Biofuels..... and the number of people dying because of bio-fuels is? 5

Follow the link here to the article "Meals per gallon".

http://www.actionaid.org.uk/102268/biofuels_and_hunger.html

This is an article about how many people will die because of biofuels production and the new EU targets.

I have no idea how good their figures are but there is a tendency in the AGW camp to report half the situation and this may be the opther half or it may be tainted with the same tendency to inflate.

For example, the AGW they want to tell about how many extra deaths will be caused by hotter summers but not how many lives will be saved by warmer winters because warmer is bad for us they say (otherwise, who cares if we are warming up?).

So OK, we know about the higher cost of food but while we can afford it we neglect that many of those in poorer countries cannot. Worse, many are being displaced from their own land where they used to grow food crops by the big companies.
It says.
Where is the truth?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[cranky108]

I guess we can agree that goverment is part of the problem.

The solution to transportation must be inexpencive, and dosen't involve some smelly old wineo guy in the seat next to you (unless he's your dad).

I did see electric buses in San Fransisco, and was impressed at how much it must have cost to add all those wires. Probally won't work well everywhere.

 

[YoungTurk]

On government and subsidies:

The US and state governments subsidize ethanol production in the forms of industrial producer tax credits, reduced taxes on mixed fuel products and in some places mixing requirements. This creates a market for the ethanol which otherwise would not exist at the market price. As a taxpayer I see three benefits worth the cost, at least in the short term.

1)Development of ethanol infrastructure, which must exist in order to develop any potential next gen biofuel, which will be required for long term economic viability of biofuel.

2)Ethanol mixed gasoline burns cleaner, reducing some of the localized pollution in metro areas.

3)A significant demand for corn as an ethanol of feedstock will improve the market value of the crop and allow the government to slowly step away from the politically necessary corn growing subsidy, which leads nowhere and is welfare for corn farmers and feedlots.


Infrastructure development should be of interest to engineers because it is a question of technological innovation which not only can, but will happen if given enough motivation. There will be more and more tech jobs associated to this innovation. Better to get on with it now than continue spending money shoring up our fuel supply lines against inevitable interruption and economic fallout.

The number of people who die from biofuels is nowhere near the number who die from crude oil.

 

[moltenmetal]

The use of ethanol or biodiesel as oxygenates in fuels to make them burn cleaner is a different matter than promoting their use as fossil fuel substitutes. These materials produce far better environmental performance as blends than they do on their own.

I'm against the government subsidization of fuels or energy sources of any kind- even on a short-term basis for the reasons YoungTurk mentions. I'm against governments betting on technologies of any kind, because the resulting market distortions make investment in new projects really risky- who wants to sink money into a plant which makes a product which is economical ONLY while government subsidy persists?

Rather than subsidizing fuels, I'm entirely FOR making fossil energy sources pay the entire cost of their consumption, rather than giving them a free pass for the emissions they dump to the atmosphere. A carbon tax is one way to do that- the one I favour as being most difficult to defraud or avoid or manipulate. Put in place a steep carbon tax, and all kinds of alternatives INCLUDING the alternatives that do the most environmental good, i.e. those which eliminate or reduce CONSUMPTION in the first place, are favoured. The market will then allocate resources to reward the technologies which have the best REAL shot at doing that.

 

[KENAT]

"I did see electric buses in San Fransisco, and was impressed at how much it must have cost to add all those wires. Probally won't work well everywhere."

And the circle keeps turning...

Decades ago in the UK, many cities had things called 'Trolley Buses' which ran from overhead electrical lines. They were replaced by Diesals.

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[cranky108]

Many cities here had Trolley cars (which I supose is simular to Trolley buses), and in most places were replaced by buses, powered by diesels with rubber tires.

There trying to make a come back, but it just cost so much to add the cantary wires, let alone the rails. But also most cities have grown, so it's an even bigger chore.

On the other hand the cost of maintaining roads is so much.

But to be completly green, they need to bring back the hitchen post.

 

[KENAT]

If I recall correctly Trolley buses were not on rails, they had rubber tires. Obviously they could only drive where there were wires though, though some newer versions have partial work arounds apparantly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

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[cranky108]

Somewhere above there was a comment about generating less waste. Would it be better to say, finding better uses for resource materials.
It looks to me like calling something waste, is the first problem. If you can use it in some other process, then it is not waste.

As for generating new infrastructure, why not adapt new fuels or products to the existing infrastructure. Then you will have less waste from discarded infrastructure.

 

[KENAT]

OK, call it bi-product if you like.

However, whenever there's a need to additionally transport and/or process the bi-product, then in this kind of situation you're probably better off minimizing the amount of bi-product.

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[moltenmetal]

If you consider atmospheric emissions a waste or by-product requiring post-processing, then indeed you should be doing what you can to minimize the production of that by-product! That will ALWAYS be a waste. The problem is, with fuels being so cheap, and with ZERO cost being fed back to the consumer of the fuel for the emissions impacts we all must bear, there is no money to fund the capital you need to spend to reduce consumption. Price the emissions and suddenly there's market feedback- and things WILL start to change. Try to do that via consumption subsidy and all you do is encourage yet more consumption.

Cranky, we already have an alternative infrastructure in place for much of our transportation fuels use: it's the electrical grid.

 

[jmw]

Residuum is referred to by environmentalists as waste.
The fact that it is either blown for bitumens or diluted with distillates for fuel oils and not dumped on the ocean floor or buried in landfill sites doesn't change this perception.

The eco-warriors choose the most emotive words they can to describe it. "Ship's burning the dirtiest fuels and belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere." is a typical phrase.

The facts are never allowed to get in the way of a good piece of propaganda.




JMW

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[moltenmetal]

jmw, you forgot about delayed coking, whch is where a lot of it goes if I'm not mistaken. But compared to coal, resid-laden bunker oil is a relatively clean fuel!

Fortunately, the carbon content correlates very well with the environmental impact of a fossil fuel. A carbon tax will punish coal more than bunker, and that suits me fine. It will also reward processes which push this precious resource up the food chain to feedstocks and away from fuels.

 

[jmw]

Except that people like Senator Boxer, being spoon fed misinformation by the environmentalists groups, are actively trying to get solutions adopted that are actually counter productive.
For example, one approach is to replace heavy fuel oil with gas oil (MDO or MGO). Sure, some shipping companies are prepared to do this but the net effect is to increase CO2 emissions because of the added refining.
Another approach is a special bunker fuel tax, unilateral of course, the net effect of which would be to cause shipping to divert from US ports to Mexican and Canadian ports. Then the goods will, instead of using the inland waterways, be distributed by road and rail... increasing pollution.

Heavy fuel oil $450-$500 a ton? MGO $650 a ton? Since fuel is 80% or so of the operating costs, fuel price is a very sensitive factor. (coal is what, $80-90 a ton?)

JMW

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[BrunoPuntzJones]

I reently heard a suggestion for an alternative scheme for carbon taxation that seemed more elegant that the other plans I've read about.

The idea is to create a 'carbon mobilization' tax. That is to say, tax the companies that pull carbon from immobile reserves (such as coal, oil, NG). It is this transfer of carbon from immobile to mobile pools that results in a long term net carbon increase in the atmosphere. The carbon mobilizer would also have the options of buying credits from a carbon sequestration company, or they can sequester an amount of carbon equivalent to their mobilization.

This plan has the (political & administrative) benefit that you would only be (directly) taxing one industry, so oversight would be reasonable, and the political backlash might be less severe.

 

[moltenmetal]

Bruno, I think that's the only way it could work. Only fossil carbon itself would be taxed. So if the ethanol producers choose to fire their distillation reboilers using natural gas, they would pay the carbon tax on that fossil fuel use- and that cost shows up in the cost of the ethanol they sell.

Since the CARBON in the ethanol for sale is not fossil-derived, the ethanol itself would not be subject to the carbon tax- but the fossil carbon used in its production, all the way from the farmer's tractor to the diesel delivery truck- would be accounted for.

To make it simple, you'd need to tax the non-fuels uses of fossil fuels too, to capture the in-refinery fuels use that also ends up in the atmosphere. That's not really fair to the materials producers if you're solely after fuels use, so you'd have two choices: either make it more complex and fairer, or just assume that since most of the fossil fuels used for non-fuels uses end up in the atmosphere as CO2 eventually, they deserve taxation as well. I'm OK with either, actually, as either will help us to properly value this finite resource and hence waste less of it, whether that be as a fuel or as a frivolous use of fossil-derived material for packaging etc.

Set the tax to the right level AND get rid of the price (consumption) subsidy and all of a sudden you wouldn't need the likes of Pimentel to figure out whether or not ethanol is fossil carbon negative or positive by means of highly suspect and easy to manipulate calculations-all you'd need to know is the price. Since the price would in effect determine whether or not it was for sale AS a fuel, you'd be even better off than that!

 

[KENAT]

How do you tax companies outside of your country? Wouldn't this lead either to taxing local energy extractors out of existence in favor of foreign imports, or some kind of import tariff to keep things level, which most people seem to think are the devil.

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[moltenmetal]

You need not fear such a system actually being put in place, because it would need to be widely accepted across the world to be effective.

You could punish a few non-complying countries with energy tarrifs, but doing that to the products of the entire rest of the world would be impossible.

If we actually care about fossil carbon emissions to the atmosphere, it's still the right thing to do. Instead of being proactive, we'll react and pay whatever cost that entails- because we will then have no choice.

 

[cranky108]

The whole problem with any tax used to correct the value of something, is that with a little addition it can also be used to fund things not intended in the orignal design.

Example: The income tax was inacted to pay for the goverment, and was sold to be only 2 or 3 %. It soon became over 70%, to help pay for social engineering.

So what would happen if the energy tax also became a way to pay for goverment social engineering. Or to enact goverment giveaways for special interests, like say ethonol, or wind power, which probally would not survive in the large scale if left on there own.

So have a beer and think of what might happen to ethonol.

 

[moltenmetal]

The tax would deter consumption regardless what it was used for. It would deter consumption if it were used to help people and businesses AND government institutions (such as public housing developments) make capital investments in energy efficiency, or to build new infrastructure in an effort to get the fossil monkey off our backs- that's what it SHOULD be used for. It would also deter consumption if it were "wasted" on schools and hospitals. Likewise, it would deter consumption if the money were simply put in a pile and burned.

 

[jmw]

Trouble with taxes is that whether they do the job intended or not, they tend to stay and grow. Governments can always find new things to spend tax money on even if they don't spend it it where they earned it.

Carrots are good too, but rarely offered - except to cronies, maybe.

For governments any good excuse for taxation is welcome. It doesn't have to be true it doesn't have to fulfil the intended function, it just needs to generate revenue.

Some how the way the talk is going we are now debating the means to control CO2 emmissions. Worse, we seem to accept that taxation is a good way to go.
Worse still we are a step away from carbon trading and sequestration technologies.... we are about to make a very few people very very rich and we didn't yet finish deciding it was all a scam.

What happened to CO2 being good for us? And warm being better for us than cold? Did someone close out that argument, or more likely conclude that once the wheels have been set in motion we might as well choose whether we want to be hung, electrocuted, shot or poisoned, guilty or not?


JMW

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[YoungTurk]

I see the link between Biofuels and AGW, but let us not restart the marvelous AGW threads here and focus on the OP.

Do biofuels take food off the table? Are they worth it?