Bio-ethanol debate - Is the West's effort, to be enviromentally friendly, denying the Third world food ?

Bio-ethanol can be made using solar heat, burning dried biomass and using recycled water. Corn, sugar cane and other food plants are not the only sources of ethanol. We could even genetically engineer plants to be used in the making of bio-fuels. Bio-fuels cannot alone replace petroleum or coal-based fuels, but it can supplement them as part of a mix of fuels.

The crazy environmentalists want fewer people on Earth to protect the animals in the wilderness, they think everyone should be forced by law to be vegetarian, use no animal products, have no pets and not to use animals for labour. Name an alternative energy source and there will be environmentalists who oppose it. Their aim is to return to nature, the simple life, by having no energy sources to maintain our civilisation. Yet they are conflicted by their "humanitarian" concerns for the "suffering poor", their hatred for the "rich", their desire to "protect nature" by reducing the population and it drives them right round the bend.

Since plants take CO2 out of the air and burning them releases CO2 that is taken out of the air by the next crop of fuel plants, bio-fuels are CO2 neutral. It is just recycling. Certainly there would be some competition for farmland between food crops and fuel crops, but genetic engineering could develop plants which would thrive on marginal land, where food crops would not grow well. However the environmentalists also oppose genetic engineering.

Most of the Third World could grow more than enough food, if they were not ruled by corrupt governments which deprive their people of freedom and education. Zimbabwe is a case in point, it used to export food until its government destroyed its agriculture. Yet the political views of the environmentalists preclude sending troops in to straighten such places out, so they are also partly to blame for starvation in the Third World. But that starvation also fits in with their ideal of population reduction.

They hate autos and want everyone to walk or bicycle everywhere, yet they promote Electric Vehicles and Hydrogen fuel as being zero pollution, knowing that both would require twice as many electric generating plants, nuclear, coal-fired or hydroelectric. All of which they want to do away with, not build more.

Now I am a conservationist, a conservative, I want energy, but I want it cheaper, I want it more efficient at a lower cost. I want people to be educated, because educated people have fewer children. I don't want to be dependent on one energy source, especially if most of it is owned by my enemies. I want government to get out of the way and actually provide incentives to become individually self-sufficient, to encourage passive solar, earth-sheltered homes, solar steam generators for home electrical production and push banks to finance them.

I want a military which will kick a dictator's butt out of power and stick around long enough to have at least a relatively honest government to replace him. Then the people can be educated and learn to grow their own food.

Not at all. Believe it or not, people can and do actually eat other things than just corn all the time. I had fish and carrots last night for dinner! I haven't met a human being yet who eats 100% corn all the time. Brazil has been using ethanol made from sugarcane for 25 years and sugar is in no short supply and no one has starved yet in a quarter of a century as a result! You can still buy candy bars and sugar at the store. Amazing! And farmers simply grow more to meet the demand, keeping the price down. On top of all that feed corn is used to make ethanol, not food corn. There is a big difference between the two. And livestock can still be fed distiller's grain, a by-product of ethanol production after the corn has been used to make ethanol.

You have to be kidding. The majority of people have no idea of how to base results from actions. Farmers have quit growing food crops to grow fuel crops as the profit/market is so much larger. It won't be long before we see $5 a loaf for bread. Meanwhile, China is buying the REAL gasoline and driving prices ever higher. The earth has been COOLING since 1998. Al Gore and his (rich) cronies can't explain it, nor do they want too. We are entering third world status and meanwhile the government and tree huggers are patting themselves on the back. Welcome to the new world order, where the rich are richer and the rest of us are screwed.

This is actually a hot topic that I have been following for awhile now. However, I'm not sure that anyone has a conclusive answer yet. We need to gather more data over time as the production of crops for bio-fuels increases. Only then will we realistically be able to determine if biofuel production actually does disrupt food production, particularly in those countries that are most in need of the food crops.

There were protests in Mexico last year about the rise in tortilla prices due to corn being used for American biofuels.

It is raising the prices so some will will not be able to afford it and some will be encouraged to grow it, This makes it financially viable to grow cereal crops on what is already knackered land (due to sterile monoculture) due to the cost of the fertiliser being covered.

I don't think it is the west's effort to be environmentally sound, more an effort to diversify and greenwash the petrochemical industry, save it's overstretched armed forces and continue its growth beyond its 'natural' limits.

Either that or it's the continued effort of the West to shove it's head up it's own posterior.

(Don't confuse the petrochemical industry with home brewers)

Only to a relatively small extent as yet but if biofuel production gets pushed any harder, and it looks inevitable that it will, then the poor will be left to starve in order that the rich may drive cars.

Nothing changes much in this world except for the worse.

And anyway the energy return over energy invested in biofuel production is not very favourable although it should improve as we get better at it.

One project I heard of was using the waste from turkey farms (i.e. bones,guts etc. ) as substrate for biofuel production. I suppose this is better than landfilling or incinerating it but it also makes intensive poultry production still more viable - bad news for animal welfare.

Bio-ethanol is not environmentally friendly. The arguments in its favour are bad science. To produce bio-ethanol, you first need to produce sugar cane. Much of the world's sugar cane production is on land previously occupied by forest. Trees extract far more carbon dioxide from the air than cane. You then have to ferment the sugar with yeast. The process releases carbon dioxide. Then you have to distil it, putting in nearly as much energy as the fuel delivers. We need global holistic solutions, not scratching the surface get-rich-quick schemes.

Ethanol is horrible- here is a couple of links. Ethanol is worse on the enviroment than gasoline because rate is higher.

http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS41...

http://www.9news.com/news/local/article.aspx?story...

It takes 1700 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of ethanol

http://climate.weather.com/articles/nebraska081007...

That must be the reason why corn is up 100% in the last 2 years. When more corn is grown, beans, soy, wheat and everything else is in lower quanity, that is why Milk, Cheese, Meat and everything that is fed on a farm, the prices in the last couple of years increased big time.

A quote from Tad Patzek

more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol than the energy contained within it.

I've heard this before. I think the responsibility is with them, but it's decisions being made by short sighted leadership for their personal benefit that will affect many generations to come, just as it is in the USA. Human's have never lived on a planet without rain forests. Cutting them down to grow crops to make fuel to power internal compustion engines that are technologic dinosaurs is the height of folly.

Yes

And this is one of the good things about it. If we are able to reduce the world population through starvation and disease, then we will reduce the amount of green house gases produced. As an added benefit to future generations the reduced population will provide more area for farming to produce more grain crops and additional forested areas to lock up more carbon.

Corn is King!