BIO - Fuel or Food

The Age today reports that the U.S. has rationed sales of rice. The world price for rice rose about 68% last year.

In February, The Times reported that the world was only 10 weeks away from running out of wheat. The world price for wheat rose about 92% last year.

In January, The Finacial Post reported that U.S. corn exports will seize up in less than three years. The world price of corn rose about 60% last year.

Here's another one from April 24 that talks about the UN having to make "heartbreaking choices" with its emergency aid because it can no longer afford to buy food for starving nations.

So let's talk a little about the real costs and benefits of biofuels, if any can be said to exist. What are biofuels? Biofuels are those fuels like "biodeisel" or ethanol, that are produced mostly from food plants or disguarded by-products of food plants like used vegetable oil. For the most part we use grains like wheat, corn and rice to make ethanol with the very versatile (not to mention gentically modified) canola being used for oil, mostly.

Ethanol is an excellent energy carrier but produces just as much CO2 as regular unleaded fuel. Biodeisel, distilled from old or new vegetable oil doesn't work quite as well, so you'll need a Deisel engine to burn it properly. Even so, you'll still produce just as much CO2 as you would with deisel fuel, so in that regard at least, there's no real advantage to either of them as "environmentally friendly" fuels. They are however, renewable resources.

The European policy on biofuels dictates that there be 2% ethanol by volume in petrol, rising to 5.75% by 2010 in order to create a disired "crude oil saving". America is considering a similar policy, as is Australia and a myriad other countries around the world and the saving in crude oil is the only reason for it.

As we can see from all those articles though, there's already a serious food shortage brought on mostly by our current minimal insistance on biofuels. But as ethanol percentages rise in fuel, so will the demand for those food products. That means food becomes scarce, prices continue to rise, which of course drives yet more inlfation and the UN will have to choose who will die for lack of food.

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Excellent stuff! Gimme more...

Complete crap! Get rid of it...