Re: Interesting Though On Biofuel


"Mich" <comat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"John" <amdinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mich wrote:

"Kirk Gordon" <kg1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mich wrote:
In an article Fidel Castro pointed out that diverting agricultural
resources away from food will have some serious repercussions on
world
food supplies. Obviously, there are so many people who are having
trouble
even affording food that any change in the market can have very
serious
effects.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6505881.stm


Just out of curiosity, when did Fidel Castro become a good source
of
realistic predictions about the state of the world? One of the
reasons
that food costs as much as it does is because of the energy costs of
growing it, transporting it, packaging it, refregerating it, and
more.
If
fuel costs were to go down, food prices would go with them.

Someone who's spent nearly five decades living in his own isolated
little non-economy, and who's had no reason to pay attention to how
markets and resources actually work, might imagine that food and
bio-fuel
could come to compete with one another for scarce real estate. But
that
doesn't mean he's right.

First, there isn't going to be any significant amount of bio-fuel,
ever. We'll play with it, and governments will waste trillions of
dollars
on it, and a tiny percentage of fuel users will embrace temporarily,
and
for all the wrong reasons. But none of that will make any difference
at
all in the overall way that fuel supplies work.

The reason is that, with current crops and technology, there isn't
enough acreage on the whole planet to produce fuel at the same rate
we
currently use it, even if we quit making food altoghether, and switch
exclusively to farming for fuels.

Fossil fuels work because they were able to accumulate for
millions
and
millions of years before we started using them. We simply aren't
able,
by
any current (or forseeable near-future) means, to produce what we
consume
in real time.

Plants are just collectors of solar energy - and not terribly
efficient
collectors, actually. So they won't supply what we use, any more
than
solar panels will. And solar panels won't - at least not if we build
them
on the surface of the Earth. Consider too that most farming of all
kinds
is done in places that don't get huge amounts of intense sunlight to
start
with. Good farmland includes clouds and rainfall. So until we
invent
an
enormously efficient kind of plant that can grow in the deserts,
bio-fuel
will never contribute even a tiny percentage of total global fuel
needs.
I'd be surprised if it ever fuels even tiny farming villages that are
designed for it.

Bio-fuel is foolshness, promoted by those who are totally ignorant
of
what energy really is, or by those who hope to make money off of
others'
ignorance.

My "tortilla plan" makes more sense than Castro does.

Biofuel is successful in places like Bresil. In the US it is failing
because
of the government who is using it as an excuse to divert more money to
farmers.

Big Farmers..... ADM... Cosgill.....

The small farmer doesn't see much of the money.


How is the money handed out? Is it based on the size of the farm?


http://zfacts.com/p/60.html

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