Corn Ethanol Starving Poor - Enjoy Your Eco-Hypocrisy

TreebeardsUncle · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jun 15, 2006 Posts: 602

Hi.
There was an article in the Bee or the SF Chron. the other day stating that tortillas are getting too expensive for the poor. Anyway like Africa, Mexico is another affordable loss. The war in Iraq must continue as well because the US government has

"Got to keep the cars moving in the drive through nation.
It's an escalade elation.
a marketing sensation,
such exhileration."

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

Ludi

The thing I like about you, Jack, is that you're totally consistent. You're horrible, you know you're horrible, and you don't pretend to be anything but horrible. Smile

I trust you to be consistently horrible and a threat to those I care about. An honorable enemy.
_________________
"...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy

Aaron

Come on guys chill... I just swept the circle of death.
_________________
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.

Praise HawkMan

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

nwildmand · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jul 12, 2006 Posts: 561

Merlinson · Coal Joined: Jan 30, 2007 Posts: 2

Hello all. Umm... I think this post may not be very popular or even on topic given this thread so far, but what the heck, LOL.

I agree that corn grown the Monsanto way is a poor source of energy. Start with sterile expensive seed that has been genetically mutated with bacteria to make them resistant to roundup. Add extreme levels of fertilizer and pesticides which happen to be made from petroleum. The result is a poor energy gain. However, corn could be grown following permaculture techniques that would make the energy gain alot better. But why use corn? Because there are alot of corn farmers and they are politically powerful. Brazil uses sugar cane which has quite a nice energy gain, although there are environment issues with the way they grow and harvest it. We could use sugar beets or similar crops which grow with much less favorable soil and weather conditions than corn and give an energy gain around that of sugar cane. However, there is the sugar lobby to contend with.

The point I wanted to make, however, is that ethanol from corn doesn't have to lead to starvation. Corn is 70% starch and 85% of it is fed to animals in the US and Europe because we like our steaks. Cattle are very poor digesters of starch. Of course feeding grains to animals is a very bad idea if we are interested in efficiency of generating nutrition. (I like steaks as much as the next guy though. )

When we ferment corn into alcohol, the starch is lost, but the proteins, vitamins, and minerals remain in the distiller's grain that is left over. In addition there are a lot of dead yeast, which is 50% high quality protein. Farmers feed that distiller's grain to cattle and they gain more weight faster that feeding them the original grain. So where is the lost nutritional value? Huge amounts of ethanol production from corn should result in huge amounts of high protein distiller's grain created from a low quality starchy feedstock. So I'm just saying it doesn't have to be that way for the poor if this was done intelligently. But are we smarter than yeast?