AL GORE DUCKS....As Bio Fuels cause food crisis!

[CRAIG B]

Bio Fuels are a big hoax and will cause worse fuel mileage by as much as 20% negating the so called benefits of cleaner burning fuel. Plus it will cause your cars to wear out faster, burning your pocket book 20% sooner by causing you to buy a new car in 5 years instead of 6 or 7.

Food Crisis Starts Eclipsing Climate Change Worries
Gore Ducks, as a Backlash Builds Against Biofuels
By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2008
The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.


  Scott Olson/GettyClick to enlarge>Corn is harvested at Morris, Ill. in September 2007.With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”

“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”

Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects.

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.”

Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article.

However, the scientist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore, Rajendra Pachauri of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, has warned that climate campaigners are unwise to promote biofuels in a way that risks food supplies. “We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security,” Mr. Pachauri told reporters last month, according to Reuters. “Questions do arise about what is being done in North America, for instance, to convert corn into sugar then into biofuels, into ethanol.”

In an interview last year, Mr. Gore expressed his support for corn-based ethanol, but endorsed moving to what he called a “third generation” of so-called cellulosic ethanol production, which is still in laboratory research. “It doesn’t compete with food crops, so it doesn’t put pressure on food prices,” the former vice president told Popular Mechanics magazine.

A Harvard professor of environmental studies who has advised Mr. Gore, Michael McElroy, warned in a November-December 2006 article in Harvard Magazine that “the production of ethanol from either corn or sugar cane presents a new dilemma: whether the feedstock should be devoted to food or fuel. With increasing use of corn and sugar cane for fuel, a rise in related food prices would seem inevitable.” The article, “The Ethanol Illusion” went so far as to praise Senator McCain for summing up the corn-ethanol energy initiative launched in the United States in 2003 as “highway robbery perpetrated on the American public by Congress.”

In Britain, some hunger-relief and environmental groups have turned sharply against biofuels. “Setting mandatory targets for biofuels before we are aware of their full impact is madness,” Philip Bloomer of Oxfam told the BBC.

Biofuel advocates say they are being made a bogeyman for a food crisis that has much more to do with record oil prices, surging demand in the developing world, and unusual weather patterns. “The people who seek to solely blame ethanol for the food crisis and the rising price of food that we see across the globe are taking a terribly simplistic look at this very complex issue,” Matthew Hartwig of the Renewable Fuels Association said.

Mr. Hartwig said oil companies and food manufacturers are behind the attempt to undercut ethanol. “There is a concerted misinformation campaign being put out there by those people who are threatened by ethanol’s growing prominence in the marketplace,” he said.

The most obvious impact the food crisis has had in America, aside from higher prices, is the imposition of rationing at some warehouse stores to deal with a spike in demand for large quantities of rice, oil, and flour. The CEO of Costco Wholesale Corp., James Sinegal, is blaming press hype for the buying limits, which were first reported Monday in The New York Sun.

“If it hadn’t been picked up and become so prominent in the news, I doubt that we would have had the problems that we’re having in trying to limit it at this point,” Mr. Sinegal told Fox News Thursday. “I mean, I can’t believe the amount of attention that is being paid to this.”

The Sun’s article, which came as food riots were reported abroad, circulated quickly on the Internet, was republished in newspapers as far away as India, and prompted local and network television stories.

Speaking in Kansas City, Mo., yesterday, the federal agriculture secretary, Edward Schafer, blamed emotion for the spurt of rice buying at warehouse stores. “We don’t see any evidence of the lack of availability of rice. There are no supply issues,” he told reporters, according to Reuters.

[jaxhater]

Albert Gore is a Hoax.
First he tried to steal the election and now he is starving the world to death.
Global warming is just the earth's way of killing off the human virus, nothing more and nothing less.
Why should Albert Gore get all the credit for killing 7 Billion people.
The earth can do the killing without any help from Mr. Albert Gore, thank you!
John Mccain has a brillant plan to destory the earth with nuclear weapons to save us from global warming.
I love that guy.
(Message from the earth), "I'm coming for you suckers".

[JeffreyS]

Bio fuels add to food costs slightly.  Inflation this time is being driven by energy costs oil specifically.

[downtownparks]

Perhaps its finally time to stop farm subsidies, and let farmers farm as much as they can?

[Midway ®]

Midwest farms reap benefits of ethanol boom
Updated 10/2/2006 7:35 AM ET    

Jim Casey uses his new combine to harvest the corn crop last month at his farm in Friesland,Wis. Casey is an investor in the United Wisconsin Grain Producers ethanol plant.   

By Judy Keen, USA TODAY
FRIESLAND, Wis. â€" When he's working on his farm, Jim Casey often glances at the ethanol plant looming over the prairie a half-mile away. "You know you're making money when you see that smoke coming out of the stack," he says.

Ethanol plants are changing farming across the Midwest. The last time there was such a dramatic shift in agriculture was "when electricity came to the rural people" in the 1930s and '40s, says Dave Hughes, president of the township board and a farmer who invested in the plant.



Casey bought his shares in the ethanol biorefinery for $1,000 each three years ago. They're now worth almost $4,000 each. Like the other 950 shareholders in the cooperative, he has gotten $400 in dividends for each share since the plant opened in April 2005.

That's not the only way his bottom line is being helped. Casey is selling part of his corn crop this fall to the plant for 17 cents a bushel more than he was offered elsewhere. He also saves fuel when he hauls his corn just down the road instead of trucking it to an elevator miles away. Because of the plant's proximity, the value of his land has increased. "When I get old, that'll be pretty nice," he says.

The United Wisconsin Grain Producers plant here employs 36 people, all but two of them from the area. Hourly workers make about $35,000 a year and get profit sharing, incentive pay and full benefits, CEO Jeff Robertson says.

Rising gas prices and the push for less dependence on foreign oil have increased demand for ethanol, which is made by converting the starch in corn into sugars that are fermented and distilled. When it's blended with gasoline, ethanol can reduce carbon monoxide emissions. Legislation signed by President Bush last year added urgency: It requires oil refiners to use 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel this year and 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.

Those factors have created a rapidly expanding industry that is centered in the rural Midwest.

There are 105 ethanol plants in operation; almost half are owned by local farmers, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry group. Forty-one more are under construction, and seven are expanding. Capacity is 5 billion gallons a year. When the new plants are running, that number will grow to 7.9 billion.

Many small ethanol producers qualify for federal and state tax credits and loan guarantees.

"I think the boom will continue," says Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association. "The nation needs to have more domestic renewable energy, and ethanol is going to satisfy a big part of that. ... Farmers ought to be re-evaluating what they are planting and responding to the market signals."

That's happening here.

Corn into cash

Before the plant opened, Casey planted corn on two-thirds of his 1,500 acres and soybeans on the rest. This year, he moved 20% of his soybean acreage into corn.

Even though it can cost more to grow corn than soybeans because of the cost of fertilizer, Hughes also has shifted more of his 740 acres into corn. The plant, he says, "has changed a lot of things. A lot, and they're all positive." Some area farmers who didn't invest in the plant, Hughes says, "are kicking themselves in the fanny."

Friesland's 303 residents have embraced the plant, but not every town is as welcoming. Before settling on the site just off state Highway 33 here, organizers considered locating in Arlington, says Bill Herrmann, president of the United Wisconsin Grain Producers' board. The concerns of residents there about noise, odor and possible effects on a bird sanctuary prompted them to drop those plans.

Bruce Braaksma, owner of Royal Lumber here, says the plant isn't much of a nuisance. The 100 or so trucks that enter the plant daily don't usually go through town, he says. "If it's dead still, you can hear just a little bit of a hum, and the wind has to be just right to smell it. It smells like an old tavern," he says.

Besides, Braaksma says, most people in town have been won over by a decline in property taxes since the plant was built. "When your property taxes go down $200 to $300, everybody's got a smile on their face," he says.

The plant produces about 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. An expansion that will increase production to 80 million by the end of 2007 is underway. "The profitability of the company is such that this is happening earlier than anybody planned," Robertson says.

"The presence of an ethanol plant really does ripple through the entire economy," says Geoff Cooper, ethanol analyst at the National Corn Growers Association. "With the current rate of growth that we're seeing, that's going to continue for the next several years."

Reliance on oil continues

There are some doubts that alternative fuels can end the country's dependence on foreign oil.

For years, studies showed that more energy is required to produce ethanol than is saved when it's used in gasoline. A University of Minnesota study released in July concluded that ethanol and biodiesel made from soybeans return more energy than is consumed in growing the grains and distilling them into fuel.

The study estimated that using all corn and soybeans grown in the USA for ethanol and biodiesel would offset only 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand. In 2005, the U.S. Agriculture Department says, ethanol accounted for about 3% of the nation's gasoline consumption.

Ray Defenbaugh, president of Big River Resources, a farmer-owned ethanol plant in West Burlington, Iowa, says weaning the nation from foreign oil is important, but his priorities are closer to home.

"We want to create jobs for youth, preserve the community and provide a good return to the investor. The money we make goes right back into the community," he says. "That's the reason we built it."

Casey says his goal is to help himself and other farmers: "It's more about the end product for ourselves, to have a place to sell our corn, so we can stay in business."

The farmers don't need subsidies, and are growing the crops that they want to, and are quite happy, thank you.

They are just operating in a free market society. They have a right to be happy, don't they? Quit bitching just because your cornflakes doubled in price. the market will take care of all of this.

[RiversideGator]

The free market is being distorted by government incentives re ethanol and other farming subsidies.

[RiversideGator]

Such as...

[RiversideGator]

The 32.7 cents per gallon in gas taxes we pay isnt much of a subsidy, is it?

[RiversideGator]

By the way, according to the "cleantech" website you posted, these are apparently the most egregious subsidies offered by the Feds to "Big Oil":

For instance, the U.S. government has generally propped the industry up with:

    * Construction bonds at low interest rates or tax-free
    * Research-and-development programs at low or no cost
    * Assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company's stead
    * Below-cost loans with lenient repayment conditions
    * Income tax breaks, especially featuring obscure provisions in tax laws designed to receive little congressional oversight when they expire
    * Sales tax breaks - taxes on petroleum products are lower than average sales tax rates for other goods
    * Giving money to international financial institutions (the U.S. has given tens of billions of dollars to the World Bank and U.S. Export-Import Bank to encourage oil production internationally, according to Friends of the Earth)
    * The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve
    * Construction and protection of the nation's highway system
    * Allowing the industry to pollute - what would oil cost if the industry had to pay to protect its shipments, and clean up its spills? If the environmental impact of burning petroleum were considered a cost? Or if it were held responsible for the particulate matter in people's lungs, in liability similar to that being asserted in the tobacco industry?
    * Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid (more below)

Most of these are not subsidies at all and this list is largely bunk.  Unless you can show how oil companies pay a lower corporate tax rate than any other company, I am not buying the subsidy argument.  The only arguable  real subsidy would be the government building roads for the use of cars which then use gasoline which is sold by the oil companies but this is a bit of a stretch even as it appears most people actually want this.

[RiversideGator]

The government takes over 40 cents a gallon in taxes for gasoline, far more than the profit per gallon made by oil refiners like Exxon. And the government doesn’t make any gas for you.

~Temple University Economics Professor Bill Dunkleberg

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/

[vicupstate]

The government takes over 40 cents a gallon in taxes for gasoline, far more than the profit per gallon made by oil refiners like Exxon. And the government doesn’t make any gas for you.

~Temple University Economics Professor Bill Dunkleberg

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/

And Exxon doesn't build highways with the profit it makes....

What's your point?

[Midway ®]

I guess the point is that there should be no road tax on gasoline, and if you want a highway, go build it yourself.

[gatorback]

John McCain has offered a short-term fix: Suspend the federal gasoline tax for the summer, which would lop 18.4 cents off the per-gallon price.  RG 40 - 18 = 22...so where's the other 21.6 cents?  The states? So, can the federal governement limit or elimate state taxes or the right for states to tax?  Wow.  So, the republicans are for  less states rights.  I don't think I want that.

[gatorback]

Pericles did it, so I'm that would nothing for Lord River.  And Stephen, you're giving urchins a bad name.

[Midway ®]

Yes!

There would be bridges involved?

Perhaps a certain person could deploy his troll doll collection on/under those bridges?

Exciting times these are, endless possibilities for persons suitably situated.