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Comment by zqmall | Hacker News Reader

In 2012 you could feed 570 million people with the crops that go into the "green" ethanol scam:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do...

I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence for national security, but please do not call it "green".

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Then factor in all the havoc caused by ethanol in gas ruining seals, not working well in small engines, etc. and it’s just totally non-sensical that this fraud has been allowed to happen.

Most of "green" movement is a fraud. The majority of "green" energy comes biomass - aka cutting trees down and burning it.

Would love to see the funding behind many of these green groups. I'll bet most of it comes from oil companies, governments, etc. The past 15 years, much of the anti-coal "green" movement was funded by oil companies who wanted to take out their coal competitors and replace it with "clean" natural gas. It was all about taking market share. Nothing to do with the environment.

I've heard of the seal issue but never seen any numbers on how widespread the damage is. Got any numbers?

This is anecdotal, but just wanted to give an example that I've personally experienced.

We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel that the engine was designed to use.

The end result was that all the racers ended up having excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go through several sets of the fuel pump internals every year. The fuel pump is a pulse driven flexible element that the pump gas (containing ethanol) would just destroy.

Never had those issues with the ethanol free VP fuel.

I mean, the need for engine compatibility was part of the push for ethanol, it isn't some big secret, and there are millions of vehicles that have no issues with ethanol gasoline. Blame the organizers, not the ethanol.

Hot rodders love it - they build their fuel systems for it, though.

All I have are my experiences of every small engine I own that worked fine for a decade or more gradually going to crap in the past few years and I need to take four different ones to the small engine repair guy right now. :)

I’ve just been phasing out every gas engine I own for battery powered. I’m done with gasoline as much as possible. A lifetime of begging this horrible Frankenstein machine we call the internal combustion engine to work is enough for me.

In defence of ethanol, producing it from plants and then burning it as fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions vs extracting, refining and burning dino juice.

This is disputed. The GAO issued a report that cited research which claimed its worse when taking land use effects into account.

In regards to your other question about why its a bad way to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane on the other hand is 8:1.

Whatever the exact numbers are, the benefits are pretty modest if there are any. Its an agricultural subsidy program.

>> This is disputed

Credibly disputed?

We’re talking about “big oil” here, you’ll forgive me if my first reaction is to imagine a pre-completed study with all the right conclusions and a big fat cheque hidden under page 3, being shopped around academia looking for someone willing to sign their name to it :-)

From a layman’s point of view the claim just smells weird.

On one hand, we take carbon out of the atmosphere over millennia, compressing it tightly under the surface of the earth for even more years until it turns to a thick sludge. Then very quickly, in comparative seconds to the millennia of oil deposits formation, we release all that into the atmosphere again.

And it’s alleged that causes less greenhouse gas emission than the other idea: extract carbon floating around in the atmosphere today (i.e. grow a plant of some sort today), process it then instead of shipping it across the world from the oil wells to the consumers, instead just distribute it locally where it is grown and processed.

The same of course goes the other way, Big Ag definitely is able to put its hand on the Department of Ag. The report I referred to is from GAO, which is much more independent than USDA.

I couldn't find the GAO report I mentioned but I found a more recent one published this year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more prestigious journals in the world. In their abstract in addition to mentioning US ethanol raised corn prices by 30% and other crop prices by 20% they say it

> ... caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.

Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2101084119

That was a good link, it seems like replacing corn with an alternative crop really is the sensible direction.

There is something of note in the methodology behind the figures though:

“We apply our models only domestically”

Throughout the years of this study, the US imported most of its gasoline. The production emissions are excluded. It’s not comparing like with like.

> Throughout the years of this study, the US imported most of its gasoline.

Uhh what? We export more gasoline than we import.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbblpd_a_cu...

Even if you meant crude oil and not gasoline you are still wrong, we recently became a net oil exporter.

>> Uhh what? We export more gasoline than we import.

The study data is from 2008 to 2016 right? The US was (massively) an importer of gasoline in that time period, right?

Yes but corn is one of the worse sources for alcohol production

I don’t know the story, what’s bad about it?

My understanding so far is that the corn used for ethanol isn’t the kind you eat (sweetcorn) it’s a cheaper to produce and more hardy plant but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed and ethanol production.

Ages ago i read something that said in the US, corn was the optimal source but in other parts of the world, sugar cane could result in a more energy efficient process for ethanol.

> but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed

Spoiler: most agriculture goes to supporting industrial livestock farming.

It doesn’t change the economics. The ethanol mandate is horribly stupid.

I’m open to that, I was looking for more information rather than a pre-determined opinion though :-)

Sure fair enough. It’s more nuanced than someone will be able to write in a succinct HN comment. Without debating the merits of carbon intensity, the ethanol mandate is far too small to make any appreciable impact on emissions. But it is large enough to have a very appreciable impact on food costs.

Field corn is used to make corn flour.

Most people probably eat way more corn chips and similar than sweet corn.

And then there is corn syrup, but we probably shouldn't eat more of that.

That makes sense. It’s not something that would solve itself then if that’s true - i don’t know that my demand for fuel is driving up the cost of my corn based foods and vice versa. I’m not deciding to drive less miles or take alternative transport because i want cheaper food - because i don’t know that connection exists.

Tricky problem.

I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities to this sort of thing.

The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them.

The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge.

I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.

Late Soviet regime produced so much farm hardware as if it wanted to outright lay siege to the field and storm it by having greater numbers.

Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines. Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would just rot.

I don't think you should label all that people incompetent. They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system sucked and people were just trapped in it.

I didn't take incompetent as an insult, but in its straightforward, descriptive sense: the people were not competent at the jobs they were assigned to (and, presumably, weren't given sufficient help in becoming competent)

I have to disagree. The tractor-builders were very competent in building 100,000 new tractors each year when operating on vastly insufficient resources with apathetic workforce; and making sure these tractors could leave the factory gates on their own. In short, they did fulfill their plan.

Would they be happier producing 10,000 tractors that would actually last, instead? Maybe. Would they be able to do that right away? No, but with some practice it could be done. Could they produce better tractors with the constraints that they had? I don't think so.

You will undoubtedly see the same pattern all over the corporate world.

Thanos’ ideas about everything were extremely silly. A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve better writing, even in comic book movies.

The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her enough to make her want to be with him.

It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.

That makes much more sense, I wish they had stuck with that.

I thought they would, considering they introduced the Goddess of Death in Thor: Ragnarok, but...NOPE. Cate Blanchett delightfully hamming it up as a supervillian only lasted one film.

Death is a separate character from Hela. So the possibility is still there.

They even teased it at the end of The Avengers: the Chitauri leader tells Thanos "to challenge [humans] is to court death", at which time Thanos grins eagerly. But with Earth-199999's Thanos dead, they're going to have to invoke some multiversal malarkey if they want to develop that storyline now.

Real life despots and fanatics are usually quite a bit crazier and less coherent than Thanos. As usual you have to tone it down to make it believable in fiction. A realistic depiction of a genocidal fanatic would be too stupid or insane to be believable.

See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples.

If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).

Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over more than a few people.

Thanos' line is more rational than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Reading _Wizard's First Rule_ right now. "Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc)." That's pretty much the premise of the book.

Like it best from the series. In a way, each whole volume of the series is to describe one sentence.

> A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction.

The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were also half of now back then (2). That’s nearly 30 years of runway that Thano’s solution would provide. With today’s technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do something better for climate change.

I’m not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with your assertion.

(1) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

Halving the emissions today would buy us only a couple of years until 2° warming becomes completely unpreventable.

This is simply not true.

And how would you go about halving the population? Who should die?

> Only 1 percent of all corn grown in this country is eaten by humans.

> The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol.

https://www.wired.com/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-busted-2/

It is digestible post processing like after nixtamalization to turn it into masa. No 2 corn is used in tortillas, snack foods and other processed corn products. That sentence is misleading, because yes straight off the cob you can't eat it.

https://agcrops.osu.edu/newsletter/corn-newsletter/2016-40/t...

All you have to do is dry and grind it to make cornmeal. It's quite digestible, and keeps very well, like wheat. (I've never tried eating it fresh like sweet corn, may have to add that to the bucket list.)

A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal. Nixtamalization corrects that[0].

Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You can make corn bread, but not tortillas.

Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

This also hints that our food production is more complex than you would first expect, in a true food crunch there are likely many substitute diet options which can be made by processing inedible agriculture products or repurposing fields.

To add to that I'm sure this country eat more tortillas than actual corn...

Sure but something else could be planted in its place or the acreage could go to conservation and absorb more carbon.

Could we use it as a diet food if it’s indigestible?

You aren't going to get thin eating corn chips. That combination of fat and high glycemic carbohydrate is one of the worst.

The corn in corn chips has undergone nixtamalization, which makes more of the nutrients available to humans.

As others have commented, no. 2 yellow field corn can be ground into cornmeal, and even without nixtamalization, it is certainly digestible by humans, it's just that nixtamalization makes important nutrients like niacin available.

Sorry, it has not.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_chip

Thanks for the clarification. FWIW I was interpreting "corn chip" to mean a tortilla chip, but yep, you're right.

I think it's the lack of nixtamalization that makes cornbread so nice and gritty and corn chips so nice and crunchy. Try Ottofile dent, if you can find it or grow it.

Dietary fat does not contribute to weight gain any more than any other macronutrient. This long lived myth needs to die. Similarly dietary cholesterol also likely does not contribute significantly to blood levels.

Fat combined with refined carbohydrates produces a strong insulin reaction, which directly results in fat deposition. This is not a myth. [0]

I agree with you in that fat, by itself, does not promote weight gain. It's the combination that does.

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About-ebook/dp/B003W...

Digestibility of corn post-processing aside, who eats the animals?

Maybe rising corn prices is all that's needed to help bring an end to ethanol in gasoline! (Except I don't want to starve people just to fix political problems, or, really, at all.)

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