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The actual number is that 25 gallons of bioethanol destroys enough calories to keep one person barely alive for a year. A cow consumes enough calories to feed a family well for a year. When I talk about ethanol, I'm talking about the ethanol that is mixed with gasoline all over the country from 10% to 85% by volume.
Vegetable oil is produced by mashing the oils out of food. This process DOES NOT DESTROY FOOD, and has been done to produce fryer oils we have consumed our entire lives. If you have a bottle of olive oil, corn oil, soy oil, or products with a mixture of oil in them, you haven't contributed to the food shortage in any way. When you buy a package of tofu, the oil that was in the soybeans that made that tofu has already been extracted. It would be foolish beyond belief for a vegetable oil producer to throw away the mash after extracting oil. Why dump something that food companies are lining up to buy?
Biodiesel currently destroy a small amount of food. It takes a 10% mixture of ethanol to make biodiesel out of vegetable oil. Half of that alcohol can be recovered after the process is complete. This recovery process is becoming better as time goes on, because the high cost of alcohol, when mixed with nearly free used cooking oil, causes biodiesel to be more expensive than regular diesel.
Biodiesel is a bridge technology with the ability to prove to the masses that our cars can be fueled by a farm product without dramatically affecting food supplies. Biodiesel will soon be made entirely from non-food sources such as fish guts, beef carcasses and algae. This won't be done so much to reduce the affect on food as to increase profit. Making food into fuel simply isn't profitable. If you don't believe me, go see what a gallon of Wesson Oil costs. It's around $8 while biodiesel needs to be at or below $5 to convince anyone to use it.
A little over a hundred years ago, the main use for liquid fuel was lamps for light, and the main source of that fuel was whales. People didn't stop using whale oil because they felt bad for whales, they made the switch to petroleum oil because whale oil became very expensive. Many people sat in the dark or went to sleep early during that transition period, and we are having to make sacrifices as we learn to be independent from oil.
Biodiesel currently uses about 5% alcohol by volume to produce (after recovery). This does reduce the world's food supply. By buying biodiesel, however, we increase the profitability of US farmers, which enables them to improve their farms, increase productivity, and reduces the need for them to continue to send more than their share of sons and daughters to fight in wars to protect our oil supply. The reduction in carbon emissions is good for the global climate, which helps protect the lives of everyone on this fragile planet. The reduction in toxins also increases the quality of life for all.
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = a better life: One third of our energy consumption could be offset by taking public transit, another third by developing geothermal, wind and solar power, and the last third can come from using sustainable biofuels. Biodiesel isn't the complete answer to our energy dependence, but it is part of the bigger solution. We need to buy sustainably produced fuels, paper products, homes, cars, and clothes. We also need to buy things that last instead of things we know will end up in the trash.
We don't need to ask our government to save us. We can save ourselves by making careful choices.
Sources:
Biodiesel America (book by Josh Tickell)
King Corn (film available to watch online at Netflix.com)
The Story of Stuff (website)
Vegetable oil is produced by mashing the oils out of food. This process DOES NOT DESTROY FOOD, and has been done to produce fryer oils we have consumed our entire lives. If you have a bottle of olive oil, corn oil, soy oil, or products with a mixture of oil in them, you haven't contributed to the food shortage in any way. When you buy a package of tofu, the oil that was in the soybeans that made that tofu has already been extracted. It would be foolish beyond belief for a vegetable oil producer to throw away the mash after extracting oil. Why dump something that food companies are lining up to buy?
Biodiesel currently destroy a small amount of food. It takes a 10% mixture of ethanol to make biodiesel out of vegetable oil. Half of that alcohol can be recovered after the process is complete. This recovery process is becoming better as time goes on, because the high cost of alcohol, when mixed with nearly free used cooking oil, causes biodiesel to be more expensive than regular diesel.
Biodiesel is a bridge technology with the ability to prove to the masses that our cars can be fueled by a farm product without dramatically affecting food supplies. Biodiesel will soon be made entirely from non-food sources such as fish guts, beef carcasses and algae. This won't be done so much to reduce the affect on food as to increase profit. Making food into fuel simply isn't profitable. If you don't believe me, go see what a gallon of Wesson Oil costs. It's around $8 while biodiesel needs to be at or below $5 to convince anyone to use it.
A little over a hundred years ago, the main use for liquid fuel was lamps for light, and the main source of that fuel was whales. People didn't stop using whale oil because they felt bad for whales, they made the switch to petroleum oil because whale oil became very expensive. Many people sat in the dark or went to sleep early during that transition period, and we are having to make sacrifices as we learn to be independent from oil.
Biodiesel currently uses about 5% alcohol by volume to produce (after recovery). This does reduce the world's food supply. By buying biodiesel, however, we increase the profitability of US farmers, which enables them to improve their farms, increase productivity, and reduces the need for them to continue to send more than their share of sons and daughters to fight in wars to protect our oil supply. The reduction in carbon emissions is good for the global climate, which helps protect the lives of everyone on this fragile planet. The reduction in toxins also increases the quality of life for all.
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = a better life: One third of our energy consumption could be offset by taking public transit, another third by developing geothermal, wind and solar power, and the last third can come from using sustainable biofuels. Biodiesel isn't the complete answer to our energy dependence, but it is part of the bigger solution. We need to buy sustainably produced fuels, paper products, homes, cars, and clothes. We also need to buy things that last instead of things we know will end up in the trash.
We don't need to ask our government to save us. We can save ourselves by making careful choices.
Sources:
Biodiesel America (book by Josh Tickell)
King Corn (film available to watch online at Netflix.com)
The Story of Stuff (website)
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Re: Biodiesel and food
Fri, July 11, 2008 - 4:01 PM
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Re: Biodiesel and food
Fri, July 18, 2008 - 12:19 PM>> Biodiesel isn't the complete answer to our energy dependence, but it is part of the bigger solution.
The difference between Biodiesel, (or any other 1 technology) being part of the bigger solution and the "complete answer" all has to do with infrastructure. If the infrastructure is developed to create sufficient supply, (which could be possible with the introduction of enough algae bio-farms) I believe that enough oil could be produced to meet whatever worldwide demand would arise.
>> The reduction in carbon emissions is good for the global climate, which helps protect the lives of everyone on this fragile planet.
I know that most of the world population has come to believe (through repititious brainwashing) that CO2 drives global temperatures up.
And the graphs that Al Gore uses (and which are shown in An Inconvenient Truth) demonstrate how in the Earth's past, global temperatures share a link with CO2... but the problem is that it's reversed. CO2 rises a few hundred years (about 800 or so years) after the climate rises... because the oceans take a few hundred years to warm-up.. and when the oceans warm, they put out much larger amounts of CO2.
This has been proven beyond a doubt by the science community that is most concerned with climate change. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have been shown to be dishonest and are being sued by many of the scientists whose names they will not remove from their list of contributors.
The whole Global Warming industry is so huge and powerful that it's become blasphemous to challenge them. They have demonized anyone who would disagree with their theories.
The sad fact is that if a scientist wants funding (grant/research moneys) they HAVE TO tack on "Global Climate Change" or "Global Warming research" to their grant applications if they want money. Otherwise, they don't get priority and aren't given funding.
I still believe we are harming the planet by drilling, raping, pillaging and consuming its resources, polluting our oceans, clearcutting forests... destroying indigenous cultures etc... but let's not be the Boy Who Cried Wolf and destroy the credibility of the environmental movement by being as closed-minded as the consumerist culture we're trying to transform.
We must have integrity in our movement and accountability... otherwise, we will be ignored and categorized as ignorant, idealists who choose to disregard scientific data.
Watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" for more info on the wrongdoings of the IPCC, the Climate-Change industry etc...
I disagree with the premise of the documentary, because it debunks Global Warming while making the case that we shouldn't worry about harming the planet. Just goes to show how the Crying Wolf effect ripples out and causes the pendulum to swing opposite. People are so spookable... like a flock of birds. We need to be careful what scares we create and how that weakens our cause.
