Uprising Against the Ethanol Mandate

[groovedaddy]

The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.

Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.

“When you find yourself in a hole, you have to quit digging,” Mr. Perry said in an interview. “And we are in a hole.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/business/23ethanol.html?th&emc=th

[kestrel91316]

1. I got an interesting perspective on the ethanol-from-corn dilemma

from a veterinarian at the AVMA convention in NOLA this past weekend.

I was having lunch at the bar in Mulate's and started talking to the guy sitting next to me (OT - he turned out to have grown up in the OH town where I went to HS and when his HS was destroyed by a tornado he briefly went to MY HS at the time I was going there, and we might even have passed each other in the hall, in 1974, lol). He's the Univ of Nebraska agricultural extension veterinarian and works a lot educationg and advising livestock producers.

He said most the cattle producers are pretty happy about the corn ethanol thing because the byproduct, known as distiller's grains, is a much higher quality feed than the corn itself. It's higher in fiber and protein and much lower in carbohydrates, so the incidence of feed-related medical problems like liver abscesses and such are much less. In theory, the risk of the bad E. coli is also substantially less because you aren't getting the ruminal acidosis.

I definitely said HMMMMMMM........

But now I am wondering why we are being told feed costs and livestock production costs are going up so much...........

[DCKit]

3. That would indicate that there is no increase in actual demand...

and that the prices we're seeing at the feed and grocery stores are due to speculation alone.

Hmmmmmmm.

[izquierdista]

2. Engineering first, mandates later

This whole subject shows the folly of letting politicians responding to lobbying groups decide what is best. While the engineering is in its development, before the best feedstocks, processes, fermentation pathways, heat recovery schemes, by-product uses, and waste minimization are figured out, politicians are running their mouths off, each advocating a different mandate to cover everyone.

A wise politician (even though FDR was before my time, I have to think of him, since there hasn't been a wise one since) would ask a team of scientists and engineers what they needed, give them funding and set a goal for them. He would inquire as to progress along the way, what obstacles they have run into and what other resources they might need. He would remind them again of the goal and ask them if it was still realistic and if they were still on track to achieving it. And then later, AFTER they had demonstrated a workable pilot project and had cost estimates for how it would scale up, THEN he would try to encourage, and at a last resort, mandate what had to be done.