Re: What is work? (was Re: Writing courses)


"Joann Zimmerman" <jzimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1efa4805495967eb98975f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <12910ldsmehff2b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, pwrede6492@xxxxxxx
says...

It'll probably be easier to adapt plants -- they're already making
biodiesel
from soybeans, and I've heard tell of cars and trucks converted to run on
cooking oil recycled from the fryers at places like McDonalds. And
that's
without any specialization of crops at all. Of course, if we start
getting
energy-fuel from the same land and crops that are currently used for
food,
it will do interesting things to grocery prices...

You were thinking of corn subsidies?

No, I was thinking of the effect on availability and prices if farmers can
make $X/bushel selling crops for food, or $X*10 selling the same stuff for
fuel. But subsidies would probably come into it somewhere. Possibly from
both ends; right now, there are already subsidies for both farms and oil.
Somebody really enterprising could probably figure out a way to collect both
*and* benefit from $70/barrel crude-oil prices, for a while, anyway.

I'd also get interested in weather effects and monoculture. All of a
sudden one particular crop is absolutely essential to the ecomony's
functioning in a way that there wasn't before. Don't know how you manage
droughts, tornadoes, permanent hurricanes and insurance with all that.

Large swaths of the Midwest are essentially monoculture already; I don't
think this will have a whole lot of impact.

I can see all the vast fields of waving corn going to the cars, while
cornbread muffins get a bit more expensive. But nothing serious would
likely happen to heirloom tomatoes, kiwi fruit, and lettuces. More free-
range beef, etc., because all the corn that went into the feedlots would
likely be diverted to the fuel pumps.

I think you're underestimating the amount of corn and corn products that go
into everything these days. Corn syrup is a commonly used sweetner in just
about everything from Coke to cookies, for instance. And whether or not it
affects heirloom tomatoes and so on depends a lot on whether the land
they're growing on is suitable for corn or not, which much of it is. There
isn't enough land to raise as free-range the amount of beef people eat now,
if you take the corn and feedlots offline, so those prices rise, too. And
that's *without* assuming any varieties of fuel-plants bred or genetically
adapted to use fertile land in climates where corn and soybeans currently
don't do well.

You also have the production-useage effect -- the fact that farmers have to
use fuel in their tractors to produce the plants that produce more fuel --
but I think that's overplayed. It's obviously possible to make this work;
farmers used to have to raise feed for their horses to pull the plow to
raise the plants, which is the same sort of cycle but on a different level.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

Loading