Corn is a staple for human and animal diets… it does not belong in our gas tanks! Photo by D Sharon Pruitt, used under Creative Commons License.
Corn belongs on the dinner plate, not in the gas tank.
America’s food and energy policies are severely twisted. How else can you explain the fact that America refuses to mine its own energy sources, choosing instead to import most of our oil, while arguing that to meet our needs for something to power our cars and trucks, we ought instead to simply use a food staple used the world over?
Recently in the news, the Environmental Protection Agency approved adding a new 15% blend of ethanol, or E15, to the nation’s gas stations as part of government’s false premise that renewable energy is going to power America away from foreign oil dependence.
Let’s back the coal train up a moment and think about what we’re doing to ourselves.
Corn is a major staple for humans and animals alike. You can find corn ingredients on many of the food labels we buy at the grocery store. Likewise, animal agriculture consumes a lot of corn — and we consume those animals.
By adding ethanol to gasoline American dairy farmers, for instance, are paying more to feed their cows than they ever have. According to one story, dairy farmers in southern California have seen their corn feed prices increase nearly 50% to $260 per ton over the past several months. As a matter of scale, some dairies consume as much as 50 tons of corn per day. Meanwhile, milk prices to the farmers remain very low.
On the human side, the cost of everything in the grocery store, particularly those products with corn in them, have skyrocketed over the past several years. This didn’t go unnoticed in Mexico where the increased price of tortillas hurt the poor even more.
Not only are we spending more money on food and to feed our food, we’re banking on something that has proven not to work for investors and must be subsidized by US taxpayers in order to only slow the bleeding.
NASCAR, for instance, is concerned that the change to ethanol is going to harm the expensive race car engines by making them burn hotter. For you and I, the trade off is about a 33% reduction in fuel economy, according to studies.
Energyrefuge.com cited a Consumer Reports study on the 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe that could burn gasoline or the flex fuel E85 gasoline/ethanol blend. In that study, the Tahoe reportedly got 14 mpg on straight gasoline and 10 mpg on the E85 blend. Other studies have reported that the ethanol-blended fuel requires approximately 1.5 gallons of fuel to power a car for every mile that gasoline will power the same car. More trips to the fueling station can’t be good for one’s pocket book, not to mention the environment that the ethanol proponents claim their product is helping.
So, what’s the point? Why are we even going down this road when we can see that food-based ethanol products harm car engines, don’t burn as efficiently as fossil fuels and cause food prices to rise unnecessarily?
No fan of ethanol in my gas – I deliberately buy from Marathon here in Ohio, because they don’t deliver the ethanol formula in my rural area.
But NASCAR engines running hotter? ! ! ! No way! In the bad old 1960s I was involved with antique race engines that ran straight alcohol. Why? Because those old engines had very, very poor cooling. The high latent heat of vaporization of the alcohol made those old cast-iron engines run a lot cooler! On days of high humidity, you could actually see frost form on the intake manifolds. This feature of alcohol, by the way, is just one reason why it’s a poor fuel from the efficiency viewpoint. Energy that would otherwise be driving the pistons has to be spent vaporizing the fuel. We had to burn about 70% more fuel by volume than we would have if we were running gasoline. We also had to run at 12:1
to 15:1 compression ratios. Alcohol doesn’t burn well at the typical 8:1 ratios that normal automotive engines have.
The corn you put on your plate is sweet corn. The corn that ethanol is made from is dent corn.
Corn prices are going up not because it is being used for ethanol, but because the American dollar is weak and other countries can buy our products, that includes dent corn, for less of their currency.
A co-product of the ethanol process is Distillers Dried Grains (DDG’s) which makes an excellent feed for dairy cattle. It’s cheaper to use than dent corn.
Over the last several years the price of corn has gone up to $5 on 2008, down to $2.75 in 2009 and then back up to $5 in 2010. The price of food did not go down in 2009 when corn prices did, the price of food continued to go up. The World Bank has determined that the rising price of corn had nothing to do with the rising price of food, but that price speculation on the commodities markets was to blame.
Here in Minnesota we are proving the value of ethanol. We have more years of ethanol research here than in any other area of the U.S. The facts are here.
Thanks for the info Michael, but we’re talking semantics at this point. The food that farmers grow in America should be for human and animal consumption, not to convert to fuel for the internal combustion engine. We have plenty of oil around the world to fill those tanks.
Is the only use of dent corn to make ethanol and DDG? Could that acreage be better used for corn or other agricultural commodities that feed human beings and the animals we eat?
I don’t know how you’re proving the value of ethanol when it’s less productive as a fuel for the internal combustion engine than fossil fuels. In California the ethanol boom went bust and ethanol manufacturers filed for bankruptcy protection.
There are better ways for American agriculture to succeed than to convert productive agriculture land into uses that no longer efficiently feed and clothe the world.
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