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Comment by klysm | Hacker News Reader

Having 'negative' results like this published is so good though because then it's harder to scam people with this idea in the future.

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Why do we still use corn based ethanol?

I can't speak _specifically_ to ethanol, but there are good reasons for the US to provide various subsidies to farms. A visceral example -- if there is a large "world war III" and the US doesn't have a strong Agricultural sector, we could be screwed. It is worth keeping domestic agriculture strong, to hedge against the case where we can't buy produce from other countries. I suspect ethanol is a subset of this general approach. Worth noting I'm no expert, this is just my extremely layman understanding.

some more discussion on this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...

As far as i know, ethanol and all biofuels are/were a dead end. They were used purely for farmer subsidies and the energy independence was an excuse.

That doesn't sound right. If that were the case, why would people still be building biofuel factories, e.g. in Sweden?

In Sweden, I’m guessing it’s government backed greenwashing. This article (state sponsored site) strongly suggests biofuels have significantly reduced their carbon output:

https://smartcitysweden.com/focus-areas/mobility/biofuels/

But the numbers don’t add up. Instead, it looks like they’re simply burning less gas (biofuels or not):

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/sweden

Trust the government and their experts though.

Literally a report from government experts:

"It is important to note that biofuel production and consumption, in and of itself, will not reduce GHG or conventional pollutant emissions, lessen petroleum imports, or alleviate pressure on exhaustible resources."

Which makes it even more ridiculous that governments subsidize ethanol for fuel.

Its only ridiculous if you view it as a subsidy for ethanol fuel rather than a subsidy for the corn industry. All the government is doing there is creating a market where one wouldn't otherwise exist.

> Its only ridiculous if you view it as a subsidy for ethanol fuel

I.e., what the government claims it to be.

Hence my sarcastic comment about trusting the government and its "experts".

what is the source?

Googling the exact quote: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/economics-biofue...

That doesn’t necessarily mean you can trust government reports though. Take this Bush-era propaganda piece, for example:

https://www.energy.gov/articles/biofuels-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Because the Iowa caucus is the first Presidential primary and it gets old gas cars off the road quicker by gunking up their fuel systems, allowing manufacturers to sell newer vehicles.

I don’t think any gas engine built in the last twenty to thirty years has problems with 10% ethanol.

Agreed. How many any automobiles older than that are not already in need of new hoses and gaskets?

So what? It allowed them to increase sales over the last thirty years.

I mean the subsidies exist regardless of what the corn is used for and the rural folks are the most angry about ethanol in their fuel. I'm not sure this explanation lines up all the way.

Out in the country is the only place I can still find 100% gasoline.

It’s a lot harder to justify subsidies if the corn was just rotting in the field.

But mandating a certain percentage of ethanol ensures a minimum level of demand, preventing that problem.

The irony there is that most of the government subsidies and crop insurance programs come with stipulations related to how the crops are used. The last two years corn farmers in my area have had a hell if a time with drought. The corn ends up rotting in the field specifically because they can't claim insurance or get government assistance if they find another use for the corn, even if the other use only pays a fraction of what a full harvest would have yielded.

> rural folks are the most angry about ethanol in their fuel

I think there is some kind of presupposition here about how voting correlates to policy as enacted. What I would put forward instead is that regardless of how rural people vote, it's Big Ag lobbying and setting the agenda/policy.

https://pure-gas.org

Nobody is willing to upset farmers.

Nobody is willing to upset massive industrial farmers. Small farmers and homesteaders are regularly upset by the government.

If I want to sell you raw milk from a cow on my pasture it can only be for non-human consumption. If I want to sell you beef you either have to buy 1/4 or more of the animal before its processed or I have to load it onto a trailer and allow a state or USDA facility process it, leaving me with lovely packaged cuts that have a high level of stress hormones and was sprayed down with bleach.

I think this take is pretty funny because it's in instance where our elected officials are responding directly to the will of the votes that actually matter. Which is pretty refreshing compared to listening to the campaign donations that matter.

I want more of this kind of thing, not less. Politicians should be scared to piss lots of different voting blocs off. The way we do democracy is terrible at rewarding politicians for enacting (roughly) the will of the people.

Farmers are a tiny fraction of the voting population. Politicians are more concerned with farm lobbying money rather than the actual voters themselves.

Yes but they're a big voting population in swing states that actually decide elections which is why I say they're the votes that matter. It's why Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are getting pelted with political ads right now.

The votes that matter?

Or big agribusiness and their campaign donations?

I think this is off topic and I'm not the expert but it's a relatively reliable and established process that replaced lead in gasoline. I did some quick digging and didn't turn up any research of an alternative to ethanol for anti knock so perhaps this is why.

Ethanol free lead free gasoline works just fine. Some stations sell it. It just costs more because the ethanol is subsidized.

Cars don’t need ethanol. In fact they don’t like it. It causes problems for older cars, the auto industry had to adjust things to be able to survive a certain percent ethanol without damage.

Ethanol breaks down or degrades certain polymers (formerly) used in fuel systems. But in the actual engine, it's fine: it has lower energy content but a very high octane rating compared to other constituents of gasoline.

Yeah when the CORN-FREAKING-CRETE skyscraper crowd funding video comes out we can all be more skeptical than we were for SOLAR-FREAKING-ROADWAYS.

Sweet jesus was anything stupider than the solar roadways idea? "Let's take a technology that can easily be aggregated in appropriate, economies-of-scale implementations and _distribute them_ and require them to be extraordinarily more durable while running voltage through a surface that's being contacted by random people thousands of times a day, with the miles and miles of additional distributed infrastructure necessary to boot!"

My favorite part about the video was them talking about how much square footage roads take up and how that space could be used for solar panels, while showing footage of vast fields of open land right next to a road.

Given how often I still see people dunking on PV due to the land usage, I unironically think that's one of the better points.

Yes, I know there's plenty of better land, but comparing the scale needed to something we've already got likely helps change people's minds about the practicality of PV.

Loads of things are stupider in that sense and actually done.

They're a bad fit in practice on basically every count, but the idea was interesting enough to pass the elevator pitch sniff test. Ruggidised PV as footpaths might not even suck, though I suspect even then they'd be better as roofing over footpaths rather underfoot.

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