Corn not the future of U.S. Ethanol.

[Guest Vitamin X]

I just wanted an excuse to post this excerpt from an article:

 

The corn prices, the highest in a decade, have spurred thousands of people in Mexico to protest over the price of tortillas, a national staple made from corn. The spike has also lead to worries that meat and dairy prices could eventually rise.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/...830990020070328

 

I love that Mexico's national emergencies revolve around the price of their tortillas.

[Ripper 0]

I just wanted an excuse to post this excerpt from an article:

 

The corn prices, the highest in a decade, have spurred thousands of people in Mexico to protest over the price of tortillas, a national staple made from corn. The spike has also lead to worries that meat and dairy prices could eventually rise.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/...830990020070328

 

I love that Mexico's national emergencies revolve around the price of their tortillas.

 

Well, its a broke country with broke citizens and they are raising the price of cheap affordable food. It makes sense. I think it only sounds silly because we are in America.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I was reading in one of my trade magazines at work. The problems with corn for ethanol are:

 

1) More energy invested into growing the corn and processing it than you get from the ethanol thats derived from it.

2) Corn grown in this country is more grown for feed for livestock than human consumption. So if you switch of the corn from being grown for livestock feed to ethanol, than the livestock has to be fed something else or else the really expensive corn. So theres where your meat and dairy prices going up come from.

 

So people pretty much have to decide whether they want to pay $3 or $4 a gallon for gas and still have cheap milk, eggs and meat/poultry or not..

It seems to me as if food costs would hit people harder than gas if you really think about it because everyone has to eat and the increased food costs of dairy and meat products would hit just about every non-vegan person in America.

[Guest Vitamin X]

I just wanted an excuse to post this excerpt from an article:

 

The corn prices, the highest in a decade, have spurred thousands of people in Mexico to protest over the price of tortillas, a national staple made from corn. The spike has also lead to worries that meat and dairy prices could eventually rise.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/...830990020070328

 

I love that Mexico's national emergencies revolve around the price of their tortillas.

 

Well, its a broke country with broke citizens and they are raising the price of cheap affordable food. It makes sense. I think it only sounds silly because we are in America.

 

You can make tortillas out of flour, as it is commonly eaten, and hell burritos and all that as well.

 

It'd be like us flipping out over having to switch to flour bread because wheat was getting too expensive for whatever reason. Hell most Mexicans I know that have family there and all that have tortilla makers at home.

 

Anyways, to reply to Marv up there, the whole point of the article is that the Department of Energy is not going to use corn for Ethanol. In fact, I'm fairly sure I put that in the topic title for this very thread.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

The whole corn ethanol thing is a joke anyway. Yeah, it's nice for the American farmers, but from everything I've read, the mileage you get is worse than with traditional gasoline.

 

Why the hell don't we have electric cars already? They've been f'ing talking about them for 20 years now. Maybe we should dick around with it some more until gas goes up to $4.00 a gallon?

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I just wanted an excuse to post this excerpt from an article:

 

The corn prices, the highest in a decade, have spurred thousands of people in Mexico to protest over the price of tortillas, a national staple made from corn. The spike has also lead to worries that meat and dairy prices could eventually rise.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/...830990020070328

 

I love that Mexico's national emergencies revolve around the price of their tortillas.

 

Well, its a broke country with broke citizens and they are raising the price of cheap affordable food. It makes sense. I think it only sounds silly because we are in America.

 

You can make tortillas out of flour, as it is commonly eaten, and hell burritos and all that as well.

 

It'd be like us flipping out over having to switch to flour bread because wheat was getting too expensive for whatever reason. Hell most Mexicans I know that have family there and all that have tortilla makers at home.

 

Anyways, to reply to Marv up there, the whole point of the article is that the Department of Energy is not going to use corn for Ethanol. In fact, I'm fairly sure I put that in the topic title for this very thread.

 

Corn IS used for ethanol right NOW though and for the near future, so thats why people are complaining about the cost of eggs and milk going up. Eggs have doubled in price ive noticed, and milk, heavily subsidized as it is anyway, has gone up like 40 cents a gallon here.

 

and to Invader up there..go watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". It will open your eyes up to a lot of things about electric cars, including the fact that GM was producing an electric car called the EV1 back in the early 1990's that got canned after a few years for various reasons and no other car maker would touch the electric car market because of it until recently. Even today you probably wont see a viable all electric car due to limitations on the technology (milage, batteries, really high cost) but some of the technology GM and other companies used in the electric cars is making it to the Hybrid models today. They also made it clear that Hydrogen for fuel isn't the answer anytime in the next 20-30 years despite all the money being thrown at it now by the government.

[Guest Vitamin X]

We tried using electric cars in the late 90's/early 2000s, and I've seen a few of them out there. A lot of security carts used in some places are electric. And as Marvin explained, cost and mileage are huge factors. You can only get around 30 miles or so on a charge on some models. I don't even see how that's practical if, say, you live in Los Angeles where any typical round-trip commute is a hell of a lot longer than that.

 

And I don't know how much ethanol is really being used now, because I haven't seen many, if any gas stations that offer it in more than a 10% form. You could attribute the cost of eggs and milk to various other things outside of the rise of the cost of corn, especially in this country considering we are the world's largest manufacturer of them. The Mexicans can complain because they have to import it from us. What's our excuse? Gas prices. And the cycle comes around.

 

The best alternative to the energy problems as it relates to cars would be with better urban planning and better use of mass transit systems. Get people out of their damn cars more often and they won't use them as much. I understand that's not such a viable solution for folks in rural/suburban areas, but if you make a difference where the population is more concentrated, that works out better for everyone else.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

I know about the EV-1...GM basically set it up to fail from the very start.

[EricMM 0]

Just watch the movie, "Who Killed The Electric Car?"

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Just watch the movie, "Who Killed The Electric Car?"

It was the Stonecutters, right?

[Art Sandusky 0]

Probably the oil lobby. At least Europe woke up a while ago and has started changing their consumption patterns.

[Guest Vitamin X]

Well, on the other hand, Europe has the luxury to be able to do that far more than we do. Overall, there's much less distances between major cities there than here, to put it simplistically, but you'd find that out yourself when you bust out that longass drive through terrifically mundane and vasty empty stretches of land, like most of New Mexico, West Texas, Eastern Oregon, etc... It's easier in Europe to switch to mass transit, and thus why my comment on changing to a better use of mass transit and urban planning relates more to large, crowded, urban areas, a place like Los Angeles being an excellent example. But imagine taking a bus to go places when you live in the middle of BUTT-fuck Oklahoma. A friend of mine lives in Norman and his car broke down recently, and he just couldn't get anywhere because he had no bike and it would take him way too long to get to his daily errands.

[Art Sandusky 0]

We're just going to have to start migrating back toward cities again. None of this was that much of a problem until we decided that sprawling development and inflated speculation was the way to go and people made peace with the idea of driving perhaps as much as one or two hours one way just to go to work each day.

[Danville_Wrestling 0]

I think the way to go is an electric/gas hybrid type car. The main problem with electric cars as a poster mentioned above was the size of the battery because the basic battery would be like what was in your cell phone but much larger which would seriously weigh the front end of the car down. However, I remember reading several years ago that such a hybrid car would severely cut down on emissions since most people commute short distances every day and that would allow people to use the battery more than emit gas fumes.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

Probably the oil lobby. At least Europe woke up a while ago and has started changing their consumption patterns.

From the wikipedia page on the movie because I cant really remember that well..

 

Consumers - guilty

Lots of ambivalence to new technology, unwillingness to compromise on significantly decreased range, increased cost, lack of cargo and passenger space for the environment.

 

Batteries - not guilty

Somewhat limited range and reliability in the first EV-1s to ship, but moderately better later.

 

Oil companies - guilty

Fearful of losing business to a competing technology, they supported efforts to kill the ZEV mandate. They have also bought patents to prevent modern batteries from being used in US electric cars.

 

Car companies - guilty

Negative marketing, sabotaging their own product program, failure to produce cars to meet existing demand, unusual business practices with regards to leasing versus sales.

 

Government - guilty

The federal government joined in the auto industry suit against California and has failed to act in the public interest to limit pollution and force increased fuel economy.

 

California Air Resources Board - guilty

The CARB, headed by Alan Lloyd, caved to industry pressure and repealed the ZEV mandate. Lloyd was given the directorship of the new fuel cell institute, so had an inherent conflict of interest. Footage shot in the meetings showed how he shut down the ZEV proponents while giving the car makers all the time they wanted to make their points.

 

Hydrogen fuel cell - guilty

The hydrogen fuel cell was raised as an alternative that distracted attention from what was presently possible to what might some day be possible.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

I still say we bomb the fuck out of the arabs and take their resources. Suck the desert dry.

[EricMM 0]

Like we/they aren't already.

[Guest]

Brazil is doing just fine with their ethanol program.

[snuffbox 0]

I still say we bomb the fuck out of the arabs and take their resources. Suck the desert dry.

 

Our next try will be the charm.

[NoCalMike 0]

Gas prices are a pain, but they still aren't at the point of breaking people's households yet. Every time they get up there(reaching the mid three dollar level), we hear all this mumbo jumbo about how it is time for this and that, and then gas prices go down about .50 so everyone can pretend for a few months that the problem has been magically solved.

 

The time for action on alternatives to the gas vehicle was about 30-50 years ago. The technology has been there and is here now. It is the will(or lack thereof) of the people, the government and the manufactures that is preventing bigger evolution in the industry.