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Ethanol Madness Drives Up Milk Prices
The price of milk is now about the same as the price of gasoline, around $4.00 per gallon. One big reason why: Ethanol madness. Ethanol is probably more of a bane than a boon, and most estimates say that even if every kernel of US-grown corn was used for fuel, it would make up less than 15% of our fuel needs.
MSNBC quotes an expert who says, "higher gasoline prices have increased the costs of moving milk from farm to market, and corn — the primary feed for dairy cattle — is being gobbled up by producers of the fuel-additive ethanol. The USDA projects that 3.2 billion bushels of this year’s corn crop will be used to make ethanol, a 52 percent increase over 2006."
Another expert says, "The claim that using ethanol will save energy is another myth. Studies show that the amount of energy ethanol produces and the amount needed to make it are roughly the same. "It takes a lot of fossil fuels to make the fertilizer, to run the tractor, to build the silo, to get that corn to a processing plant, to run the processing plant" (see "Ethanol Facts and Fiction").
The insane desire to use ethanol has caused far more problems than it has helped. Mexican consumer know this all too well (see "Of Tortillas and Ethanol"). Mexicans been paying much higher prices lately for items made of corn, due largely to the displacement of ethanol for fuel usage.
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A real mess, this one is. Many of the ethanol plants are in rural areas that are struggling to keep young people from moving to the cities. So farm state senators support ethanol, a lot of environmentalists do...
ReplyDeleteIt's bad.
I'm glad there are more people noticing that there is a very nasty trade-off involved in the "alternative" fuels, which is steeply higher food prices, and possible famines as we commit more and more increasingly scarce farmland to the production of fuel crops.
ReplyDeleteWill half the population of this country, including maybe you and me, starve to keep our fleet of 200 million fuel guzzlers running no matter what?
The sickest part is that, even if we took every acre of decent farmland (that which isn't already slated for a new subdivision) out of food production and committed it to ethanol and biomass, we would only FRACTIONALLY be able to replace fossil fuels.
We will all starve and we STILL won't be able to keep the cars running.
I am writing to Gov. Blago and all our state senators and reps, to urge them to cancel the $1.2 billion worth of subsidies for ethonal and biomass fuel production and instead commit a substantial portion of this money to subsidizing mass transit in the Chicago area, and the rest to promoting mass transit and more economical land use policies in the remaining viable small towns in the state, whither hundreds of thousands of suburbanites from the collar counties will surely head when our fuel situation starts to become dire and the far-flung auto suburbs become unliveable and unusable.
Environmentalists supporting this technology is illogical considering that the required agricultural production would seem to be the far greater environmental threat.
ReplyDeleteThe serious impact of agricultural practice on environment gets short shift next to fuel policy. This error of emphasis in the public debate is troubling.
You are correct Rebecca, and to your comment that impact of agricultural pracitice on the enviroment get short shrift next to fuel policy, I could add that sensible fuel policies and land use policies, get short shrift next to KEEPING THE CARS RUNNING AT ANY COST and KEEPING SUBURBIA FUNCTIONING AT ANY COST.
ReplyDeleteWe Americans simply will not face the fact that the chosen lifestyle of roughly 70% of the population is unsustainable and is exacting a massive toll in dollars, fuel, and human lives lost to resource wars now and forever, and to rapidly contracting supplies of food, electricity, and every life-saving necessity tied to the availability of oil, down the road.