Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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This article directly contradicts my understanding of some key points. For example, does the production of corn ethanol really increase food prices? I was under the impression that the US overproduces so much corn that the farmers were specifically getting tax credits to produce less of it.

Also, is growing and harvesting this corn (taking out the final burning of ethanol out of it for a moment) a net positive or negative in terms of carbon emissions? Is the fact that the corn is growing and absorbing carbon dioxide enough to offset the planting, fertilization, and harvesting? What about all that + conversion to ethanol + disposal of the conversion byproducts?

The real question is this: what is greater?

(a) CO2 emissions from planting, harvesting, transporting, converting, disposing of corn + CO2 emissions from burning the ethanol + CO2 and other emissions from having to recycle/downcycle/dispose of engines that die earlier because ethanol is bad for them.

or (b) CO2 emissions from drilling/fracking for oil, transport, refining, disposal of byproducts + CO2 emissions from burning gasoline.

If I accounted for all the factors, the questions of whether a > b or b > a should determine the policy.

There is of course a (c) CO2 emissions from mining and transporting coal/oil/natural gas to the power plant * loss factor for transporting the electricity + losses in charging systems + CO2 and other emissions from mining and processing lithium and manufacturing, transport, and recycling of lithium ion batteries.

> does the production of corn ethanol really increase food prices?

It might be hard to determine. But here's an anecdote, the price of short ribs has dramatically gone up. My wife is Korean, so short ribs (galbi) are a favorite dish. We used to be able to buy several pounds of ribs, a huge pile of them, for $20-30. They were so cheap, and there were so many of them, and the way they were packaged was in such large packages, that it would take us several meals to get through them. It used to be a regular thing for us to go get some ribs, grab a few friends and spend a lazy afternoon in the park cooking Korean bbq and we'd all go home stuffed. We used to even buy it when we were much less well off it was such a cheap and satisfying meal.

Only a decade later, $30-40 buys you enough for a couple people, if we eat a side of rice and other food with it.

As a result, galbi has turned into a rare treat, despite us being much better-off financially, it's so expensive compared other foods that it's just not worth it anymore. Even restaurants we frequent will have a menu of $10-12 meals and then galbi (1 person's service) will be something like $18-20.

My understanding is that over 90% of cows are fed mostly with corn feed, so if corn goes up, the price of cows go up.

We're also starting to see some minor kickback against HFCS. The story is that it's bad for health, but my personal theory is that companies are trying to rework supply chains around other sugar sources in the event corn subsidies disappear. "Mexican Coke" and "Throwback Pepsi" are regulars at my local stores. Sold at a slightly higher price than the HFCS varieties.

I haven't read this yet, but it appears to look at some of these relationships. http://www.card.iastate.edu/policy_briefs/display.aspx?id=11...

Beef prices have gone up a LOT in recent years, but ethanol-related corn price increases is only a part of the reason.

Slightly increased domestic demand due to economic recovery, as well as very large increases in foreign demand due to economic development, combined with the fact that supply was trimmed back during the recession, are also big parts of the equation.

I had read a couple years ago that drought was making feed prohibitively expensive, leading to a culling of stock which lowered prices temporarily, and now we are in for an extended run of higher priced beef.

E.g http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-21/peter-luge...

The supply was semi-decimated because of drought. The price rises are better correlated with drought than recovery.

Here's a chart of beef prices over the last 10 years:

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=beef&months...

From the perspective of global warming, all that matters is the net contribution of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels to the atmosphere.

The reason oil companies object to the Renewable Fuel Standard is that it results in lower net usage of oil. If it resulted in higher net oil usage, they wouldn't oppose it. So that answers your question.

No, that isn't all that matters. I outlined the other factors that matter in my original comment. Wouldn't you agree that fracking also contributes to global warming? Or that fermenting corn does? What matters is the net total. If all that mattered was CO2 from oil, it would be an easy problem: get rid of oil, use ethanol. Thing is CO2 is the same, whether it comes from oil, ethanol, coal burning power plants, or cow manure. What matters is the net emissions.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if for example we only used pure ethanol as fuel, carbon would still be emitted, but it would also be offset by the carbon absorbed by growing the next round of fuel crops. It seems like such a situation would be either carbon-neutral or close to it.

Especially if we develop (through GMOs or ordinary selective breeding) crops specifically for fuel purposes to make the whole process more efficient.

That's not correct. In a pure-ethanol economy, the total emissions will be CO2 from:

- Deforestation for the creation of corn fields. This includes the process of cutting down trees (gas powered machines, transport, etc.) and loss of trees that will no longer produce O2/absorb CO2

- Planting

- Fertilizers. This one is huge as creation of fertilizers is nasty business and fairly energy intensive.

- Harvesting

- Transport

- Fermentation

- Disposal of byproducts

- Transport again to the pump

- Combustion

- Other effects, such as having to manufacture more engines as they would wear out quicker and recycling of more worn out engines.

This would partially offset by the fact that the corn is absorbing CO2.

As I mentioned above (twice), fossil fuels have similarly complex sources of emissions (drilling/fracking, transport, refining, transport again, combustion).

The question to answer is this: if you sum up the totals for both methods, which is more efficient. I guarantee you, both still will produce net positive CO2 emissions. The only question is which will produce less net CO2 from all the sources.

Lastly, I should mention that theoretically, there is also a benefit of reducing other nasty emissions from fossil fuels such as sulfur. We could probably produce cleaner ethanol than gasoline. But none of that will matter if we spew so much CO2 into the air that we suffocate before we can measure these secondary pollutants properly.

I'm still kind of confused on this. In all the examples of energy expenditure, we assume that the energy comes from ethanol in the first place. The plants aren't magically creating more carbon, so if you grow the same amount as you burn, that carbon should be absorbed back.

That leaves deforestation for planting, which is a problem since human energy use isn't the only source of CO2. But if deforestation is avoided (this is where GMO crops would come in, grow more fuel in a given amount of space) or we implement other methods of CO2 sequestration (impractical now, but perhaps not in the future) we could still minimize that risk.

If we got rid of oil and used ethanol for everything, we would indeed solve global warming because we would be fixing as much carbon as we release every year.

Edit: Not totally solve of course because that doesn't do anything about coal and natural gas emissions.

There is no "oil company" that is purely interested in maintaining oil demand. It's all services except for the actual leaseholders. There may be consortia that are interested, but they are of limited ability to influence policy.

Post-2008, demand for oil has dropped without recovering, yet the cash flows of oil firms have remained strong ( it remains to be seen what comes of the big price drop ).

It's not quite as simple. Oil companies are interested in making money, not in your burning oil. If they could make more money with your burning less oil (eg by raising oil prices high enough without damaging demand too much), they'd go for it.

In this case, the conclusion might still hold. But the proper argument has one more step.

You're right but that's not the effect that the RFS has. Ethanol directly supplants oil, without affecting total supply or demand for liquid fuel, so it does not allow oil companies to raise their price per volume. Again: that's why they oppose it.

Actually, it's even worse: if people are forced to consume ethanol with their oil, and ethanol makes the combination a worse product, then demand for oil will drop further than the displacement alone.

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