Word: ethanol
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...such as China and India, where millions of increasingly prosperous people are eating more; short-term supply shocks thanks to unusually cold weather and pest infestation in Vietnam, the world's second largest supplier of rice; and the diversion of a huge chunk of America's corn crop to ethanol production, which has boosted demand for other staples, including rice...
While Michael Grunwald's article on the emerging ethanol industry was both chilling and truthful, it's damaging to demonize the global effort to develop clean fuels as "myth," "scam" and "hype" [April 7]. It is no myth that thousands of scientists and their teams are working feverishly to create biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and biobutanol from nonfood plants grown on land unsuitable for food production. We could not have landed on the moon without first launching at Kitty Hawk. We're getting better at this every day. Mark Beyer, DETROIT...
...without a fight, and the deeply ingrained subsidy programs will require a struggle to dismantle. Farming has a particularly strong valence in our national consciousness. The image of the courageous yeoman farmer, rising at dawn to milk the cows seems as American as apple pie or corn-based ethanol. As Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust, told the Wall Street Journal, farmers are perceived as “hard working, salt of the earth, a core part of our culture.” Perhaps this sentiment, combined with the political clout of farming states like Iowa...
...years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits...
...overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers...