Biofuels, fueling SUVs and Hunger.
May 6, 2008The amount of food it takes to produce enough ethanol to fill the tank of an SUV once, is coincidentally, the same amount of food it takes to keep a man alive for one year. I don’t mention this fact in the hope of guilting even one person out of driving a gas guzzler, as such people left their social conscience at the dealership.
This fact is important because the world needs to quickly wrap its collective mind around the “Global Food Shortage” and its attendant “Food Riots”. Skyrocketing food prices threaten to break the backs of relief agencies that are the only standing between millions of poverty stricken people, and death by starvation. But that is not why the Oil President wants America to, literally, drive food prices to sudden and unforeseen heights.
America is technically bankrupt and is stuck in an unwinnable war over a resource they can’t operate without exerting control over. The American dollar is tanking on world markets and because it is primarily traded in greenbacks, the price of oil is rising uncontrollably. Without continued lending from rival China, America will be instantly bankrupt. The exploding Indian and Chinese economies threatens American hegemony.
America is in the unenviable position of having its benefactors as rivals.
China and India have two primary vulnerabilities. They are hungry for food, and thirsty for oil. America is in the middle east in an attempt control the world’s energy supply, and they are gassing up on corn in an attempt to set up a mechanism of control over the world’s food prices.
China and India both have a booming economy that is fuelled by an ever-increasing demand for food and oil. America holds the keys to both. America needs to borrow over a billion dollars per day. China and India had better keep lending it.
It is the miracle of biofuel.
Ethanol is the most promising answer, look at what it has done for Brazil. Although ethanol from corn, & sugarcane is problematic in that it jacks up food prices due to the shortage of produce dedicated farmland. We should look to ethanol from switch grass’ such as miscanthus. A process called cellulosic ethanol. Burning ethanol could reduce carbon emissions by 80% and do away with the release of acid-rain causing sulfur dioxide.
Shit Henry Ford’s Model-T ran on this shit!
Forget looking at hydrogen fuel cells for cars, the conversion to such a system would cost the auto industry $illions. New production and distribution systems would need to be put in place, there would be a long and costly switch over period that wouldn’t benefit either the consumer or the manufacturer.
In Canada we could look to the prairies with fields of non-produce dedicated fields and nothing but grassland. Stewardships could be formed to protect natural habits such as they are, lets face it our hunger for petroleum has polluted every corner of the globe with plastics nothing is natural anymore. Fucking birds on the Galapagos Islands are sporting plastic necklaces and lining their nests with spent condoms. Natural habitats won’t mean shit from shinnola if something isn’t done to stop climate change.
On an interesting note, A Chesapeake Bay marsh grass bacterium, S. degradans has an enzyme that can quickly break down plant materials like old newspaper, into sugar, which can then be converted to biofuel. Ah dead wood into fuel, sweet!
reading list:
How to Beat the High Cost of Gasoline. Forever!”
-By Adam Lashinsky and Nelson D. Schwartz, Fortune.
Cellulosic Ethanol: Fuel Of The Future?
-Science Daily