Loaves Or Ethanol

The Earth Policy Institute a commie think tank, suggests that more than a quarter of US grain production was swallowed up in fuel production in 2009. They figure that the 107 million tons of grain turned (at vast energy expense) into fuel for auto mobiles could have fed 330 million people. Which is a horrid statistic.

Which statistic makes for a brilliant headline but I'm not sure what it means exactly. If you don't think too hard about it, a headline of 330 million people goes a long way for effect but does one person eat one third of a ton of corn in a year? Beats me. Beyond the headline which makes it easy for reporters to write the story, the fact remains that the world's largest producer of corn poured way too much of it into producing fuel. I'm not going to suggest that ethanol corn would make great quesadillas but you know that the energy that goes into producing one kind of corn (ethanol) could easily go into another (edible). But it isn't and the US government wants to keep it that way to keep mid Western cultivators happy.

Ethanol is going into our tanks and reducing our gas mileage by ten percent and it costs almost the equivalent amount of energy to produce a gallon of burnable fuel. But there is a Federal subsidy involved to promote this madness, so ethanol is now a political fuel and if a few people in very poor parts of the world well, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and Monsanto thank them. In the same way we produce sugar in South Florida with enough of a federal subsidy to put five cents of your tax dollars into each candy bar you eat. And to do that they import Jamaican cane cutters to do the work Americans don't have the stamina to get done. They could just let the Caribbean islands grow the sugar and harvest it but federal subsidies skew the market. And so it goes.

Now I read that Bill Gates, still I believe the Richest Man In The World is calling on scientists to work on producing clean energy. Perhaps he will have the clarity of vision and purity of purpose to do what our political leaders can't possibly do; which is to accomplish the obvious.