftards: absolutely no notion of basic economics. Bunch of poster children for the law of unintended consequences. Any first year economics student could have predicted the downstream effect of bio-fuels. Guess the enviro-tards are a lot dumber than first year economics students.”
Not that I’m in any way defending leftards, but the original ethanol subsidies in the US of A were introduced by, and approved by, a Republican Congress and Senate. Those same Republicans continued to embargo and/or tariff cheap sugar cane and ethanol from Cuba, Brazil, etc..
Not that I believe any politician could do anything underhanded like introduce corn subsidies for mid-Western states that just happen to elect Republican senators and governors, and whose electoral college votes also find their way to the GOP. I mean, that sounds as absurd as accusing the Liberal Party of Canada of funneling federal advertising funds back into their own pockets. Shurely, no right thinking person could believe any of this.
If biodiesel has a net energy return of 3:1 why have farmers been buying fossil fuels ??
If wind power is as high as 10:1 why do power companies not go to all wind ?? Why do they let third party “investors” in-on-the-deal ??
When ever a promoter “allows” you to reap high returns on his “sure thing” — ask questions. Not some U-prof, but someone who has walked the walk.
I have no idea whatsoever where cconn cooked up those numbers.
first off, we arent ‘creating’ gasoline per se, merely refining from the freebie oil and tacking on cost of drilling plus the BIIIIIG greed factor.
bio-fuel(biofool?) otoh has to be CREATED on those millions of hectares of TWO DIMENSIONAL and LIMITED farmland (we consume, process, plow back into the ground or otherwise render no-longer-in-existence pretty much all of any year’s veggie crop harvested).
the bio-bandwagon effect here causes me concerns.
Bio fuels pollute as much as the old fuels. What about propane or natural gas?? What about turbines in automobiles ??