Lincolnite

Bloods and Crips everywhere should be offended by these idiots calling themselves a gang.

If someone from another planet came here and saw that we were using food to make fuel for automobiles, they would immediately deem this planet uninhabitable due to insanity.

Ethanol’s impact on our food supply is negligible.

So far…

“President Bush’s proposal to increase America’s use of ethanol fuel to 35 billion gallons a year in less than a decade would send a shock wave through the nation’s food supply, industry analysts said Thursday.

“The days of the United States meat industry in its current state now appear to be numbered,” David Nelson, an agribusiness analyst for Credit Suisse Group, said in an e-mail to clients.

...

In his note to clients, Nelson said that if only a little more than one-third of the ethanol fuel in the president’s goal comes from corn, roughly half of the country’s corn crop would end up in gas tanks instead of the troughs that feed chickens, pigs and cattle or the tanks that brew corn sweetener.

In response to record corn prices, American farmers already are planting corn on land they normally would use for soybeans

I’m embarrassed by what this “gang of 10” has come up with. It’s the Seinfeld of energy bills: It’s about nothing. It stands to help B.O. at the polls, which I don’t care for.

However, it also protects the a$$e$ of all those in the House and Senate that are up for re-election, which I *really* don’t care for. We send them there to DO SOMETHING, not to play hurry-up-and-wait, or shell games that will just delay things past an election cycle.

Ethanol is not a viable, long-term solution. It’s done little to keep gas prices down, and it’s certainly led to higher prices in groceries, plastics, and other areas.

I say drill here, and drill now - but I don’t think that, alone, is a long-term solution, either. It’s important for our economy and security reasons, but even if we stumble on massive oil supplies in the US, we shouldn’t let that stop us from working on other forms of energy at the same time.

There needs to be a comprehensive plan, that helps the nation and helps its people, and not just something that helps the politicians get and maintain their power (I don’t care which party they hail from).  A combination of drilling, and wind, and cutting our consumption, and nuclear, and coal, and flying Jetsons-type cars (okay, maybe not that last one).

First, that analysis is more than a year and a half old.

Guess what? Soybean acres are up in 2008. Farmers will adjust planting decisions based on market opportunities.

We already nearly are at a third of the 35 billion gallons per year and it’s adding value to about 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop. Nowhere near the 50 percent the gloom-and-doom analyst predicts. Plus, he fails to mention that the mandate caps the renewable fuel from corn at 15 billion gallons. And the corn used for ethanol production isn’t removed from the food chain. High-value by-products feed livestock and actually reduce the amount of grain required to take them to market weight.

Improvements in plant genetics have corn yields increasing by about 2 bushels per acre per year. We’ll be OK on the production side.

The biggest threat to food and food prices is energy costs. A $1 increase in the price of fuel at the pump has three times the impact on food prices as a $1 increase in the per-bushel price of corn or soybeans.

Drilling won’t do anything for prices for several years, and even then the oil will go on the global market, not straight to our pumps.