Bush - Backing Away From Ethanol No Answer To Food Price Hikes - Instead, Go Cellulosic!! - NYT

[hatrack]

:puke:

President Bush said Wednesday that the national drive toward ethanol production was also driving up the cost of corn and other foods, a problem he said needed to be addressed. The boom in alternative fuels, he said, was “beginning to affect the price of food. And so we got to do something about it.”

Mr. Bush has previously pointed out that the price of corn has been pushed up by competition from ethanol manufacturers and that this had raised costs for companies that raise beef and hogs on corn. But addressing a conference on renewable energy on Wednesday morning, Mr. Bush said that this was also affecting the price that consumers pay for food.

But, he said, the solution was not to back away from ethanol, but to develop ways to make ethanol from agricultural wastes, wood chips or similar materials. The Energy Department has spent nearly $1 billion trying to incubate a “cellulosic ethanol” industry, he said.

Mr. Bush said it was “amazing to think how far our country has come” in ethanol production, which reached 6.4 billion gallons last year, he said up from 1.6 billion gallons in 2007. Under the president’s goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent between 2007 and 2017, ethanol production would rise to about 35 billion gallons a year, far more than could be made from corn kernels.

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=94178

[Kittycat]

1. Great - so now that we've built another economy on sand...

[Javaman]

2. Exactly. the "cellulose" molecule has yet to be broken in an inexpensive fashion...

it's just more castles in the sky.