Will the US keep up the push for "the green" bio diesel, while the rest of the world goes "brown" ?

Question

With starvation?

Your thoughts please.

Answer 1

I hope not. This government created crisis should stop immediately. Making corn into ethanol is plain stupid.

Answer 2

I think it is incredibly retarded using food for fuel, it takes more energy to turn food into fuel. The return is not worth it. This is all politically charged

Answer 3

All the US congress has done is cave in to the agriculture lobbies that want to grow more corn at inflated prices.

There has been nothing done for second generation ethanol production (non-food sources).  Nor has there been any push for thrid generation biofuels such as bio diesel from algae.  There has been nothing done to encourage people to get off the grid.

It looks like American special interest groups and lobbies can manipulate the politicans into doing anything they want.   Politicians are just going with the money.

Answer 4

I think it's the best attempt they could come up with to look like their solving to the problem but actually just making every thing worse.

ethanol works amazing for Brasil, not so much for north america.   what we really should be getting in gear on and turning the infrastructure over to use hydrogen refueling. it's a much cleaner battery source then ethanol by far.

and btw Ethanol is used as a "clean" battery not as a fuel source.

Answer 5

Well, in spite of the valid concerns other answers have shown for the use of corn that could otherwise be used for food, bio diesel is NOT made from corn. Ethanol is. Bio diesel is made from used vegetable oil that restaurants would otherwise have to dispose of through other means. Therefore, bio diesel does not contribute to starvation in any way at all, unless it is made from new vegetable oil instead of used vegetable oil. And as for the ethanol that comes from corn. Ethanol can be made from almost any organic material. In Brazil they use sugar beets, and their country is almost completely independent of foreign oil. So why not look for alternative energy sources? If you have choices other than gasoline or diesel, the oil companies may one day actually have to lower their prices because they will not have a monopoly like they do now.

Answer 6

Bill is right about the source for biodiesel being veggie oil, not the corn itself or alcohol produced. But if it's not waste oil, some plant must be used to produce it so it becomes an unimportant distinction.

There are many better sources for ethanol than corn, sugar cane or sugar beets are much more productive than corn, while waste plant such as some weedy plants can be used without impinging on food sources at all. It's incredibly stupid to mandate ethanol use and turn food crops into fuel, we have much better alternatives.

We haven't even been allowed to explore for oil in many areas of the US and off-shore for decades, so we don't even know what our reserves are, let alone drilling where we know there is oil, such as ANWR. We now get a lot of our oil from the tar sands in Athabasca up in Canada and we could liquefy coal and sequester the carbon, providing cleaner and cheaper alternative to oil.

None of those are terrific ideas in the long run because we need to stop using fossil fuels the way we have done in the past. If we built nuclear power plants or built more solar plants like they're doing in Nevada, we could switch to electric cars. We'd also need to get our government to fund research for better storage options to make them more practical. Fusion is still a ways off but it will eventually be an option and in the meantime we should research solar, fuel cells, hydrogen (mostly for fuel cells), and better batteries or capacitors for cars. If we had cheap electricity people would switch from fossil fuels on their own, with no government mandate, just to save money and that's the only way this will work.

It's unconscionable to let people starve or go hungry, here in the US or elsewhere, just so we can use potential food as a fuel source. But that's the kind of wisdom when you have big corporations telling politicans (of both parties) what to do, instead of finding an actual solution to our problems.

Answer 7

GOOD questions but I doubt we will ever starve - the problem will be the price of corn will be astronomical - - but then again - -so is gas