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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Compared to the alternative, though? The corn will be grown either way.

It's not hard to see 100 bushel per acre swings in corn yield between growing years even within normal growing parameters, never mind times of crop catastrophes. While everyone hopes for a good year every year, you can't plan for a good year. As such, there will always be times where there is way more corn than we can handle.

Which is what happened in 2006. A lot of corn, having busted the bins and having no home, was left out to rot. Ethanol subsidies were introduced in 2007 to build out more ethanol plants to provide a greater buffer in excess times when the regular corn market can't absorb it all so that we aren't both burning gasoline and letting the corn rot away to nothing.

I don't recall ethanol ever being considered better for the climate in a vacuum. It was only ever thought to be when you take reality into account.

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>The corn will be grown either way.

Citation needed

That was not a quote. No citation is possible. Is there a reason for this bad faith participation?

It doesn't seem to be bad faith. They are asking for your evidence for the claim that corn will be grown anyway. I agree that corn will continue to be grown anyway, but at this point it's nothing but our opinions without supporting evidence.

They asked for a citation, not evidence. A citation that cannot be provided as there was no quote in which to cite.

Furthermore, good faith participation seeks to provide equal value to the participants. "Citation needed" offers nothing to other parties.

Apparently, according to another comment, "Citation needed" is some kind of Wikipedia slang, but a website that attempts to document knowledge is very different to a casual conversation and to try and conflate them, again, can only be done so in bad faith.

Saying "the corn will be grown anyway" is not done in good faith. The corn is grown because it is profitable to do so. Remove subsidies and the corn will not be grown - something else that is profitable will be grown.

Of course it is profitable to do so. There is a large market for it, from animal feed, to sugar, to tortillas, to many things in between.

The trouble is that it's unpredictable how big the crop will be before planting. As mentioned before, yields can vary quite significantly from year to year. As such, you will have periods of excess where we don't have enough storage for it all. Ethanol was promoted as a way to clean up those excesses before they turn to waste, recapturing some of fuel that was put into its growth initially.

When ~45% of US corn is used for ethanol production[1], I'd say we can stop considering that "periods of excess" and call it what it really is: grift.

[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...

On the other hand, US soybean acres have grown by essentially the same amount over the same period (63.78M in 1983, 87.45M in 2022). It is well understood that soybeans and corn are kept in the same rotation for a lot of practical and ecological reasons, so how are you establishing that it isn't excess as a byproduct of producing other crops? None of this happens in a vacuum.

> That was not a quote. No citation is possible

(The expression is not to be read literally. 'Citation needed', widespread after Wikipedia, rhetorically points to that idea in a generalized intention including "foundation needed". I.e.: "You need grounds to write that".)

I am not the poster you are replying to but calling that post “bad faith participation” surprised me. Stopping ethanol production will lower demand for corn so it is conceivable that this would reduce the marginal value in producing corn and cause some amount of corn production to become worth less than the alternatives (like planting different crops or less intense farming of corn field, etc.)

To me at least, not being an agricultural economist, the statement that the corn would be grown anyway wasn’t obvious on the surface; I too would have liked to have seen some further justification for the claim.

See, your comment comes in good faith. You clearly put thought into and offer something that allows continuation of the conversation.

"Citation needed" is a purposeful attempt to dead end a conversation. It fundamentally cannot be replied to in a reasonable way. What would even be cited? There was no quote in which to cite. Maybe if I scour Google hard enough I'll find someone else saying the same thing and then I can pretend that I quoted it instead of using my own words, but what would that gain?

The ethanol situation is an interesting topic that is worthy of continued discussion, I agree. It's unfortunate that the bad actor steered discussion away from it. Oh well.

When your turn corn into ethanol there is a byproduct "distiller grains" that is fed to animals. This is feed we would have to grow in some form anyway.

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