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A million times yes, there needs to be more awareness of how ridiculous corn ethanol is. Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something y

by BenSS 15y ago

A million times yes, there needs to be more awareness of how ridiculous corn ethanol is. Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.

cfgvjkljhgfb 15y ago
Corn ethanol is an indirect way of converting farming subsidy into electoral college votes.
lutorm 15y ago
I'm not going to defend corn ethanol, but I do think this debate is misguided. The problem is not the corn ethanol, the problem is the corn. Corn is an indirect way of converting oil into sugar. It is just as inefficient at making food as it is at making fuel (though that's less obvious because the end product doesn't have the same units.) There's a great article in an old issue of Harper's called "The oil we eat" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915). I find it amazing that people are complaining that diverting corn to make ethanol raises food prices, when you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices. Making beef via corn is an extremely inefficent method that's only viable because of cheap oil. If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. From a food supply point of view it's pure waste to feed cattle food that humans can eat directly. (Letting cattle eat grass on land not suited for agriculture is different.) The only reason it's sustainable to raise cattle the way it's done in the U.S. is because of an abundance of cheap corn due to cheap oil.
- hugh3 15y ago
  you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices As far as I can figure out, diverting corn to feed cattle raises corn prices and lowers beef prices. Since beef eats up a much larger fraction of my grocery budget than corn (and is, additionally, far more delicious) I'm cool with this.
  - positr0n 15y ago
    Yes that's his point I believe. It's ok for us wealthy nations full of meat lovers. But a billion starving people say otherwise. (At least that's my understanding of the debate).
    - lutorm 15y ago
      Kind of my point. But it's only ok for wealthy nations if you don't care about oil consumption, either due to energy security or CO2 concerns.
  - lutorm 15y ago
    Sure, but that just means you aren't price sensitive. By the same rationale, some people might use enough gasoline that they don't care whether food prices go up because it's more important to keep gas prices low. I spend 1/10 as much on gas as on food, so I'm the other way. The problem with the food price argument is that it's usually put in terms of the poor people starving because food prices go up. And if that's your argument, you have several worse problems that should be fixed first.
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  > If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers: 1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein. 1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein. So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu? Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
  - cfgvjkljhgfb 15y ago
    So is it more or less efficient overall to eat vegetarians?
  - DougWebb 15y ago
    Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to Oryx & Crake. It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
      - DougWebb 15y ago
        I have no idea what Oryx & Crake is. You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat. My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages. The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead. Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...

by BenSS 15y ago

cfgvjkljhgfb 15y ago

Corn ethanol is an indirect way of converting farming subsidy into electoral college votes.

lutorm 15y ago

I'm not going to defend corn ethanol, but I do think this debate is misguided. The problem is not the corn ethanol, the problem is the corn. Corn is an indirect way of converting oil into sugar. It is just as inefficient at making food as it is at making fuel (though that's less obvious because the end product doesn't have the same units.) There's a great article in an old issue of Harper's called "The oil we eat" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915). I find it amazing that people are complaining that diverting corn to make ethanol raises food prices, when you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices. Making beef via corn is an extremely inefficent method that's only viable because of cheap oil. If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. From a food supply point of view it's pure waste to feed cattle food that humans can eat directly. (Letting cattle eat grass on land not suited for agriculture is different.) The only reason it's sustainable to raise cattle the way it's done in the U.S. is because of an abundance of cheap corn due to cheap oil.

hugh3 15y ago
you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices As far as I can figure out, diverting corn to feed cattle raises corn prices and lowers beef prices. Since beef eats up a much larger fraction of my grocery budget than corn (and is, additionally, far more delicious) I'm cool with this.
- positr0n 15y ago
  Yes that's his point I believe. It's ok for us wealthy nations full of meat lovers. But a billion starving people say otherwise. (At least that's my understanding of the debate).
  - lutorm 15y ago
    Kind of my point. But it's only ok for wealthy nations if you don't care about oil consumption, either due to energy security or CO2 concerns.
- lutorm 15y ago
  Sure, but that just means you aren't price sensitive. By the same rationale, some people might use enough gasoline that they don't care whether food prices go up because it's more important to keep gas prices low. I spend 1/10 as much on gas as on food, so I'm the other way. The problem with the food price argument is that it's usually put in terms of the poor people starving because food prices go up. And if that's your argument, you have several worse problems that should be fixed first.
jcampbell1 15y ago
> If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers: 1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein. 1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein. So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu? Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
- cfgvjkljhgfb 15y ago
  So is it more or less efficient overall to eat vegetarians?
- DougWebb 15y ago
  Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to Oryx & Crake. It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
    - DougWebb 15y ago
      I have no idea what Oryx & Crake is. You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat. My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages. The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead. Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...