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The Great Ethanol Fraud |
Brazil to Limit Cane Planting in Food Producing Areas
Reuters/Flexnews
November 18, 2008
Food Crisis Looms
Shane Romig
Dow Jones November
17, 2008
Canadian Trucking Alliance
Warns of Impending Transportation Catastrophe
Due to Biofuels Mandate
Canadian Trucking Alliance
November 17, 2008
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ANOTHER
GOVERNMENT GIVEAWAY TO ETHANOL |
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U.S. ETHANOL INDUSTRY IN COLLAPSE |
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Indiana
Producers Say the Industry Is No Longer a Sure Bet
Pacific Ethanol 3Q Loss Widens to $69 Millon "If government funds become short, |
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Investors, such as Microsoft’s
Bill Gates, are sitting on billions of dollars in losses after
buying into the corn-based ethanol industry that George W. Bush
embraced as the answer to US energy woes. ....Investors who bought and held shares in hotly anticipated market listings of Aventine Renewable Energy, VeraSun Energy and other ethanol producers that have gone public since 2005, have seen the value of their holdings plummet as much as 90 per cent from their flotation price, in spite of billions of dollars of government support for the industry.
Ethanol Group's PBS Protest May Reveal Industry Panic
This is the program the Ethanol Industry were
protesting:
Oct 21, 2008
For years, big business -- from oil and coal companies to electric
utilities to car manufacturers -- have resisted change to
environmental policy and stifled the debate over climate change in
America and around the globe. Now, facing rising pressure from
governments, green groups and investors alike, big business is
reshaping its approach to the environment. With the election
looming, FRONTLINE producer Martin Smith investigates what some
businesses are doing to fend off new regulations and how others are
repositioning themselves to prosper in a radically changed world. Prof. DANIEL KAMMEN, U.C. Berkeley Inst. of the Environment: Corn ethanol is simply a bad biofuel. And it's a bad biofuel several times over. We, in this country, have optimized corn, ironically, to be as greenhouse-gas-intensive as possible. We reward farmers for using more fertilizer, more irrigation because those things have been cheap historically. So we have lots of greenhouse gasses and carbon embedded in what it takes to grow an ear of corn. And the analysis that my lab and many others have done says very clearly that corn is simply not a good feed stock for biofuels. MARTIN SMITH: Regardless, the corn lobby continues to throw its weight around Washington and has helped the auto companies win a fuel efficiency credit for every E85 car they sell, even though very few drivers have access to ethanol filling stations. [on camera] You say you have 2.5 million E85-ready vehicles on the road. BETH LOWERY: Yes. MARTIN SMITH: How many of those are actually using ethanol? BETH LOWERY: Well, there's a few pumps there, and also- MARTIN SMITH: A few. But there's not much. BETH LOWERY: Right. It's not widespread. MARTIN SMITH: Negligible amounts. BETH LOWERY: It's not widespread. MARTIN SMITH: [voice-over] In fact, out of a total of 120,000 gas stations nationwide, only 1,600 offer ethanol, most in the Midwest. California has just 10, New Jersey none. [on camera] We've invested a lot of money in ethanol. Is that getting us anything? AMY MYERS JAFFE, Baker Institute, Rice Univ.: The corn-based ethanol program is going to be considered one of the biggest follies ever implemented in energy policy anywhere in the world in the history of energy policy.
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Tiawan
Converts Biomass
to
Hydrogen
at
High Rate |
| Taiwan's Feng Chia University has succeeded in boosting the production of hydrogen from biomass to 15 liters per hour, one of the world's top biohydrogen production rates, a researcher at the university said Friday. Lin Chiu-yu, dean of the Feng Chia College of Engineering, said at a news conference at the school's campus in Taichung City that the university began efforts in 1998 to use facultative anaerobic organisms to produce hydrogen gas, that could one day power fuel cells in cars and other devices. ...Lin pointed out that so far, the plant's hydrogen production rate from biomass using a one-liter reactor has reached 15.09 liters per hour per liter of reactor volume, a world-class standard. |
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Food Crop Biofuels to be Cut |
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The European
Commission has proposed that 10 percent of all vehicle fuel come from
renewable sources by 2020, without specifying how much of that should be
biofuels, renewable electricity or hydrogen. ...The European Parliament's influential industry committee endorsed the overall 10 percent target but voted that at least 40 percent be achieved with electricity or hydrogen from renewable sources, or second-generation biofuels from waste. That would leave just 6 percent coming from traditional biofuels made from food stocks. "While the maintenance of a binding target for biofuels is a bitter pill to swallow, the committee has at least strengthened the safeguards against the damaging impact of agri-fuels in this directive," said Luxembourg Green MEP Claude Turmes. |
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A STARVING CHILD CONSUMES ENOUGH GRAIN IN A YEAR TO DRIVE AN SUV ABOUT 90 MILES ON ETHANOL |
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BIOFUELS: THE "FINAL
SOLUTION" |
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"It's criminal to burn corn for
fuel when we are out of food!" |
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THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT AND COMPREHENSIVE REPORT ON THE SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE OF BIOFUELS. -- RDM |
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Another
Inconvenient Truth
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Summary Biofuels are presented in rich countries as a solution to two crises: the climate crisis and the oil crisis. But they may not be a solution to either, and instead are contributing to a third: the current food crisis. Meanwhile the danger is that they allow rich-country governments to avoid difficult but urgent decisions about how to reduce consumption of oil, while offering new avenues to continue expensive support to agriculture at the cost of taxpayers. In the meantime, the most serious costs of these policies – deepening poverty and hunger, environmental degradation, and accelerating climate change – are being ‘dumped’ on developing countries. Neither a solution to the climate crisis… Rich countries’ biofuel policies currently offer neither a safe nor an effective means to tackle climate change. By increasing aggregate demand for agricultural land, they will drive the expansion of farming into critical carbon sinks such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands, triggering the release of carbon from soils and vegetation that will take decades and in some cases centuries of biofuel production to repay, at a time when emissions need to peak and fall within the next 10 to 15 years:
Even ignoring land-use change,
biofuels are an overly expensive way of …nor a solution to the oil crisis Meanwhile 30 million people are dragged into poverty
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Food Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher
Putting Rich Farmers First
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Floodwaters to Widen 'Dead Zone' in Gulf of Mexico |
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"Everything is going up in price. |
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BY ESTABLISHING THE
GREAT ETHANOL FRAUD, THE IDIOTIC BURNING OF PRECIOUS FOOD FOR FUEL, IN
PLACE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF REAL RENEWABLE ENERGY - UNTAPPED, ABUNDANT,
FREE ENERGY THAT WOULD THREATEN CENTRALIZED FOSSIL AND NUCLEAR ENERGY'S
STRANGLEHOLD ON THE WORLD - THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, AT THE BEHEST OF
ITS OIL MASTERS, HAS SET INTO MOTION AN ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL EVIL SO
SOULLESS AND UNCONTROLLABLE THAT IT THREATENS TO DRIVE STRUGGLING HUMANITY
INTO A CHAOS THAT MAY RIVAL OR EXCEED THAT OF THE WORST OF THE
PREVIOUS CENTURY. - RDM |
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A Third Day of Record Corn Prices
Biofuels Row Holds Up Deal at UN Summit |
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"If government funds become short, subsidies for
fuels will be looked at very carefully. "The fact is we can't grow enough
corn in this country to make a dent in our petroleum dependency." |
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Statement of Joseph Glauber, Chief Economist, USDA |
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Continued expansion of biofuels
production will likely maintain corn and soybean prices at historically
high levels and livestock producers will adjust to the increase in feed
costs by reducing production, leading to higher retail prices for beef and
pork in the longer term.
Oil-Rich States Starve the World Food Program |
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"This is silent mass murder. |
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Food Crisis Provides Opening
for Array of |
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An informal coalition of oil refiners, environmentalists and food processors is trying to convince lawmakers that increased output of the alternative fuel is inflating food costs by siphoning off corn otherwise fed to livestock and discouraging U.S. farmers from planting wheat, soybeans and other crops. These strange bedfellows also argue that ethanol distribution constraints are contributing to higher prices at the pump, and that the biofuel is unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and may even increase them. ...Despite the wave of second-guesses by many lawmakers, most analysts say Congress is unlikely to alter or drop the ethanol mandate, given the political importance of farm states in an election year and President Bush's support for the industry. The top ten ethanol producing states account for half the electoral votes needed to win the White House, notes Kevin Book, an analyst at Friedman, Billings Ramsey & Co. Inc. |
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Europe Grapples Over Biofuels |
| The latest call for a change of course came from economist Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who this week urged the European Parliament to scrap the E.U.'s much-touted target of increasing biofuel's share in Europe's diesel and gasoline consumption to 10% by 2020. |
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Insurrection Of The Famished |
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We are
seeing the specter of August 1792 when the famished people of Paris
stormed and ransacked the Tuileries Palace, an event that was going to
change the world. ...We haven't seen the end of the riots. This is just the beginning. President Bush is now concluding that it is necessary to replace fossil fuel by biofuel which is derived from raw vegetable materials (biomass). The U.S. launched, at the cost of $6 billion to the producers, production of ethanol for this purpose. Last year the U.S burned 138 million tons of corn and hundreds of tons of grain for these very purposes. In Brazil the culture of cane sugar has expanded immensely at the detriment of the culture of food products, in spite of the fact that there are already enormous numbers of undernourished people in the country. This is also the case for the United States by the way. In the EU a decree has recently been passed that says that by 2020, in 12 years, 10 % of fuels in the 27 countries of the European Union have to come from food. There will be scientific progress in this domain though, since it will be possible in a future to produce ethanol from agricultural waste, the ears and stems of corn will be burned instead of the food part in order to produce ethanol. The only problem is that the cost of this process is much higher than the burning of the entire plant. The heads of the three international financial organizations, Robert Zoellick of the World Bank, Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF and Pascal Lamy of the WTO, are certainly well aware of the catastrophe that is underway, says Jean Ziegler. All three are convinced that subsistence agriculture must now receive an absolute priority, convinced of the urgency to radically change their policies, abandon the programs of structural adjustment and restrain forced privatization – the neoliberal policies in the world which amount to a unilateral disarming of the developing countries for the profit of the multinational corporations and of the rich countries in the North. Jean Ziegler seems to believe in the good intentions of the three men who head the transnational institutions. He says, however, that there is not much they can accomplish against the enormous power of the multinational private companies (Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, Bung, etc.) who, the same as the commodity speculators, have one principal goal – that is maximum profit, which is what the shareholders are demanding. There is a balance of power between these institutions, and behind the IMF there are the private transcontinental companies, the huge banks and financial groups. Without a total awareness in our respective countries of the looming catastrophe, this huge problem of world hunger will not find a solution. We must realize that this daily massacre of hunger is a crime that we can not tolerate. The rich people in the world have to be made aware of this daily massacre that is taking place right under our eyes, in the third-world countries and even in the United States. It is strictly criminal. It is a question of crimes against humanity. The awareness of having the means to act against these crimes must make us impose radical change on our governments against the interests of the transnational institutions. Without these radical changes even the multinational institutions, says Jean Ziegler, can do nothing. |
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UN Moves to Head Off Food Riots |
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ASK A KID, THEN ASK AN ETHANOL ADVOCATE, |
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Food Rationing Strikes the U.S.
WALL STREET BIOFUEL PUSHES THE WORLD'S POOR TO THE BRINK |
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In Haiti, where three-quarters of the
population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically
malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of
patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically only consumed by the most
destitute. "It's salty and it has butter, and you don't know you're eating dirt," said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. "It makes your stomach quiet down." The New Face of Hunger The Economist (UK) April 17, 2008 |
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"Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will be
starving. Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences
for all their lives." Dominique Strauss-Kahn International Monetary Fund Head Warns About Food Prices Harry Dunphy AP April 12, 2008 |
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Earlier Saturday,
Germany's development minister, who is attending the World Bank's meeting
Sunday, called for greater regulation of the global biofuels market to
prevent its expansion from driving up food prices. "To grant enormous subsidies |
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Rice Jumps to Record |
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THREE YEARS
AFTER YOU FIRST READ ABOUT IT
HERE, TIME MAGAZINE BARES THE UGLY
TRUTH ABOUT ETHANOL -- IN ITS EUROPEAN EDITION! |
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"It's like witnessing a rape." |
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THE GREAT ETHANOL
TAXPAYER FRAUD |
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| Corn is the basic feedstock for most of the plants and about 20 percent of last year's 13 billion bushel corn crop was consumed by ethanol production. That percentage is expected to increase to 30 percent for the next crop year, which ends Aug. 31, 2009, according to Terry Francl, a senior economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. | |
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ETHANOL AND BIOFUELS: JUST ANOTHER WAY TO
PAY FOR OIL
THE GREAT ETHANOL FRAUD SIPHONED FUNDS AWAY FROM GENUINE RENEWABLE ENERGY SOLUTIONS (THAT THREATENED OIL PRICES AND CONGRESSIONAL GRAFT) |
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“I have no idea how importing
countries will get rice.” |
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United Kingdom: |
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Top Scientists Warn Against Rush to Biofuel |
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| John Beddington, the government's current chief scientific adviser, has already expressed scepticism about biofuels. At a speech in Westminster this month he said demand for biofuels from the US had delivered a "major shock" to world agriculture, which was raising food prices globally. "There are real problems with the unsustainability of biofuels," he said, adding that cutting down rainforest to grow the crops was "profoundly stupid". | |
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Could We Really
Run Out of Food? Higher prices are not meeting any resistance from desperate buyers. Most unusual about this phenomenon, according to BMO Financial Group strategist Don Coxe, is that until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns that arose from crop failures, war or pests. Once global trade of grains got going in the 19th century in a major way, food shortages in one country were ameliorated by imports, he said. What's happening now is a lack of supply everywhere at once. ...Coxe's solution: As a first step, shut down all ethanol plants immediately. more |
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FOOD, CRUDE ESCALATE
AS
DOLLAR IMPLODES |
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AMERICA IS NOW TASTING THE BITTER
FRUIT OF A PERPETUAL OIL WAR, A POLITICAL WAR WAGED AGAINST RENEWABLE ENERGY AND A FANTASTIC,
RIDICULOUS FRAUD ON TAXPAYERS INVOLVING ZERO-NET-ENERGY-GAIN CORN ETHANOL CONCOCTED BY
SO-CALLED "LEADERS" FROM BOTH PARTIES.
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Bakers on Ethanol: Stop Burning Up Our Food Supply! |
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THE DEATH KNELL SOUNDS
FOR BLOATED ETHANOL SUBSIDIES |
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Last week, I was discussing ethanol
with a California Farmer from the Central Valley, trying unsuccessfully to
find a sliver of guilt for spiraling food prices. I should have known better. "We all love those corn prices!" he said. "We'll plant all we can sell." "Yeah? How many of you are running your equipment on ethanol?" "No one." "Nobody? Not one?" "Not one," he replied. "You can't get any power out of it!" Of course, I knew he'd say that. Farmers aren't stupid. They all knew the ethanol fuel debacle has been a fraud all along but they were sure the last folks that were going to complain about it. In 2005, looking at the 52.5 cent government give-away subsidy for ethanol that made it appear competitive to an uncritical public, academic cynic Tad Patzek prophesied, "If government funds become short, subsidies for fuels will be looked at very carefully. When they are, there's no way ethanol production can survive." [UC Scientist Says Ethanol UsesMore Energy Than It Makes Elizabeth Svoboda, San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 2005] Now the news has just come over the wires from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher that the Fed is going to act to stem inflation "however politically inconvenient." [Emphasis mine.] The writing is on the wall. |
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