A serious conservative trashes dubya moonshine fuel plan

[boutons_]

Blindness on Biofuels

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; A23

President Bush joined the biofuels enthusiasm in his State of the Union address, and no one can doubt the powerful allure. Farmers, scientists and venture capitalists will liberate us from insecure foreign oil by converting corn, prairie grass and much more into gasoline substitutes. Biofuels will even curb greenhouse gases. Already, production of ethanol from corn has surged from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 5 billion in 2006. Bush set an interim target of 35 billion gallons in 2017 on the way to the administration's ultimate goal of 60 billion in 2030. Sounds great, but be wary. It may be a mirage.

The great danger of the biofuels craze is that it will divert us from stronger steps to limit dependence on foreign oil: higher fuel taxes to prod Americans to buy more gasoline-efficient vehicles and tougher federal fuel economy standards to force auto companies to produce them. True, Bush supports tougher -- but unspecified -- fuel economy standards. But the implied increase above today's 27.5 miles per gallon for cars is modest, because the administration expects gasoline savings from biofuels to be triple those from higher fuel economy standards.

The politics are simple enough. Americans dislike high fuel prices; auto companies dislike tougher fuel economy standards. By contrast, everyone seems to win with biofuels: farmers, consumers, capitalists. American technology triumphs. Biofuels create rural jobs and drain money from foreign oil producers. What's not to like? Unfortunately, this enticing vision is dramatically overdrawn.

Let's do some basic math. In 2006, Americans used about 7.5 billion barrels of oil. By 2030, that could increase about 30 percent to 9.8 billion barrels, projects the Energy Information Administration. Much of that rise would reflect higher gasoline demand. In 2030, there will be more people (an estimated 365 million vs. 300 million in 2006) and more vehicles (316 million vs. 225 million). At most, biofuels would address part of the increase in oil demand; it wouldn't reduce our oil use or import dependence from current levels.

Suppose we reach the administration's ultimate target of 60 billion gallons in 2030. That would offset less than half of the projected increase in annual oil use. Here's why. First, it's necessary to convert the 60 billion gallons into barrels. Because there are 42 gallons in a barrel, that means dividing by 42. Further: Ethanol has only about two-thirds of the energy value of an equal volume of gasoline. When you do all the arithmetic, 60 billion gallons of ethanol displace just under 1 billion barrels of gasoline. If that merely offsets increases in oil use, it won't cut existing import dependence or greenhouse gases.

The 60 billion-gallon goal -- and the 35 billion-gallon interim target -- are also probably unrealistic. When we rhapsodize about biofuels, we're talking mainly about old-fashioned alcohol (aka ethanol). Until now, most ethanol has been made from corn. If small amounts of toxic gasoline were not added, it could become corn whiskey. Ethanol receives heavy federal subsidies. Oil refiners that blend it with gasoline get a 51-cents-a-gallon tax credit. The subsidy causes them to buy more ethanol, increasing corn demand.

Naturally, corn farmers love this. They've been the program's main beneficiaries. Although ethanol displaces only tiny amounts of oil (slightly more than 1 percent), it's had a big effect on corn prices. They're about $3 a bushel, up from $2 last year and the highest in a decade. They could go higher. In 2000, ethanol used 6 percent of the U.S. corn crop. In 2006, that was 20 percent, and the ethanol plants under construction would double capacity by 2010. Higher prices for corn (which is fed to poultry, hogs and cattle) raise retail meat prices. Ironically, fuel subsidies may boost food costs.

But corn harvests won't be large enough to meet either the 35 billion- or 60 billion-gallon targets. Large amounts of "cellulosic" ethanol would also be needed -- the term referring to the cellulose in other plants to be converted to ethanol. Prime candidates are farm wastes, including wheat straw and cornstalks. Unfortunately, the chemistry for doing this is far more costly than it is for corn kernels. Without technological advances, cellulosic ethanol won't be economically viable. It could be supported only with massive federal subsidies or direct requirements forcing refiners to use the fuel, regardless of cost. Then the high costs would be passed on to consumers. Congress started down that path in 2005 by enacting a modest mandate for biofuel use.

Biofuels are certainly worth pursuing. Up to some point, they're even worth subsidizing. Government can nurture new technologies, and breakthroughs for cellulosic ethanol -- hardly inconceivable -- would make a meaningful difference in the U.S. fuel balance. But there's also a real threat that the infatuation with biofuels is a political expediency that will turn into a classic government boondoggle, benefiting selected constituencies and providing few genuine public benefits. That has already happened with corn.

Our primary need is to curb reliance on foreign oil. If imports were dependable, they would not be dangerous, but they come from unstable or hostile suppliers. Although our dependence can't be eliminated, it can be reduced. The most obvious way is to improve the efficiency of vehicles by 30 to 50 percent over the next few decades. Americans need more hybrids and more small vehicles. Biofuels might be a complement, but if they blind us to this larger reality, they will be a step backward.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/23/AR2007012301562.html

=============

This forum has already done the arithmetic on biofuels and found it not helpful.

oilman dubya's plan is a smokescreen for doing nothing about imported oil (and leaving his owners' (oilco) profits untouched).

[boutons_]

The fucking market won't fix the oil-consumption/foreign-oil-dependence/CO2 pollution problems. The market, aka energyco's, will do everything they can to keep the problems going since they profit so insanely well from those problems.

It's a situation for the proper role of government to intervene to fix what the market refuses to fix. But since the US electorate has been hyper-sensitized against any taxes by the hate-government right-wing nutters for 20+ years, legislators refuse to mention taxes and tariffs as means to causing solutions to happen that the energycos don't ever want to happen.

Here's one:

=========


January 24, 2007, 8:37 am

A Taboo Link

By John Tierney

Tags: No Tags

If you thought there was something missing in the energy section of the State of the Union Address, there’s a new Web site to fill in the gap.

President Bush last night dutifully mentioned the “serious challenge of global climate change” and reeled off ways to address it – burn less gasoline, subsidize other forms of energy. In the Democrats’ response, Sen. James Webb of Virginia dutifully talked of “affirmative solutions” and “a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs.” But neither he nor Mr. Bush went anywhere near economists’ favorite prescription for slowing global warming: a carbon tax.

The tax is taboo in Washington, but now there’s a place it dares speak its name: the Carbon Tax Center, which opened this week with the aim of becoming “the village square for civic and political conversations about the why, who, and how of taxing CO2 emissions in the U.S. and, eventually, the world.” It’s the creation of an economist, Charles Komanoff, and a lawyer, Daniel Rosenblum, who revel in arcana like calculations of the price-elasticity of energy usage.

They know they’ve got an uphill fight, because presidents and legislators would rather hand out subsidies and set long-range targets than inflict immediate pain at the pump and in utility bills. But that immediacy is why the carbon tax appeals to so many experts of both parties (at least experts who aren’t running for office). A carbon tax would encourage conservation right away, unlike fuel-efficiency standards for cars in the future.

The tax would also be quicker and simpler to set up than the alternative approach now under consideration: setting an overall cap on carbon emissions by utilities and handing out tradeable allowances to the companies. As the Carbon Center argues, a tax would be more “transparent and easily understandable” than a cap-and-trade system, and could be “implemented with far less opportunity for manipulation by special interests.”

But those are just more reasons not to discuss it in Washington.

[01Snake]

http://madbean.com/static/blog/2003/40/xcv.jpg

[DarkReign]

http://madbean.com/static/blog/2003/40/xcv.jpg

Maybe I am stupid....but, I dont get it.

[Yonivore]

Maybe I am stupid....but, I dont get it.
I'm glad somebody finally asked. Thanks for stepping up to the plate, DR.

[1369]

Maybe I am stupid....but, I dont get it.

Control "hot key" shortcuts for cut/copy/paste.

I think.

[DarkReign]

Control "hot key" shortcuts for cut/copy/paste.

I think.

Yup. You got it. Nice observation.

[DarkReign]

I'm glad somebody finally asked. Thanks for stepping up to the plate, DR.

lol...I dont pretend to be anything but myself here. No dumb questions, only dumb answers...yada yada..

[01Snake]

Control "hot key" shortcuts for cut/copy/paste.

I think.


:clap :clap

[01Snake]

he also talked about setting better fuel economy standards and increasing the number of hybrids and plug in cars on the road


It doesn't matter. Dubya is responsible for 9/11 and global warming.

Signed,
Boutons

[boutons_]

... many many years away. well after the current crop of oil execs are into retirement with their $100M retirement plans.

NOTHING of immediate impact, all very distant, very fuzzy pie-in-the-sky bullshit.

He doesn't have the the votes to get any of it passed, and when he did have the votes, he didn't do it.

[boutons_]

http://madbean.com/static/blog/2003/40/xcv.jpg

... inserted by copy/paste, without any intelligent comment.

[01Snake]

http://madbean.com/static/blog/2003/40/xcv.jpg

... inserted by copy/paste, without any intelligent comment.


Shit!! Let me go find an article so I can leave an intelligent comment!

[johnsmith]

Shit!! Let me go find an article so I can leave an intelligent comment!


:lol :lol :lol


I haven't had much of a chance to post over the last week, but man, I come back and actually read some of the stuff Boutons writes........he's an angry little fella isn't he?

[01Snake]

:lol :lol :lol


I haven't had much of a chance to post over the last week, but man, I come back and actually read some of the stuff Boutons writes........he's an angry little fella isn't he?


Why yes, yes he is.
http://www.opushotel.com/blog/uploaded_images/angry_man2.gif

[johnsmith]

Why yes, yes he is.
http://www.opushotel.com/blog/uploaded_images/angry_man2.gif


Furthermore, I noticed that on some of his posts, he actually edits like a day later on them........what the fuck is that? Is it possible to be so concerned about your posts that you actually go back and re-read them just to make sure they don't sound fucking retarded?


I mean, I realize that most of Boutons posts are so filled with spelling, punctuation, and other such problems that you can't understand what the fuck he's trying to get across, but why go back and edit if you are already obviously comfortable with your "8th grade ability" type of approach?

[01Snake]

Furthermore, I noticed that on some of his posts, he actually edits like a day later on them........what the fuck is that? Is it possible to be so concerned about your posts that you actually go back and re-read them just to make sure they don't sound fucking retarded?


I mean, I realize that most of Boutons posts are so filled with spelling, punctuation, and other such problems that you can't understand what the fuck he's trying to get across, but why go back and edit if you are already obviously comfortable with your "8th grade ability" type of approach?

I think you're on to something. Perhaps this is why he only cut and pastes article after article. If he attempted to actually write his own material he would likely struggle to get to one post a day.

[boutons_]

Ethanol fuels huge corn planting

By Reuters
http://news.com.com/Ethanol+fuels+huge+corn+planting/2100-11392_3-6172112.html

Story last modified Fri Mar 30 11:41:50 PDT 2007


U.S. farmers plan to cash in on the fuel ethanol boom by planting the largest area of corn in 63 years, potentially yielding a record crop and calming fears that renewable fuels will steal grain needed for food and feed, the federal government said Friday.

At the Chicago Board of Trade, corn futures prices plunged the daily trading limit of 20 cents a bushel on prospects for a huge crop. Prices for this year's soybean crop fell as much as 33 cents a bushel, and wheat was down 27 cents a bushel.

Yet even with record output, this year's corn crop could sell for a record $3.50 to $3.60 a bushel at the farm gate, market watchers said. Corn prices on the cash market have doubled since last fall due to explosive growth in the ethanol industry, driving up costs for cattle, dairy, hog and poultry producers.

Based on a survey of 86,000 farmers earlier this month, the Agriculture Department projected corn (maize) plantings of 90.454 million acres, which would be the largest acreage since 1944. With normal weather and yields, the harvest would be 12.5 billion bushels--700 million bushels more than the record set in 2004.

"With a medium yield, we could get just about enough corn in the year ahead," said private consultant John Schnittker. USDA forecasts corn usage of 12.3 billion bushels in 2007-2008, including 3.2 billion bushels for making ethanol, up 1 billion bushels from the 2006 crop.

Farmers could collect nearly $46 billion with a mammoth corn crop, said Ann Duignan, an analyst at Bear Stearns, "which in our view is positive" for sales of farm equipment.

The chairman of farm equipment maker Agco, Martin Richenhagen, said when farmers are flush with cash, "they often then invest in equipment."

The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for alternative fuels, said with high yields the U.S. corn crop could hit 13 billion bushels. "Such a harvest would meet the needs of all the sectors that rely on it," said RFA.

There are 114 ethanol distilleries in operation across the country which produce ethanol from corn. Production is projected to exceed 6 billion gallons this year compared with 4.89 billion gallons in 2006, and some 3 billion gallons in capacity will be added in 2007, the group said.

Planting intentions are months away from actual harvests.

"The weather is going to drive it all," said Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union, pointing to the uncertainties of the growing season.

Growers told USDA they will cut back on soybeans in the Midwest and on cotton and rice in the South to sow more corn. Soybeans are forecast at 67.140 million acres, the smallest area since 1996, while upland cotton would be the smallest since 1989 at 11.855 million acres. Rice, at 2.64 million acres, would have the smallest seeded area since 1987.

USDA forecasts only a modest rise in food prices this year, but said, "With high corn prices increasing feed costs, beef and poultry price increases should begin to accelerate in 2007."

Schnittker said a large corn crop this year would stabilize food prices in 2008.

Iowa, traditionally the No. 1 corn state, would plant 13.9 million acres this year, up 1.3 million acres from 2006, USDA said. Illinois would plant a record 12.9 million acres of corn, up 1.6 million acres, while cutting soybean plantings by 1.4 million acres, the largest decline in the country.


Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

[sickdsm]

weren't we having an argument over ethanol last year and all the lib jackass's here were saying no way to an extra 10 million acres of corn? Try 12 and that's still without ANY CRP being opened up. Nothing like getting worked up over good grain prices, forgetting the economical impact they have on rural america. How much less money will be diverted from the farm program when you factor in no LDP payments for corn/beans/wheat/etc.. at all this year? What about the CRP payments coming off the books as they go towards corn acres? Now i can see some on here don't understand that corn becomes MORE VALUABLE as a feed after it is processed for ethanol. much more nutrious and the great thing feedlot's and milker's have figured out is that it can be blended with straw or other low grade feeds. You're not losing that corn as a feed product. Classic boutons. You bitch about the food quality but fail to understand why farmers have rasied a big middle finger towards that market when it hasn't paid us jackshit for years.

[smeagol]

Paraphrasing my idol, Mr. Hugo Chavez (and his idol, Mr. Fidel Castro), "Using food to run our cars is criminal when half of the world is starving".

(we should use Venezuela's oil and contaminate the shit our of this planet!)

[RandomGuy]

Ehtanol Math





The negative energy theory may have been true years ago but not now. Believe me, there's a million things that aren't being factored in in just the production stage. Ethanol and Biodiesel are tied together tightly in the production area.

They can make gas out of turkey shit and have been able to do that for years now but its not feasible enough to do widespread. Geuss what? there's still improving it! Should they stop bc its not penciling out?

Ok let's do some math.

Let's assume:
1. Corn is as efficient as sugar cane in producing ethanol. The reading that I have done is that it is still much less productive at converting mass into fuel, but let's roll with this for simplicity's sake.

2. Ethanol has as much energy in it per volume as gasoline. I seem to remember it is a bit less, but again, simplicity.

From the wikipedia article on ethanol in brazil, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil) we can pull out the following information:

Amount of sugar crop acreage allocated to Ethanol in 2003-2004:
8789 square miles.

45,000 km2, of which half is used for ethanol, and converted into square miles)

This square area produces:
88 Million barrels of ethanol per year

(cubic meters converted to liters at 1000 liters per cubic meter, converted to gallons at .256 liters per gallon, converted to barrels at 42 gallons per barrel of petroleum)

Directly converting this to gasoline would yield 88 million barrels of gasoline per year using our simplified assumptions.

The US uses 3,321,500,000 barrels of gasoline per year per ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html )

3.3Bn divided by 88M= 37.75 (the number of times larger that US gasoline consumption is than Brazil's consumption)

37.75 times 8789 square miles is 331,521 square miles.

Assume we can find 50% of that figure in unused crop land, that leaves us with 160,500 square miles of NEW crop land that would be need to completely replace gasoline with ethanol at current usage rates.

Factor in the fact that Ethanol has less energy per unit of mass, and that square mileage will go up. Substitute a less efficient crop of corn, and that square mileage will go up.

According to the CIA factbook (http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html) the united states has only 87,000 square miles of irrigated land now.
Where would we get the water to irrigate the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SQUARE MILES of crop land that fully replacing gasoline with ethanol will take, ASSUMING we can find the arable land?

Saying "let's just replace our gasoline powered cars with ethanol" doesn't make it viable as a realistic solution.

Rolling forward a bit:

Yes, we will have to start driving less and buying more efficient vehicles. This will reduce the square mileage needed.

Our population is also growing, as is the economy. This will increase demand for fuel. This will offset gains from efficiency somewhat, if not a lot.

Yes, agricultural production will become more efficient, again reducing the square mileage issue. But not by enough of a conceivable factor to replace gasoline as it stands.

Biodiesel will face the same problems of water and arable land. Keep in mind that the figure given was just for gasoline, and not for diesel. Replacing oil-diesel with biodeisel will require a similar ramp up in devoted area to crops.

One good factor that the wikipedia article pointed out is that a good chunk of the waste mass from producing ethanol can be used to produce electricity beyond what the refining process uses.

I am not saying that ethanol is stupid.
Ethanol is certainly part of what I consider part of an energy solution that takes a longer term view. I am all for ramping up usage of this renewable source of energy.

I simply wanted to point out the scale of the problem we are trying to address.

[RandomGuy]

The thing that Chavez and a lot of other leftists do miss about ethanol is that it won't really take food out of people's mouths.

What it DOES do is puts money in the pockets of farmers.

Considering that farming employs more people than any other occupation in the developing world, would that not be a good thing?

You want the solution to the war on drugs?

Go biofuels. If they don't have to deal with the murderous thugs that tend to populate drug cartels, and can grow something that ISN'T illegal, a lot of them would go for making an honest buck.

I could show how this would work out economically using supply and demand if anybody really wishes.

:lol

Should it surprise anyone that Castro and Chavez are full of shit?

[whottt]

Anyone remember in the 70's when the US tried to break away from mid-east oil and go to the most efficient powersource devised by man so far? Otherwise known as nuclear energy


And there were a bunch of dumbasses who railed against it...I think they called themselves the no-nukes crowd...and now 30 years later we are still in basically the same place?


Yeah...it's like that. It really is.


If anyone call tell me what boutons stands for, other than endless bitching...feel free to do so.

[whottt]

BioDiesel - Nope
Nuclear Energy - Nope
Oil - Nope


Why don't you guys that feel this way(boutons) stop using energy...give up your car, get off the internet, and shut the fuck up.

[RandomGuy]

Anyone remember in the 70's when the US tried to break away from mid-east oil and go to the most efficient powersource devised by man so far? Otherwise known as nuclear energy


And there were a bunch of dumbasses who railed against it...I think they called themselves the no-nukes crowd...and now 30 years later we are still in basically the same place?


Yeah...it's like that. It really is.


If anyone call tell me what boutons stands for, other than endless bitching...feel free to do so.

If nuclear power is so efficient, then why has no nuclear plant ever been built without massive government subsidies? (this is true for every country with nuclear power plants)

[boutons_]

"ethanol is that it won't really take food out of people's mouths."

Imported subsidized US corn pretty much killed 1000s of subsistence corn farms in MX. So 1000s of small corn farmers immigrated, illegally, to US looking for work. (everything is connected)

Now the ethanol idiocy is pushing up the price of corn, perhaps only started and indefinitely, MX has to import corn form USA, and the cost of corn, a MX staple, is up. Poor Mexicans still have (less) corn in their mouths, but less pesos in their pockets.

Whott, go fuck a straw man, you invent plenty of them.

Ethanol does NOTHING about emisssions, makes no dent in oil imports, needs $Ms in subsidies and tax breaks (mainly to agri-business). It's a fucking mirage leading nowhere.

[whottt]

So as I was saying....

Bitch about Oil
Bitch about Nuclear Power
Bitch about BioDiesel...

No solutions, just bitch. That makes things better.

[smeagol]

So as I was saying....

Bitch about Oil
Bitch about Nuclear Power
Bitch about BioDiesel...

No solutions, just bitch. That makes things better.
So true.

Aside from bitching, being angry all the time and cutting and pasting, what does boutons bring to the forum?

[boutons_]

Where do I bitch about nuclear power?

As even the greenies have concluded, it looks like the least worst option for electrical generation.

I'm for clean coal generation, but the coal co's are hesitating, won't build new clean plants (what they really want is tax payers to subsidize, but the coal people will never give the tax payers a break on electricity prices, fuckers), and dubya refuses to force them, as campaign contributors, to upgrade their filthy old plants with scrubbers.

Carbon sequestration looks interesting but the coal plant builders/operators are dragging their feet.

Cheap oil (not so cheap when you factor in $1T bullshit war) has us spoiled, so ALL alternatives are rejected as too expensive.

This is the perfect situation for and responsibility of govt to intervene and tax oil forever so that it doesn't look cheap compared to all the alternatives. Better the dollars for oil go into US govt treasury where they can spent domestically rather than into RU, VZ, IR, etc where they will be lost forever and used against the USA.

[smeagol]

Where do I bitch about nuclear power?

As even the greenies have concluded, it looks like the least worst option for electrical generation.

I'm for clean coal generation, but the coal co's are hesitating, won't build new clean plants (what they really want is tax payers to subsidize, but the coal people will never give the tax payers a break on electricity prices, fuckers), and dubya refuses to force them, as campaign contributors, to upgrade their filthy old plants with scrubbers.

Carbon sequestration looks interesting but the coal plant builders/operators are dragging their feet.

Cheap oil (not so cheap when you factor in $1T bullshit war) has us spoiled, so ALL alternatives are rejected as too expensive.

This is the perfect situation for and responsibility of govt to intervene and tax oil forever so that it doesn't look cheap compared to all the alternatives. Better the dollars for oil go into US govt treasury where they can spent domestically rather than into RU, VZ, IR, etc where they will be lost forever and used against the USA.

:wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow

[boutons_]

:wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wow :wowsmegma brings a lot to the forum.

[smeagol]

smegma brings a lot to the forum.
Dude, I'm in awe that one of your posts actually includes some original thoughts. No cut and pastes, no bitching . . .

By the way . . . smegma . . . that's original.

[RandomGuy]

"ethanol is that it won't really take food out of people's mouths."

Imported subsidized US corn pretty much killed 1000s of subsistence corn farms in MX. So 1000s of small corn farmers immigrated, illegally, to US looking for work. (everything is connected)

Now the ethanol idiocy is pushing up the price of corn, perhaps only started and indefinitely, MX has to import corn form USA, and the cost of corn, a MX staple, is up. Poor Mexicans still have (less) corn in their mouths, but less pesos in their pockets.

Whott, go fuck a straw man, you invent plenty of them.

Ethanol does NOTHING about emisssions, makes no dent in oil imports, needs $Ms in subsidies and tax breaks (mainly to agri-business). It's a fucking mirage leading nowhere.

Not really.

Increase the price of corn, and who benefits?

People who grow corn.

Who grows corn in mexico?

Poor farmers.

It is not a hard logical leap. Not only does the price go up, but the farmers can sell more of it.

Simple economics.

[boutons_]

Nothing I said above was "original", it's a synopsis view, the big picture, that many are arriving at. That "many" of course excludes oilcos, coalcos, generation cos, Repugs, and their right-wing ilk.

[Extra Stout]

Not really.

Increase the price of corn, and who benefits?

People who grow corn.

Who grows corn in mexico?

Poor farmers.

It is not a hard logical leap. Not only does the price go up, but the farmers can sell more of it.

Simple economics.
Increase the price of corn, and who suffers?

People who eat corn.

Who eats corn in Mexico?

Poor everybody.

It's already causing problems down there.

[boutons_]

"Who grows corn in mexico?

Poor farmers."

As I already said, the MX corn farmers couldn't/can't compete with industrialized, subsized corn from USA, so they have been forced off the corn farms, and many have come to the US a illegal immigrants.

It's exactly the same with all the subsidezed crops in USA and Europe that get dumped on the world market, destroying the lives of unsubsidized farmers of those crops in other countries.

Cotton is another example. US cotton farmers are subsizied by $1M/year, on average, so they can dump their cotton on the world market and undercut foreign cotton growers.

[RandomGuy]

"Who grows corn in mexico?

Poor farmers."

As I already said, the MX corn farmers couldn't/can't compete with industrialized, subsized corn from USA, so they have been forced off the corn farms, and many have come to the US a illegal immigrants.

It's exactly the same with all the subsidezed crops in USA and Europe that get dumped on the world market, destroying the lives of unsubsidized farmers of those crops in other countries.

Cotton is another example. US cotton farmers are subsizied by $1M/year, on average, so they can dump their cotton on the world market and undercut foreign cotton growers.

That is the way it works for low crop prices.

Add a lot of demand and the price goes up for everybody. Sure the larger producers will benefit, but so will even the small producers.

You or I as farmers get the same market price that big agribusiness does.

The US government subsidies you are talking about are unsustainable on any large scale, and would be unneeded under such circumstances.

[boutons_]

"The US government subsidies you are talking about are unsustainable on any large scale"

They've been large scale in USA and Europe for decades, and there's no sign they are going away. Here's an article the current farm bill in its 5-year cycle.


====================


April 22, 2007

The Way We Live Now


You Are What You Grow

By MICHAEL POLLAN

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods * dairy, meat, fish and produce * line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly * and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system * indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat * three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades * indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning * U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact * on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities * or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation’s political passions every five years, but that hasn’t been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the “farm bill debate” holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It’s doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community has come to recognize it can’t hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can’t be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer is * it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer’s markets in the last few years * voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can’t, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well * which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the “farm bill” is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food * to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

[sickdsm]

Ehtanol Math




Ok let's do some math.

Let's assume:
1. Corn is as efficient as sugar cane in producing ethanol. The reading that I have done is that it is still much less productive at converting mass into fuel, but let's roll with this for simplicity's sake.

2. Ethanol has as much energy in it per volume as gasoline. I seem to remember it is a bit less, but again, simplicity.

From the wikipedia article on ethanol in brazil, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil) we can pull out the following information:

Amount of sugar crop acreage allocated to Ethanol in 2003-2004:
8789 square miles.

45,000 km2, of which half is used for ethanol, and converted into square miles)

This square area produces:
88 Million barrels of ethanol per year

(cubic meters converted to liters at 1000 liters per cubic meter, converted to gallons at .256 liters per gallon, converted to barrels at 42 gallons per barrel of petroleum)

Directly converting this to gasoline would yield 88 million barrels of gasoline per year using our simplified assumptions.

The US uses 3,321,500,000 barrels of gasoline per year per ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html )

3.3Bn divided by 88M= 37.75 (the number of times larger that US gasoline consumption is than Brazil's consumption)

37.75 times 8789 square miles is 331,521 square miles.

Assume we can find 50% of that figure in unused crop land, that leaves us with 160,500 square miles of NEW crop land that would be need to completely replace gasoline with ethanol at current usage rates.

Factor in the fact that Ethanol has less energy per unit of mass, and that square mileage will go up. Substitute a less efficient crop of corn, and that square mileage will go up.

According to the CIA factbook (http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html) the united states has only 87,000 square miles of irrigated land now.
Where would we get the water to irrigate the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SQUARE MILES of crop land that fully replacing gasoline with ethanol will take, ASSUMING we can find the arable land?

Saying "let's just replace our gasoline powered cars with ethanol" doesn't make it viable as a realistic solution.

Rolling forward a bit:

Yes, we will have to start driving less and buying more efficient vehicles. This will reduce the square mileage needed.

Our population is also growing, as is the economy. This will increase demand for fuel. This will offset gains from efficiency somewhat, if not a lot.

Yes, agricultural production will become more efficient, again reducing the square mileage issue. But not by enough of a conceivable factor to replace gasoline as it stands.

Biodiesel will face the same problems of water and arable land. Keep in mind that the figure given was just for gasoline, and not for diesel. Replacing oil-diesel with biodeisel will require a similar ramp up in devoted area to crops.

One good factor that the wikipedia article pointed out is that a good chunk of the waste mass from producing ethanol can be used to produce electricity beyond what the refining process uses.

I am not saying that ethanol is stupid.
Ethanol is certainly part of what I consider part of an energy solution that takes a longer term view. I am all for ramping up usage of this renewable source of energy.

I simply wanted to point out the scale of the problem we are trying to address.

Biodiesel in america will need another source IMO to compete with ethanol. But hey, we can cut down some more effiecent rain forests in Brazil to supply us, right?

[sickdsm]

"The US government subsidies you are talking about are unsustainable on any large scale"

They've been large scale in USA and Europe for decades, and there's no sign they are going away. Here's an article the current farm bill in its 5-year cycle.


====================


April 22, 2007

The Way We Live Now


You Are What You Grow

By MICHAEL POLLAN

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods * dairy, meat, fish and produce * line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly * and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system * indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat * three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades * indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning * U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact * on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities * or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation’s political passions every five years, but that hasn’t been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the “farm bill debate” holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It’s doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community has come to recognize it can’t hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can’t be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer is * it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer’s markets in the last few years * voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can’t, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well * which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the “farm bill” is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food * to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”


The day you throw a twinkie, Dorito's and a Mountain dew in front of your average earthling and he instead choose's soy milk, carrots and salmon is the day that article means' something. Mass produce something and it's cheaper.

I could give a shit less about which crops i produce. I can pretty much guarantee you that your typical Iowa corn producer would grow lentils or pea's if it was more profitable for him.

Lemme guess, the American farmer and USDA is in cahoots to get everyone fat?

[sabar]

Anyone remember in the 70's when the US tried to break away from mid-east oil and go to the most efficient powersource devised by man so far? Otherwise known as nuclear energy


And there were a bunch of dumbasses who railed against it...I think they called themselves the no-nukes crowd...and now 30 years later we are still in basically the same place?


Yeah...it's like that. It really is.


If anyone call tell me what boutons stands for, other than endless bitching...feel free to do so.Post of the week.

Nuclear power is the best way to break free of oil, but along came three-mile-island and that retarded movie and people bought up all the anti-nuclear propaganda. Look where we are today now, building coal and oil plants that output more pollution and cause more cancers than Chernobyl and three-mile-island combined.

France and Japan are rolling in the new reactors, they know that they are clean and fuel doesn't have to be imported.

80% of France's power is nuclear, is it a big wonder that they don't give a crap about what happens in the middle east?

Oh, and biofuels are worthless, inefficient, and take up arable land that doesn't exist.

[sickdsm]

France knows what its doing on the nuclear front yet is one of the leader's in the advanced European bio-fuels front. Go figure, right?

[RandomGuy]

Post of the week.

Nuclear power is the best way to break free of oil, but along came three-mile-island and that retarded movie and people bought up all the anti-nuclear propaganda. Look where we are today now, building coal and oil plants that output more pollution and cause more cancers than Chernobyl and three-mile-island combined.

France and Japan are rolling in the new reactors, they know that they are clean and fuel doesn't have to be imported.

80% of France's power is nuclear, is it a big wonder that they don't give a crap about what happens in the middle east?

Oh, and biofuels are worthless, inefficient, and take up arable land that doesn't exist.

If nuclear power is the best way to break free of oil, why does it require massive government subsidies?

[boutons_]

"massive government subsidies?"

it just like the Repugs giving $54B in subsidies to private insurance to handle Medicare because private insurance is so much more efficient that Medicare itself.

Take away the $54B subsidies to commerical insurance, etc and let's see how they compete with govt run Medicare.

Same with polluting coal-fired electrical plants. They won't add CO2 scrubbers unless tax payers pay for them. They won't build clean coal-fired plants unless they get huge subsidies and tax breaks.

And of course, the Repugs are fully complicit in this extortion of the US govt by corps while the Repugs bitch about "entitlements" and "welfare queens", cut insurance and school lunch programs for kids.