Ethanol and Meteorites... what could possibly go wrong?

Corn ethanol is useless, but we could have told you that...

Something else I'll need to beat to death when it shows up at my door...

The blind leading the blind.  What ignorance is doing to teaching evolution.

Cereal that looks you in the eye.

Oops... the NYPD attempts to hashtag its way to popularity.

Is the seafood you're eating illegal?

Tracking the meteorites that have hit Earth.

From here to there... on Saturday no less.

Making the entire North American continent into corn fields...  That part which isn't on fire anyway.

Lost Egyptian city found under water.

Radioactive Fukushima groundwater rises above barrier being built to contain it

Caribbean has lost 80 percent of its coral reefs due to climate change and pollution

How solar farms could help save bees and butterflies

Jamie Oliver Campaign makes McDonald’s change recipe

Jamie Oliver Campaign makes McDonald’s change recipe According to Oliver, the fatty parts of beef are “washed” in ammonium hydroxide and used in the filling of the burger. Before this process, according to the presenter, the food is deemed unfit for human consumption. 

According to the chef and presenter, Jamie Oliver, who has undertaken a war against the fast food industry: “Basically, we’re taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest way for dogs, and after this process, is being given to human beings.” 

Besides the low quality of the meat, the ammonium hydroxide is harmful to health. Oliver calls it “the pink slime process.” 

“Why would any sensible human being put meat filled with ammonia in the mouths of their children?” asked the chef, who wages a war against the fast food industry. 

In one of his initiatives, Oliver demonstrates to children how nuggets are made ». After selecting the best parts of the chicken, the remains (fat, skin and internal organs) are processed for these fried foods.

Study Finds Turmeric Is As Effective As Prozac For Treating Depression

Turmeric is a rhizomatous herbaceous perennial plant of the ginger family. The average person may best recognize turmeric as a spice commonly used in Indian cuisine. The active compound curcumin is known to have a wide range of medicinal benefits including anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antitumour, antibacterial, and antiviral activities. In India, turmeric has been used for thousands of years as a remedy for stomach and liver ailments. Turmeric can also be used topically to heal sores due to its antimicrobial properties.

US regulators 'find evidence' of banks fixing derivative rates

US regulators have reportedly been handed evidence that traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated a key rate for derivatives, pocketing millions at the expense of pension funds in the process.

Killing the world

With corn.

In growing it.  Watering it from the ancient aquifer.  Overplanting it. Making unnecessary ethanol with it.  Poisoning people with high fructose corn syrup.   Forcing grass eating cows to eat corn which does untold things to their physiology and to the meat we eat.  Misusing the land.  Creating the Gulf dead zone.

Thor's day

How not to critique comics.

Bees and pesticides do not mix.

The problem with The Onion is that it is always too close to the truth;  take this one on Romney.  And now Romney has exposed what he really thinks and has pissed off the 47%....



West Wing. How we wish politics would be and how politicians would act ... as if they had our best interests at heart.  So here's an ad with the actors playing themselves, acting as we would have real politicians act, standing up for the good guys:



Speaking of good guys... you always need a bad guy for balance.  Darth Karl Rove.

Yum yum.  Monsanto's genetically modified corn causes tumors in rats.

Arctic thaw perhaps sped up by oil and shipping?

Facebook messages are protected speech.

Only a few monolithic companies control our food

Does it make you wonder at all the health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, food allergies that are found in abundance in the United States and not as much elsewhere? Take a look at the diagram and ask yourself if these companies have your health in mind or only your money. And then notice that food stamps tie into to this as well...

Update 6/18: From the Guardian article about obesity:

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race. Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money. By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place.

Update 6/20:

The US long-term strategy was to dominate the global market in grain and agriculture commodities, as outlined in the early 1970s by Richard Nixon. This policy coincided with taking the dollar off the gold exchange standard in August 1971 to make US grain exports competitive in the rest of the world. However, in order for the US to become the world's most competitive agribusiness producer, it had to replace traditional American family-based farming with the now-widespread huge "factory-farm" production. In other words, traditional agriculture was systematically replaced with agribusiness production through changes in domestic policy. For example, domestic farm programs that had previously protected smaller farm incomes were phased out during Nixon's term in office. This policy was then exported to developing countries in a bid to make US agribusiness more competitive and to get a hold into foreign markets: The Nixon Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared war to create a vast new global market in "efficient" American food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance this new global agribusiness export agenda.[2] In Henry Kissinger's 1974 report "National Security Study Memorandum 200" (NSSM 200), he directly targeted overseas food aid as an "instrument of national power."[3] The policy shifts during the 1970s were toward increased deregulation, which meant increased private regulation by the large and powerful global corporations. This led to an increase in corporate mergers and the rise of transnational corporations (which today often have larger gross domestic products than many nation states).[4] As large corporate agribusinesses were creating their food production, storage and distribution monopoly, smaller domestic farms were going bankrupt and closing. (Although this trend was predominantly occurring within the US, it later spread to other developed nations, which were forced to "modernize" their agricultural industry to compete with global trade.) For example, between 1979 and 1998, the number of US farmers dropped by 300,000 and by the end of the 1990s, the agriculture (in the US at least) was dominated by large commercial agribusiness interests. The US also operated a foreign policy of offering financial assistance "to developing countries via the World Bank in return for these countries to open their markets up to cheap US food imports and hybridized seeds."[5] By the beginning of the 21st century, world supplies of cereal were under the control of a few US-based monopolies. Four large agrochemical/seed companies - Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont - controlled more than 75 percent of the US's seed corn sales and 60 percent of soybean seed sales. By the merging of giant agrochemical and seed companies, livestock could be fed on a huge diet of drugs in order to stimulate increased growth. It has been estimated that in recent years the largest users of antibiotics and similar pharmaceutical products are not humans, but animals, which consumed 70 percent of all pharmaceutical antibiotics. Statistics show, quite shockingly, that the use of antibiotics by US agribusiness increased from 500,000 pounds to 40 million pounds (an 80-fold increase by weight) from 1954 to 2005. As a consequence, the Center for Disease Control in the US has reported an "epidemic" rise in food-related diseases in humans as a result of eating meat containing large quantities of antibiotics. One Harvard University researcher, Ray Goldberg, who set up a research group to examine the revolution in agribusiness (including genetically modified organisms), reported: "the genetic revolution is leading to an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy business."[6]

By any other name

High Fructose Corn Syrup is High Fructose Corn Syrup.  No matter how you try to obfuscate the issue..

Eclipsing intelligence...

The solar eclipse in pictures.

France bans Monsanto corn.

Street art.

The man who wishes the Google would ignore...

Congress is getting dumber, if you couldn't tell by now.  Especially in their dealings with them wimmen folk.

From lemons to lemonade: Reaction uses carbon dioxide to make carbon-based semiconductor:

(Phys.org) -- A materials scientist at Michigan Technological University has discovered a chemical reaction that not only eats up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, it also creates something useful. And, by the way, it releases energy.

Ok, I'm ready! Let me go pick some lemons in my backyard... oh.  Rats.

Go Poland!

Poland will impose a complete ban on growing the MON810 genetically modified strain of maize made by US company Monsanto on its territory, Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki said Wednesday. 

"The decree is in the works. It introduces a complete ban on the MON810 strain of maize in Poland," Sawicki told reporters, adding that pollen of this strain could have a harmful effect on bees. 

On March 9, seven European countries -- Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland and Slovakia -- blocked a proposal by the Danish EU presidency to allow the cultivation of genetically-modified plants on the continent. 

Seven days after that, France imposed a temporary ban on the MON810 strain.
Talks on allowing the growing of genetically-modified plants on EU soil are now deadlocked as no majority has emerged among the 27 member states.

Update:

Scientists with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have re-created the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder in several honeybee hives simply by giving them small doses of a popular pesticide, imidacloprid. Bee populations have been dying mysteriously throughout North America and Europe since 2006, but the cause behind the decline, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, has eluded scientists. However, coming on the heels of two studies published last week in Science that linked bee declines to neonicotinoid pesticides, of which imidacloprid is one, the new study adds more evidence that the major player behind Colony Collapse Disorder is not disease, or mites, but pesticides that began to be widely used in the 1990s.

Monsanto, Bank of America, Bees, and Cavemen...

Monsanto Found Guilty of Chemical Poisoning in France 

Honeybee Deaths Linked to Corn Insecticides

Corn insecticide linked to great die-off of beneficial honeybees

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

US e-voting system cracked in less than 48 hours

Cave Fossil Find: New Human Species or "Nothing Extraordinary"? 

Monsanto

Three articles of interest.... Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning in France

Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture

Insects find crack in biotech corns armor

Update 2/15:  300,000 Organic Farmers Sue Monsanto in Federal Court: Decision on March 31st to Go to Trial

Do you know how many food items have corn products in them?

Over the holidays, the USDA approved a strain of Monsanto's genetically engineered corn that can now be planted freely in the environment and distributed throughout the U.S. food supply, with no oversight or efforts to track its safety. Monsanto says the strain is drought-tolerant, but the USDA itself has actually found otherwise. Instead, the agency ignored its own results as well as concerns from the public, which has little trust in the safety of the crop. Nearly 45,000 public comments were written in opposition to the particular corn variety and only 23 comments were written in favor, according to the Cornucopia Institute.

Update: Bugs may be resistant to genetically modified corn. Imagine our surprise!  Who could have predicted?

 And there's more! Back in July 2011: 270,000 Organic Farmers Sue Monsanto. Their case update here.

Mexico will be the new test site for high fructose corn syrup

Mr. Mills of Credit Suisse says that A.D.M., Tate & Lyle and Corn Products International all have had big sales increases of high-fructose corn syrup in Mexico, largely offsetting their United States declines.

In a reversal, manufacturers are replacing the sugar in Mexican soda and other beverages with the less-expensive high-fructose corn syrup. In Mexico this year, consumption of the sweetener is expected to be up by a whopping 50 percent, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Slowly strangling the farmers

Massive seed corporation Monsanto -- through acquisitions and cut-throat business practices -- has cornered 90% of the soy, 65% of the corn, and 70% of the cotton market, and has a rapidly growing presence in the fruit and vegetable market, all without government anti-trust officials raising an eyebrow.

Not only that, but in order to be productive, the entire line of Monsanto's seeds all but require the use of Roundup herbicide, trapping all of their customers into buying it. And who owns Roundup? You guessed it, Monsanto.

Monsanto has, it seems, cornered the market on abusive monopolistic practices as well. In the middle of a recession, while farmers' incomes are dropping, Monsanto recently announced a 42% price hike on its most popular genetically modified seeds. When in many areas of the country distributors carry nothing but these seeds, this sure looks like evidence of a monopolist abusing its market position.

President Obama's antitrust chief Christine Varney has promised rigorous enforcement of antitrust law with a special focus on the agricultural sector. She should start with the worst of the worst, Monsanto. Sign the petition to demand that Varney immediately open an investigation into Monsanto and its abusive business practices.

And:

Last year's food riots in Haiti, India, Indonesia and elsewhere sounded the alarm bell for a painful level of global hunger that is only going to increase with a growing population and a changing climate. In a promising move, the G8 -- a group of the world's eight wealthiest nations -- has just announced a shift away from providing direct food aid to developing countries and towards helping farmers abroad produce and distribute their own food.

That's a laudable goal. But the Obama administration along with members of the U.S. Congress are using this singular moment to move their own agenda: propping up U.S. biotechnology companies like Monsanto. They hope to accomplish this by promoting genetically modified seeds and chemical inputs as tools to fight hunger through an exclusive focus on increasing crop yields. One powerful Senate committee has already passed a bill, sponsored by Senators Casey (D-PA) and Lugar (R-IN), that requires GMO technology to be part of the U.S. agricultural research agenda abroad. We need to tell them not to use our tax dollars to market Monsanto's products abroad!

Despite all the hype, GMOs have simply failed to deliver: there is no evidence that exporting this technology to the developing world will actually boost productivity. A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that GMOs have had almost no impact on crop yields in the United States. Further, GMOs have little to offer drought-prone regions like Africa. Simply put: there are no drought-tolerant GMOs currently on the market. The only two GMO seed traits available -- sold by the biotechnology giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience -- are herbicide tolerance and pest resistance for a handful of commodity crops like corn, soy and cotton. And not only are the existing seeds expensive but the use of these seeds would also tether poor farmers to the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers GMOs require.

Dedicating millions of dollars in aid money to biotechnology companies also reduces the funding available for proven agro-ecological systems and infrastructure improvements that are more appropriate for small and limited-resource producers.

Sign this petition today to tell your Senators that the path out of poverty isn't through Monsanto's doors. Ask them to oppose Casey-Lugar and any development aid bill that promotes GMO technology.

Food riots are beginning

And will soon be in a grocery store near you.

Paul Krugman:

I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

He lists the things that aren't controllable at the moment: drought, rising demand for beef, oil, etc, then gets to the point:

Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels.

The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”

This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.

And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: all the remaining presidential contenders are terrible on this issue.

What can we do? Krugman's conclusion:

What should be done? The most immediate need is more aid to people in distress: the U.N.’s World Food Program put out a desperate appeal for more funds.

We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake.

But it’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.

Ethanol is a scam to make quick money. There are other ways to lessen the demand for oil. We already have the technology. Let's make sure the next Democratic president has the facts.

crossposted at American Street

The bloom is off the ear?

The honeymoon is over? Have science and common sense begun to prevail?:

In Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and even Iowa, the nation’s largest corn and ethanol producer, this next-generation fuel finds itself facing the oldest of hurdles: opposition from residents who love the idea of an ethanol distillery so long as it is someplace else.
[snip]

Some experts say the local protests reflect a new anti-ethanol mood spurred by a slow but steady drumbeat of negative attention on the industry. Across the Midwest, questions about ethanol have been raised by environmental advocates, livestock owners have complained about soaring prices for corn feed and farmers have fretted about how expensive some farmland has become.

“That wonderful aura that the ethanol plants had may be wearing off a little,” said Wallace E. Tyner, an agricultural economist at Purdue University.

Industry advocates play down the size of the opposition and suggest the increase in objections to new plants is simply a factor of math; 131 plants are now operating and more than 70 others are under construction, and the vast bulk of them are in the Midwest.

[snip]

That is a marked increase from less than three years ago, when Congress enacted an energy law that included a national mandate for the increased use of renewable fuel in gasoline, setting off the ethanol rush. In January 2005, more than a quarter century after the commercial ethanol industry got started, just 81 plants were functioning.

[snip]

The local strife coincides with what is already a moment of tumult for the ethanol industry. In recent months, an enormous supply of ethanol has glutted the market, sinking its price and sending a chill through the ethanol boom.

[snip]

Experts debate whether the current ethanol glut is the start of the end to the rush to corn-based ethanol or merely a temporary correction as transportation lines are developed from the Midwest to bigger markets on the coasts. Either way, residents’ complaints about proposed plants have only added to the cascade of bad news for ethanol.

“It’s like the dot-com industry,” said Anne Yoder, who is pressing to stop plans for an ethanol plant outside Topeka, Kan., and describes herself “not at all” as an activist but as “an ordinary soccer mom.”

“When ethanol first came along there was so much promise,” she said. “Maybe that’s starting to trickle off.”

They've already noticed this in Iowa

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 The National Research Council has warned that the increased use of corn to produce ethanol could harm U.S. water quality and create water supply problems.

The NRC looked at how shifts in the nation's agriculture to include more energy crops, and potentially more crops overall, could affect water management and the long-term sustainability of biofuel production.

In terms of water quantity, researchers found agricultural shifts to growing corn and expanding biofuel crops into dry regions could change current irrigation practices and greatly increase pressure on water resources in many parts of the United States.

For example, the report noted that in the Northern and Southern Plains, corn generally uses more water than soybeans and cotton, while the reverse is true in the Pacific and mountain regions of the nation. Water demands for drinking and such uses as hydropower, fish habitat, and recreation could compete with, and in some cases constrain, the use of water for biofuel crops.

Consequently, researchers said, growing biofuel crops requiring additional irrigation in areas with limited water supplies is a major concern.

The study was sponsored by the McKnight Foundation, Energy Foundation, National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and National Research Council Day Fund.

Phila of Bouphonia posted on this:

Where numerous wells withdraw large quantities of water over time...regional declines in water levels may occur. In Iowa, the most widespread of these declines has occurred in the extensive Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer. Regional water levels have dropped about 100 feet in this aquifer since use began in the late 1800s, with the greatest lowering of water-levels near major pumping centers. Other declines of a more local nature have occurred, such as those in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas where the Silurian aquifer is heavily used.

In related news, ever-expanding ethanol crops in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay are expected to poison it with agricultural runoff:

The study forecasted that farmers in the bay watershed area will field more than half a million acres of corn over the next five years, reports The Washington Post. Corn fields usually produce more polluted runoff than other crops, creating a problem for the bay.

“It’s going in the opposite direction from where we want to go,” Jim Pease, a Virginia Tech professor and one of the study’s authors, told the newspaper.

It seems logical that increased runoff from the ethanol boom could pose a problem for Iowa's groundwater, too.

The ethanol boom

Is creating land grabs:

Skyrocketing farmland prices, particularly in states like Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, giddy with the promise of corn-based ethanol, are stirring new optimism among established farmers. But for younger farmers, already rare in this graying profession, and for small farmers with dreams of expanding and grabbing a piece of the ethanol craze, the news is oddly grim. The higher prices feel out of reach.

[snip]

In central Illinois, prime farmland is selling for about $5,000 an acre on average, up from just over $3,000 an acre five years ago, a study showed. In Nebraska, meanwhile, land values rose 17 percent in the first quarter of this year over the same time last year, the swiftest such gain in more than a quarter century, said Jason R. Henderson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City.

A federal-government analysis of farm real estate values released Friday showed record average-per-acre values across the country. The analysis said property prices averaged $2,160 an acre at the start of 2007, up 14 percent from a year earlier.

"For everyone who owns an acre of land, we love this," said Dale E. Aupperle, a professional farm manager and real estate consultant in Decatur, Ill., who said the rising land values were being driven by rising commodity prices (though corn has dropped some since June) and the prospect of increased demand for ethanol.

"For everyone who doesn't own an acre of land, these prices mean it gets a little harder to get into," Mr. Aupperle added. "For an entry-level land owner or a renter, there's a bit of a thought right now that the train is leaving and I'm not on it."

[snip]

Unknown is what will come of land prices if corn loses its place in the ethanol world and is surpassed by another source like cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass.

"Right now, a lot are still betting that corn-based ethanol will be around a while," said Mr. Duffy, who is also the director of the Beginning Farmer Center, which assists farmers who are starting out. He noted two other farming booms, in the 1910s and the 1970s, which were each later followed by periods of depression.

"In five years, corn-based ethanol will be around," Mr. Duffy said. "Fifteen years? I'm not as convinced."

Ethanol is a scam

As we knew from the beginning:

Biofuel - gasoline or other fuel produced from refining food products - is being touted as a solution to the controversial global-warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, biofuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under the best conditions.

Their advocates claim that present first-generation biofuels save up to 60% of the carbon emission of equivalent petroleum fuels. As well, amid rising oil prices at $75 per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil's are frantic to substitute home-grown biofuels for imported gasoline. In Brazil today, 70% of all cars have "flexi-fuel" engines able to switch from conventional gasoline to 100% biofuel or any mix. Biofuel production has become one of Brazil's major export industries as well.

The green claims for biofuel as a friendly and better fuel than gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust-pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission, however, of some toxins, including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a suspected neurotoxin that has been banned as carcinogenic in California.

Ethanol is not some benign substance as we are led to think from the industry propaganda. It is highly corrosive to pipelines as well as to seals and fuel systems of existing car or other gasoline engines. It requires special new pumps. All that conversion costs money.

But the killer about ethanol is that it holds at least 30% less energy per liter than normal gasoline, translating into a loss in fuel economy of at least 25% over gasoline for an Ethanol E-85% blend.

No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses the huge social cost that is beginning to hit the dining-room tables across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal-grain prices are going through the roof because of the astronomical - US Congress-driven - demand for corn to burn for biofuel.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline would have no impact on greenhouse-gas emissions, and would even expand fossil-fuel use because of increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of ethanol crops. And according to MIT, "natural-gas consumption is 66% of total corn-ethanol production energy", meaning huge new strains on natural-gas supply, pushing prices of that product higher.

The article concludes with this warning:

Today a new element has replaced Soviet grain demand and harvest shortfalls. Biofuel demand, fed by US government subsidies, is literally linking food prices to oil prices. The scale of the subsidized biofuel consumption has exploded so dramatically since the beginning of 2006, when the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 first began to impact crop-planting decisions, that there is emerging a de facto competition between people and cars for the same grains.

Environmental analyst Lester Brown recently noted, "We're looking at competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and the world's 2 billion poorest people for the same commodity, the same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugarcane, soybeans - anything - into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is beginning to set the price of food."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a protege of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions, stated, "Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people." The same cast of characters who brought the world the Iraq war, and who cry about the "problem of world overpopulation", are now backing conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for thought. As the popular saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."

Any chemist could have told you flat out

That ethanol is a ridiculous energy source. It is too small a hydrocarbon to produce much heat. The energy expended to till, fertilize, grow, harvest, take to the factory, change into ethanol, drive the ethanol to the gas refineries and then to the distributors will always be more than what we gain from using ethanol. They've even opened a coal-run plant to make ethanol. It's letting the farmers get some quick cash, but that's about it:

Ethanol fuel made from corn may be being "dangerously oversold" as a green energy solution according to a new review of biofuels.

The report concludes that the rapidly growing and heavily subsidised corn ethanol industry in the US will cause significant environmental damage without significantly reducing the country's dependence on fossil fuels.

"There are smarter solutions than rushing straight to corn-based ethanol," says Scott Cullen of the Network for New Energy Choices (NNEC) and a co-author of the study. "It's just one piece of a more complex puzzle."

The report analyses hundreds of previous studies, and was compiled by the environmental advocacy groups Food and Water Watch, NNEC and the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment. The study was released as the US Congress debates key agriculture and energy laws that will determine biofuel policy for years to come.
[snip]
Yet, even if all corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would only offset 15% of the country's gasoline use, according to the study. The same reduction could be achieved by a 3.5-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency standards for all cars and light trucks, according a federal figures cited in the report.

And using corn-derived ethanol does not necessarily even reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A number of recent studies have attempted to assess the total carbon footprint – from the field to the tailpipe – of the biofuel. Conclusions vary widely from being worse than gasoline to being about the same.
[snip]
"Corn-based ethanol hasn't been pursued because this is the best solution, it's been because this has been what's been pushed the hardest," Cullen says. The recent survey notes that Archer Daniels Midland, the largest US ethanol producer, received $10 billion in federal subsidies between 1980 and 1997.

But Brian Jennings, of the trade group, the American Coalition for Ethanol, disagrees. "We can release papers until we are blue in the face about what is theoretically going to be the best alternative to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and to reduce carbon emissions," he says. "But, from a practical standpoint, we have to start somewhere, and corn-based ethanol is the most viable alternative fuel on the planet today."

The current Farm Bill, which provides $16.5 billion in federal agricultural subsidies each year, will expire in September 2007. Proposals for a new Farm Bill are likely to include significant subsidies for the continued development of both corn-based ethanol and cellulosic ethanol.

Update: Phila of Bouphonia addresses the concerns Iowans have about the huge demand on water aquafiers that the ethanol business is having, besides being worried about field runoff and contamination.

Eat? Or make money?

Money wins!

The surging biofuel industry will use 27% of this year's American corn crop, challenging farmers' ability to meet food demands, the US government says.

Even with the projected, record 12.46 billion-bushel crop this year, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says national corn stockpiles will run low going into the next crop year, when voracious ethanol demand will rise again.

Some 3.4 billion bushels of corn – enough to make 9.3 billion gallons of ethanol – will be used by distillers in the marketing year that begins on 1 September 2007, says the department, compared with 2.15 billion bushels this marketing year. About 20% of the 2006 US corn crop was used to make ethanol.

US ethanol output is on track to double to more than 12 billion gallons a year by the end of this decade.