The policies of our Government have caused the dollar to decline in value. This on top of the fact that we are using our corn for gasoline is hurting the average American in our country. Maybe if we would simply drill for some oil in the US ,build some nuclear plants as well as being more conservative with our currency we would all be better off today.
Over the past five years, the dollar has lost 50% of its value versus the euro.
Usually I have to wait for an extended period of time(years) for asinine programs to have their unintended effects--at which point I send out emails with the subject “as predicted”. Ethanol is breaking the mold. Stupidity on such a grand scale is rarely seen so quick by so many. Forget that Brazil would happily ship us all we could ever need at a lower price, being derived from sugar cane but no, we had to make it from corn totally distorting the world grain prices in the process.
Now with food riots spreading around the world loopy tree huggers/global warmists and the like will get a first hand glimpse of the previously “secret hand” that governs all things on the economic plane. This is truly a butterfly flapping its wings moment. Let’s not drill for oil in Alaska, lets instead cause global hunger so we can effect a minute change in our gasoline consumption by using corn with has no measurable energy savings.
Better still lets turn over the entire free world economy to these moronskis’ so we can effect .6 of one degree in a hypotethical temperature change 100 years from now. Orwell lives.
Well, srhcb, if I remember right it was because the government paid farmers not to grow crops. We need the government out of farm policy! Back then, the farm crisis was magnified by a banking situation that had the banks repossessing farms because of the S&L confligration. Family farms disappeared and mega-owners rode herd on Congress. Guess who won?
Please get the government out of my life!
As for poor gutter-rat Nancy, can you imagine sleeping with her every night? Those eyes, alone, would scare me to watching late-night TV. Then listening to her babble about sh*t she knows nothing about would drive me batty. Where’s the Absolut when you really need it?
Please provide her family with forgiveness and a free pass to Hell, as that’s where she’ll be when this is over!
Of course, merely attempting to identify with the problems of ordinary people, I guess, makes a rich person like Pelosi a traitor to the cause. Otherwise, George W. Bush himself and those who think it’s crucial to abolish the estate tax would argue that Republicans, in general, have nothing at all against people who acquire wealth through family connections.
By the way, do you know what other prominent politician married a wealthy spouse? That would be John McCain, whose wife Cindy is worth way, way more than he is (to the tune of hundreds of millions). Most of the money’s still in her name. Does that make McCain some kind of girly-man? In any case, it seems to have freed him up to meddle in our lives too. Please try to bring a little more balance when you take these sexist cheap shots.
This is my first posting. I registered just so I could reply.
As a corn grower and ethanol investor, I have some background on this subject.
A bushel of corn weighs 55 pounds and at $5.00 a bushel, that means corn is 9 cents a pound. If you wanted to sell a box of unprocessed corn as cereal in a typical 14 ounce box that sells for around $3, it would contain $1.27 worth of corn.
All the corn is not used in the ethanol process. Ethanol removes the starch leaving the protein. A bushel of corn after the ethanol process leaves 18 pounds of high quality animal feed called DDGS (dried distillers grain with solubles). It is an especially good cattle feed and is gaining acceptance in other livestock rations.
Ethanol has become a quick and easy target for higher priced food. Ethanol can take some of the blame but more factors are at work including increasing world demand and weather.
What makes anyone think that her semi-mafiosi husband ‘Big Pauly’ gives a fat baby’s butt about the laws of supply and demand?...when did those market laws ever deter a racketeer like him from making money either legally or illegally?...at that level of economic comfort and privilege the only concern they have is how to hide and shelter their assets so they aren’t subject to ‘supply and demand’ like mere ordinary mortals
This is on the front page of that commie rag Time Magazine this week. Even the lefties are starting to get it. To bad they didn’t speak up before congress increased by five fold the gallons of ethanol over the next decade in last Decembers energy bill.
The Clean Energy Scam
A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world’s greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the “savannization” of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it’s going to get worse fast. “It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”
The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. “You can’t protect it. There’s too much money to be made tearing it down,” he says. “Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work.”
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious.
I don’t know where the meme that the cost of food increases was primarily the fault of ethanol got started, but it needs to stop. It is ridiculous. Do you know how much of the US corn supply ACTUALLY gets used for ethanol and all other industrial uses other than food? To meet the government mandate of 15 billion gallons of ethanol by 2015, we would have to use 4.5 billion bushels of the grain. Current corn carryout runs consistently around 2 billion bushels alone, without any consideration for trendline increases in yields and ethanol plant performance. This 2Billion represents the amount of corn leftover at the time you begin picking the next crop, the raw surplus. As of today, we are not even approaching using up the carryout of corn, even if every bushel ran through an ethanol plant. It is absurd.
Any ag economist worth his salt would tell you that the increased prices you find in grocery stores has two sources: The erosion of the dollar making US exports very favorable, and the demand for US commodities cheap on the global market; and high fuel costs associated with tranporting goods into the retail sector.
People have complained for years about production subsidies being paid to producers for producing low value commodities, or paying them outright in order not to farm the last time huge surpluses of grain like this were generated. That was the big government mistake that did little to solve the problem. Ethanol was a response to those huge surpluses in the free market, that has done far better in using up these massive stockpiles of old grain, and has moved prices upward.
Criticism of ag policy will make your head spin. People vocally complain about paying crop subsidies that maintained surpluses and kept prices low, and are equally outraged when the subsidies end (no corn or bean subsidies paid by USDA now since 2005) and prices rise.
Food prices are increasing mostly because of the massive subsidies that support the ethanol industry.
I read Powerline daily and agree with what is posted 99.9% of the time but I must take issue with this statement. In fact, it’s an oft repeated lie. The only subsidies for ethanol is the 51 cent blenders credit that does not even go to the ethanol industry - it goes to oil industry instead.
If you have issue’s with the use of ethanol, that’s fine. But don’t resort to recycling lie’s in order to make your point.
When ethanol subsidies are criticized, there is an attempt to insinuate that payments made under the farm program are ethanol subsidies. When the current farm bill (which is up for renewal) was written, the ethanol industry was trying to get off the ground and had not made any impact.
Under the current farm bill, farmers can receive payments three ways, a direct payment, a counter cyclical payment, and a loan deficiency payment. Market conditions determine the amount of the last two and since the market prices have risen, those payments have been eliminated. The corn and soybean markets have reduced what the taxpayer pays through the farm program.
As a farmer, I would prefer to get my income from the market.
