Friday, February 08, 2008

Delicious Irony

Too funny. The biofuels craze causes global warming.

A new report headlined in the New York Times and breathleslly reported on the front page of The Funny Paper says that planting and harvesting corn for biofuels has a huge net positive carbon dioxide impact!

The Funny Paper headline was even more ironic: it said that biofuels were “not a bargain.” When I read that I thought: “Hey, maybe they finally figured out that biofuels are not cost efficient!” No such luck.

The Funny Paper doesn’t care if we waste tens of millions of dollars subsidizing alternative fuels that cost more to produce than the end product is worth. That wouldn’t be news.

But if it creates greenhouse gasses? Front page news.

Not that it would have been hard to figure out. One more time: if something costs more to produce, then that means it consumes more resources to produce it. Resources always boil down to energy, in one way or another. So the fact that biofuels have a net positive CO2 footprint is a pretty obvious and unsurprising result.

Unless you have no clue at all about economics. What a bunch of dopes.

5 comments:

--TIM said...

I had to comment here...

This made me laugh out loud.

While I want to be a responsible steward of our planet, I've been a skeptic of the "global warming" fear ever since the leftists started bemoaning it.

More importantly, it doesn't take a rocket-scientist (or a botanist for that matter) to figure out that biofuels aren't going to save us from either our energy crisis or our dependence on foreign oil.

Now we find out that they actually "CONTRIBUTES to global warming"!

I can hardly contain my smug sense of satisfaction.

Anonymous said...

Please don't forget as many have that fertilizer used in growing corn is often a product of fossil fuels.

Add that to the total tally and it gets even deeper in the red.

Anonymous said...

I'm shocked. The outcome is what the policy was meant to prevent?

Like $200 million for Cascade Station and airport to create a "ped/bike/transit mini-city" and prohibit BIG BOX strip malls,,,resulting in a BIG BOX cluster/strip mall.

Or like light rail making congestion worse which then pollutes more.

Or CIMCAM promised to bring about a world class education system only to result in a whole generation being weakened.

Of course there are many o0ther examples.

Anonymous said...

Classic example of government camels rushing to stick their nose under the tent.

Last session, I tried to get the democrat members of the so-called "hunger caucus" to kill this ridiculous biofules mandate. The stories about the devastation to the food supply, particularly among the world's poor, had already started to pour in.

Nobody bothered to even respond to my offer to come and talk to them about it.

The food supply issue has grown now. Corn prices have tripled, leading to a crisis in Mexico, where residents buy fresh corn tortillas in shops several times a week. These are people who cannot absorb that kind of cost, especially to pay for liberals to dance in front of the mirror and talk about how environmentally sensitive they are.

Think about what corn does for food: not just corn on the cob, but corn syrup, which is in nearly everything, corn syrup solids, animal feed, etc. Add to that the fact that people are rushing to replace other staple crops with corn, which reduces the supply and raises the price of everything, from fibers like cotton to food staples like hops (okay, just kidding on the last one, but it does raise the price).

Now we find out it was all for naught...that the biofuel boom actually has its own carbon footprint.

When cellulosic biofuels come on line, this will likely be a very good idea for Oregon, as you will be able to make fuel from any plant material (like forest slash).

In the meantime, biofuels are just a way to make liberals look responsible and once again pass the bill on to John (and Juan) Q. Citizen.

Anonymous said...

There is no need for bio-fuels, and as the above comment points out, it raises the cost of both grain and meat.

"Peak Oil" is a myth.

There is plenty of oil.

Right now there is 1.2 trillion barrels of oil in reserve and growing.

And to top it off, oil likely isn't even "fossil" fuel as commonly understood.

Look for oil companies to increasingly refer to unconventional oil.

Abiotic oil theory posits that rather than organic detritus "cooked" in sedimentary deposits, oil is a product of primordial chemical presence and action in the earth's mantel.

If true, and there's more scientific evidence to support abiotic theory, as opposed to "fossil" fuel theory (around since 1757), then oil is much more abundant than previously thought.

Possibly almost unlimited, but certainly not ready to "Peak" in the next 100 years.

Bio-fuels: One more tip of the hat to liberal "good intentions", that turn out to have damaging unintended consequences (food costs go up, and wasted energy).

"I didn't mean for it to work out this way, I, I...I swear."