Biofuels 'causing food price rises'

[dragonrider]

Wow, what an interesting thread. It started off about bio-fuels and food costs, and from there it has wandered all around all kinds of social, economic, political, environmental, ethical, and moral ground!

Anyway, back to biofuels...

Food crops are not a good feedstock for biofuels because they are expensive to farm and because we need them for food. Right now the eaisiest feedstocks for ethanol are grains like corn because the technology has been around forever (ethanol plants are basically giant whiskey stills). The ethatnol-producing yeasts need sugar to convert to ethanol, and there is plenty of sugar in corn. In Brazil they use sugar cane for ethanol and do not import a drop of oil. The breakthrough technology will be the new enzymes and/or microbes that can break down other hard-to-digest carbohydrates such as cellulose into sugar that can be digested into ethanol. At that point we will be able to turn things like farm waste, cornstalks, grasses, wood chips and other easy-to-come-by non-food materials into ethanol. We won't need to use food.

There are other technologies for converting non-food waste products into fuels other than ethanol which will alse be important. The microbes that digest organic waste into methane are less picky than the ethanol yeasts --- basically you can feed them any kind of shit, literally. My local wastewater treatment plant gets 80% of its electricity by digesting sewage sludge into methane and burning that for electricity --- yours probably does too.

Garbage pretty much turns to methane naturally. My local landfill has a system to capture methane that comes form naturally occuring decomposition inside the pile. Mostly they burn it for electricity, but now the garbage company is installing a liquification facility and they are going to convert the entire garbage truck fleet to run on liquified natural gas from the landfill. This process can be made even more efficient by not putting the organic waste in the landfill in the first place --- instead you capture it first and run it through a digester.

And there is even a technology to convert ANY kind of organic material into oil --- garbage, sewage, slauhgterhouse waste, old tires, plastic, toxic chemicals, ANYTHING organic. It uses a reactor vessel that is very similar to what is used in exisiting oil refineries, and it heats the organic material to extremely high temperatures and pressures in the presence of water. Under those conditions, organic material breaks down into oil that can be run throguh the normal refinery process to make any kind of fuel or industrial petroleum product. They are running some of these plants in Europe, and there is one demostration plant in the US. It hasn't been cost effective in the past, but with oil at $140 a barrel, I bet it is.

I think the future of transportation fuel will be a combination of these methods of converting WASTE biomass into fuel. We won't need to use our food supply. We make enough waste that we can run our socisty on it if we learn how to use it.

Ok, back to random discussion. may I suggest...

• Don't eat beef, don't eat soy --- eat bugs!
• Bush is a big fat liar!
• Evolution!
• Stop workin' for the Man, man!

Or we can just stick with biofuels....

[psychocat]

The problem comes down to one thing , land being used for food crops or cash crops , the more crops you grow for fuel the less food crops can be grown. The demand for both isn't going to lessen it's just going to keep growing as is the population , suitable land for farming and homes will become more desirable.
Then you face another problem in that the demand for land will push up the price for farmers and land developers , land will be taken for the building of homes leaving less for crops.

The only realistic answer is LESS PEOPLE !

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

That's it!
right there.
We're dead.



either A, we kill the land first, then ourselves when there is no farming, or B our "benefactors" kill us off quietly.




AND STILL no one sees the NECESSITY OF TRIBALISM?!?


The yin and the yang must coexist, or the yin will fade away and the yang will explode.


we must give in to our darkest natures, and make them socially acceptable, in the current state of civilization.

[dragonrider]

The problem comes down to one thing , land being used for food crops or cash crops , the more crops you grow for fuel the less food crops can be grown. The demand for both isn't going to lessen it's just going to keep growing as is the population , suitable land for farming and homes will become more desirable.
Then you face another problem in that the demand for land will push up the price for farmers and land developers , land will be taken for the building of homes leaving less for crops.

The only realistic answer is LESS PEOPLE !

Yes, you are absolutely correct about this.

The root of all of these scarcity problems is the fact that there are way way too many of us. Everything we consume, food, water, fuel, etc. comes out of the earth, and the earth has only a limited capacity to produce.

Our reliance on fossil fuels has been spending what has been basically "money in the bank" until it is almost all gone at this point. We've used fossil fuels to grow our society beyond what may be sustainable. Those fossil fuels were once living organisms on the surface of the earth. All of their stored energy came from the sun, was turned into organic matter by plants using the energy of sunlight, were deposited under ground through a process of millions of years, where heat and pressure converted it into the oil and coal that we have burning for the last 100 years. Ultimately it all came from the sun and was converted to fuel by natural processes on the earth. Once it is gone, we'll have to wait a few more million years for more to show up, and we'll have to figure out what to do until then.

Now that we have used up almost all the stored energy of the past millions of years, we are turning to biofuels to use that solar energy immediately as it is produced. Sunlight comes from the sun, plants convert it to stored energy in the form of carbohydrates and sugars, and instead of letting the heat and pressure of the earth convert it to oil over millions of years, we ferment it into ethanol or digest it into methane directly in a matter of days.

The question is whether the earth has enough capacity (farmland) to produce all the food we need to eat and all the fuel we need to run our society. Probably not. We are either going to starve or run out of gas --- especially if we try to grow our fuel the same way we grow our food.

That's why I think it is more important to focus on using WASTE biomass to produce fuel, rather than use food crops. We can't grow both, so we should grow food and use the waste from that process to make fuel.

Also, we need to use other forms of energy other than biofuel. Biofuel is mostly attractive because it uses a similar infrastructure to what we already have in place. But using plants to make fuel out of sunlight is not the most efficiant way to harness the power of sunlight. An acre of solar power station produces a lot more energy than an acre of fuel crops. Now that we have used up all of our "money in the bank" we'll ultimately need to go to solar power and come up with a different way to run our transportation off of solar electricity.

Even if we do manage to make that conversion, I'm not sure we haven't already exceeded the earth's carrying capacity with our enormous population. We may still have a collapse of our society and starve ourselves back down to a manageable population...

[thcbongman]

Personally, I think this is an opportunity to cut some farm subsideries. I think subsideries leads to more waste and unproductive land when it could be used for growing food.

This is an opportunity to bring wealth to American farmer. If there's more demand, that's good for them. Let him grow and make money.

High fructose corn syrup is a main attribute to obesity since it contained in all types of junk food. Since it will be a luxury, many people will lose weight like that by the raise in junk food prices.

I agree that they should be more of a focus on waste-to-fuel. In the mean-time it would not hurt to supplement the alternative energy market by any means.

The only way people will learn to conserve is when prices are high. Great example is countries in Europe. Food is expensive, but the quality of the food is better and there isn't as large of an obesity problem.

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

the PROBLEM is that we are relying on machines and technology.


BACK TO BASICS!


farm to survive, hunt to survive, GET RID OF ALL INDUSTRIAL structures and plantations.


that's what's killing us, and until we are rid of mass production, we will only be digging our grave deeper.



it's about HIGH TIME we started climbing out of this hole before the powers that be bury us in it.



bah why do i even bother telling people this anymore?