CORYDON, Iowa — The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
The secret, dirty cost of Obama’s green power push | New York Post
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Liberals apparently don’t understand the concept of unintended consequences or opportunity cost or feedback mechanisms.
Estimated 600,000 bats killed by wind turbines in 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57611768/about-600000-bats-killed-by-wind-turbines-in-2012-study-shows/
Actually seems to be a big topic in bioscience these days.
http://www.bioone.org/action/doSearch?searchText=bats+wind
Reblogged this on Power To The People and commented:
Greens Kill They say they are for the environment but are okay with slaughtering eagles & bats with the blades of Wind Turbines and destroying land for crops and Virgin Tropical Rain Forest to crops for biofuel.
Offtopic: Anyone watching the ‘PBS Newshour’? Jeff Masters and Keven Trenberth are pushing the Typhoon was massive due to CO2 meme.
Just watched that segment. Thanks.
So, strong storms will become stronger because of CAGW. Have any of these clowns ever stated exactly how much stronger? 1%? 2%? 1 mph? 2 mph? Obviously, they don’t want to be pinned down on anything specific … they just want to leave the impression that typhoons/hurricanes are scary and it’s because of evil C02.
Let’s not forget what is going on Brazil to make sugar cane based ethanol or in Indonesia for palm oil plantations to make biodiesel for the Europeans. In Africa, farmers are being forced off land they farmed for generations to allow re-growth of forests that have values as carbon sequestration. The list of un-intended consequences is quite long and not very distinguished.
100% of the acres used for corn ethanol would still be used for feed even if the corn starch wasn’t used for ethanol. Ethanol production supplies distillers grains and this feed would need to be replaced, most likely by the marginally less effective energy and protein source of soybean, while losing the opportunity to produce a value-added fuel additive to mix with cheap low-octane heavy gasoline.
That being said the current command economy is a scam, and 100% of the ethanol can be produced and utilized on the farms without mandates or fake subsidies which are actually tax breaks from the massive excise tax bonds levied on the distillation industry (go on, Google ethanol + ttb) which are just strings attached to the carrot.
“100% of the acres used for corn ethanol would still be used for feed even if the corn starch wasn’t used for ethanol”
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Not true in Calif. I do not know about the rest of the US, but it is not true in the rest of the world either..
David A, my logic is straightforward. The corn ethanol process and disposition of products is the same no matter the location.
If an acre of corn is used to produce ethanol, only the starch is consumed. The remainder is distributed as a high protein, low carbohydrate animal feed. Now if that acre of corn is not used to produce ethanol neither is the animal feed produced. In order to replace the demand for the calories, protein and nutrients of the distillers grain a specific crop would need to be grown, namely soybeans which is low in carbohydrates.
That crop would obviously be grown on some acre somewhere. The obvious acre to use would be the ethanol corn acre which is now unused.
All that is gained is that no starch is produced that would need to be separated and disposed of. 1/3 of the mass of corn is distiller’s grains. Not using that acre of corn for ethanol would not triple the amount of corn, nor even triple the amount of distillers grains. The increased mass would only be from starch, which at the margin is of less value than protein ie it would displace protein in the diet, hence why high-protein (read, low-starch) feed sources like soybeans are grown.
Think of soybean as a feed source that naturally has it’s excess starch already removed. The 2.5-3.0 yield per acre difference (approx 50 vs 150 bpa) is largely due to the absence of starch and when considered holistically is actually beneficial in the lack of a market for excess carbohydrates. Now that there is a market for excess carbohydrates corn can be used for both a local source of octane-boosting fuel additive (2/3 mass) as well as an value-added processed feed source (1/3 mass) which is actually a higher quality replacement for soybean meal at the margin due to the complementary amino acids (when combined with soybean protein), higher by-pass protein (80 vs 20%) and added fat.
Well, that’s just how I see it.