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The question is: which ethanol?
Right now, the biofuel market is being grossly distorted by subsidies and trade barriers in the United States and the European Union. These make it rewarding to produce ethanol from corn or grains that are far less productive than sugarcane ethanol, divert land from food production (unlike sugarcane), and have dubious environmental credentials.
What sense does it make to have a surplus of environmentally friendly Brazilian sugar-based ethanol with a yield eight times higher than U.S. corn ethanol and zero impact on food prices being kept from an American market by a tariff of 54 cents on a gallon while Iowan corn ethanol gets a subsidy?
“It would make a lot more sense to drop the tariff, drop the subsidy, and allow Brazilian ethanol into the United States,” said Philippe Reichstul, the chief executive of a biofuel company in São Paulo. “Pressure on U.S. land will be slashed.”
The United States and Europe should maintain their biofuel targets. Pressure to scrap a European plan for renewable fuels to supply a tenth of all vehicle fuel by 2020 must be resisted while rethinking the policies that favor the wrong biofuels.
The real scam lies in developed world protectionism and skewed subsidies, not the biofuel idea.
Blog: Passages Opinion Blog International Herald Tribune
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/op...4cohen.html?hp
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One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we have apparently reached peak oil. In his book, "Eating Fossil Fuels," Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just for the machinery that plants and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields, and for fertilizers. About 30 percent of farm energy goes to fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is becoming increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil, we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might not eat.
Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to produce food, but because food can substitute for fuel, the price of food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that is going nowhere but up.
A Timely Report Shows the Way Forward
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Why More Food Is Not the Answer
There is certainly oddles of Gas in Austeralia? Owned by Chevron Mobile
I suspect that a lot of the hysteria about ethanol and biofuels is being 'fuelled' by Big Oil.
When you can make bio-fuel for $65 a barrel rather than $115 for oil you can see bio-fuels are a threat to Big Oil.
Bio-fuel production is spread among thousands of farmers and producers not centralised into the hands of 5-6 Big Oil companies. Big Oil must be scared stiff by that.
ALSO
Last night the ABC News ran a segment the NY stock exchange and food prices.
. Money, they said, was flowing into food futures at an ever increasing rate (One BILLION a day now) as the stock market and the housing market had lost their appeal to Fund Managers and other Investors.
It seems to me this is one of many reasons food prices are going up.
Climate change, bad weather, drought are a few more
