Quote:
Originally Posted by DGthe3
Most people who link ethanol to rising corn prices forget to look at the prices of other foods, like potatoes, carrots, lettuce, and anything else you can think of. When ethanol usage was going up, corn prices did go up too, but so did all those other foods which had absolutely nothing to do with ethanol, but they went up at about the same rate over the same time period. It was mostly because of rising oil prices, which in turn made things like fertilizer and diesel fuel more expensive. Then oil prices droped, and food (including corn) became cheaper again.
And as for the corn ethanol taking away from food, thats a load of BS. Its not the corn kernels that we eat that gets converted into ethanol fuel, its mostly corn byproducts that get used. So unless you're concerned about having less corn based cattle feed, its not much of a problem. Additionally, while I'm not sure if its still the case, there was a time that American farmers were being paid not to grow corn, in order to lower the supply and keep prices higher.
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Subsidies like that are probably still in force legally, but corn prices haven't been low enough to trigger them for a while.
Corn for ethanol demand CAN be blamed in part for rising prices for other agricultural commodities, because when the price of one (corn) goes up substantially, production is shifted away from the other crops to cash in on the hot one, thus lowering the supply of everything else.
PS> I completely support your idea of algae based bio-diesel. It makes much more sense than ethanol for a whole list of reasons, particularly since diesel is in tighter supply than gasoline. If the free market where choosing winners and losers in alternative energy, and not lobbyists from important primary states, that is where the focus would be. The resources we are wasting on ethanol (which is more about vote buying than energy) would be much better spent on bio-diesel.