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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Ethanol a net energy loss

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tom Chapin" <tjc@mvp.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Ethanol a net energy loss
  • Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 08:05:26 -0500

>Anyway, who cares about Pimentel and ADM? It's just irrelevant
>to a real soil farmer.

I do, and you'd better. The two sides on this are talking totally at
cross purposes.

Pimental is dealing with how agrifactories actually work in the real
world, supported by our lobbyist-sponsored laws and political subsidies.
Corn and soy are grown using heavy machinery requiring enormous amounts
of petroleum to manufacture and run, heavy use of fertilizers
manufactured from natural gas, and pesticides and herbicides from
petroleum, petroleum-using irrigation (depletingthe Oglala aquifer),
then transported by petroleum thousands of miles away to processing
plants built with petroleum where petroleum will be used to ferment and
then distill the stuff into ethanol.

This process will take much more energy from petroleum to create the
ethanol than the ethanol will ever be able to give back, a severe net
loss in EROEI. This is the process my Senator (Jim Talent from
Missouri...along with Barak Obama from Illinois) will be further
subsidizing with your tax dollars if his E85 bill (providing gasoline
that is 85% ethanol instead of the current 10-15%) gets passed. There
is nothing in this technology that has changed in the last 40 years and
so absolutely no reason why Pimentel should change his methodologies.

The Journeytoforever folks are speaking of homegrown ethanol from crops
grown sustainably. Which may have a positive EROEI because much of the
energy may (repeat "may") be coming from sunlight today rather than from
the distilled sunlight of millions of years ago. But utopians and
cornucopians tend to let hope obscure their visions, and I will believe
they have given up all the subsidies coming from cheap oil when oil goes
up to $300 a barrel and all the hidden subsidies are exposed. I would
have thought that would take 25 years but now I think it may only take
five...

But meanwhile, Senator Talent will be doing everything he can to ensure
that Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and his other campaign
contributors will have wealth piled on wealth from selling a hundred
million Americans ethanol made from corn and soy made out of petroleum
to fuel their SUVs, and he will be doing everything in his power to make
sure that your sustainable crops and ethanol distilled from them will
never see the inside of an engine. And Pimentel's calculations will be
the ones that apply and not yours.

Unless you start caring about Pimentel and ADM...

Its not about physics, its about politics overtrumping physics...at
least until the roof caves in, and then it may be too late. Real soil
farmers can lose their land to taxes and bankers and have them given
over to factory farmers. Real soil farmers can be sued into extinction
when Monsanto detects patented genes in your crops from the wind
spreading GM pollen onto your fields.

So maybe you'd better start caring. Because politics is relevant to
your survival as a "real soil farmer".

Tom






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