Great ethanol warning

[Hammermechanicman]

Back when the government mandated ethanol gas huge amounts of corn exports was diverted from Mexico to ethanol production. Caused a massive food shortage for a couple years.

 

[Tbone0106]

Back when the government mandated ethanol gas huge amounts of corn exports was diverted from Mexico to ethanol production. Caused a massive food shortage for a couple years.

I remember that. The commodity price of corn futures nearly tripled too, causing farmers to shift cropland into corn and away from things like soybeans and wheat, and that shift drove up the prices of those crops at the same time. So the folks in Mexico are hungry, and everybody in the US gets the pleasure of higher prices on just about everything they eat. Oh yeah, we also take a hit on our fuel mileage.

It has only been the new employment or re-employment of marginal, once-fallow land for corn production that has allowed the commodity prices to stabilize.

There's really no need to wonder where you can find a really, truly bad idea when you need one.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Corn is a product that organic engineers absolutely love as it is a wonderful concentrated package of carbs & protein that can be economically converted into almost organic molecule that they want to from ethanol to synthetic meat to plastic .
As we start to appreciate the real cost of throw away oil derrived plastics we will be using more & more corn based plastics that are marginally more bio-degradable but less UV stable
There was a speaker some time ago I hear who claimed 40% of everything that went into the mouths of US citizens was actually corn and soy accounted for another 20%
I did ask if that was a dry weight because water by volume used to be about 50% of all food but I never got an answer

 

[sgkent]

during studying my family history back to the 1500's I found that nothing has changed in how markets worked between then and now. The people investing don't care who loses in the process. They look for new ways to sell their products, cheaper ways to produce them, people with money in their pockets or assets to borrow on to buy the products, politicians who will pass laws to help them with their game plan, other people whose money and lands they can use, and militaries who will enforce their interests. That was the game plan then and it is the game plan now. Ethanol is no different. The whole climate change thing causing this is a scam because nothing can be done to stop it until the third world stops having babies in masse, and exporting them to the west. When my late father was born there were less than 2 billion people in the world, When I was born it had grown to 2.5 billion people. Today it is 8 billion. That is a 4x increase in just one generation. Basically it was stable between 1.6 billion and 1.8 billion people during the time of my grandfather (bn 1891) and father (bn 1920) then rose a small amount by the time we were born, then we started feeding the world, and poof climate change took off. Their solution - force us to make allowances for the failures of others.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Well we can do a lot to lessen our foot print on the planet and save the finite resources
World population growth rate is actually slowing and if you remember , China has a 1 chid policy that every "developed " country decried as being "unhuman" .
Korea has a negative population growth , Japan is just about neutral and will be negative by the end of the decade
The US population growth is declining as is the life expectancy ( only western country where that is happening )
However do you know that he US government has withdrawn development aid to every third world country that has as active contraception policy ( obviously you lot still need slaves ) .
I never use the term global warming because the USA has turned it into an ideological debate so people minds instantly close but when you say atmospheric pollution then most agree that it needs to be reduced
And the other thing to remember that Africa for instance contributes around 1% of the total atmospheric pollution while having 11% of the worlds population
So 1 american is responsible for he same atmospheric pollution as 18,000 Africans ( Ozzies are worse as 1 Ozzie = 42,000 Africans )

And yes laws are made to protect the assets of the wealthy and prevent those without assets getting any .

 

[Tbone0106]

Well we can do a lot to lessen our foot print on the planet and save the finite resources
World population growth rate is actually slowing and if you remember , China has a 1 chid policy that every "developed " country decried as being "unhuman" .
Korea has a negative population growth , Japan is just about neutral and will be negative by the end of the decade
The US population growth is declining as is the life expectancy ( only western country where that is happening )
However do you know that he US government has withdrawn development aid to every third world country that has as active contraception policy ( obviously you lot still need slaves ) .
I never use the term global warming because the USA has turned it into an ideological debate so people minds instantly close but when you say atmospheric pollution then most agree that it needs to be reduced
And the other thing to remember that Africa for instance contributes around 1% of the total atmospheric pollution while having 11% of the worlds population
So 1 american is responsible for he same atmospheric pollution as 18,000 Africans ( Ozzies are worse as 1 Ozzie = 42,000 Africans )

And yes laws are made to protect the assets of the wealthy and prevent those without assets getting any .

Not sure where you're getting your numbers.....

China, despite its unenforceable one-child policy, has positive population growth. So does South Korea; nobody knows about North Korea, because they don't share that sort of information. Japan slipped into population decline years ago.

US population growth would be negative except for immigration - mostly illegal. This (along with Covid) is also driving the decline in life expectancy.

 

[sgkent]

Not sure where you're getting your numbers.....

China, despite its unenforceable one-child policy, has positive population growth. So does South Korea; nobody knows about North Korea, because they don't share that sort of information. Japan slipped into population decline years ago.

US population growth would be negative except for immigration - mostly illegal. This (along with Covid) is also driving the decline in life expectancy.

these stats are my understanding too. I read that China went so far backwards under the one child rule that they removed it several years ago. Looking at pictures of their army, and their numbers, they don't seem to have any issues fulfilling recruiting needs under what was the 1 child rule. It ended at the end of 2015.

 

[bertsmobile1]

I get numbers from SCIENTIFIC organizations or people like the various UN organizations not shock jocks on Face Book with a strong political agenda .
The birth rate ( not the actual population right now ) is what is important and it is 2 ( static ) or less than 2 ( declining ) for a lot of countries
China right now is 1.3 , Korea is 0.8 Japan is 1.5 as is Canada the US is 1.6
So while the actual population is increasing in a lot of these countries, the rate of increase is slowing down and eventually the death rate will outnumber the birth rate and the population will start going backwards as is happening is Japan & Korea right now. In Japan it is quite marked as their population is substantially older than Korea
China's population will take a lot longer to decline because their population is quite young and the death rate is dropping .
China had to go down the One Child path because the movement of people from villages where they would be looked after by the village till they died to the new cities where they will be looked after by the state would have cost the country more than it was making .
If those who moved to the cities to work in factories had to provide for their retirement then the wages would have needed to be a lot higher so the exchange rate would need to be almost zero to give China the international competative rate on manufacturing to encourage greedy Western countries to shift their manufacturing to China to the detriment of their own population as the USA, Germany, Australia have all done where out economies are dominated by multi nationals who have no patriotic ethics, just the thirst for finding the biggest profit margin for the least capital outlay .

Note these numbers exclude migration.
Without the economic activity generated by migrants then Australia would have been in a recession for the past 10 years .
And I would imagine the USA would be even worse as your debt to GDP ratio is off the charts

There is a joke in academic circles about US "research"
European research is driven by universities that are mostly state funded so they get figures then postulate theories to account for the numbers
US universities postulate theories for the benefit of their sponsors then find numbers to prove it ( smoking & cancer is the perfect example of this )

 

[GrumpyCat]

I have a 30 year old two stroke chain saw that I never drain the fuel in. It may go unused for several years. Never had a fuel issue and always starts right up. Does the oil in the fuel help alleviate the ethanol issues? I don’t have easy access to ethanol free fuel but have been lucky I guess.

Many premix oils had trouble with ethanol in the early days. Didn't like staying mixed, had to shake it up. Guessing modern premix has learned how not to separate in the presence of ethanol.

Your 30 year old saw is likely to have vinyl and gasket materials which do not tolerate ethanol. Sometimes E0 is $1.00/gallon more than E10 but how many gallons do you use? Delightfully Buc-ee's is only 15 miles away and has 87AKI E0 for only $0.30/gallon more than E10.

The big problem with ethanol is that water dissolves in to solution then is carried in to the engine where both water and ethanol get to work on your carburetor guts. Water rolls off pure gasoline, you can decant the water out of the tank. There is no additive which can neutralize ethanol, most I have seen are more of exactly the same sort of thing as ethanol. They deal with the water problem by increasing the amount of water the fuel can carry... which is the problem in the first place.

 

[Tbone0106]

I get numbers from SCIENTIFIC organizations or people like the various UN organizations not shock jocks on Face Book with a strong political agenda .
The birth rate ( not the actual population right now ) is what is important and it is 2 ( static ) or less than 2 ( declining ) for a lot of countries
China right now is 1.3 , Korea is 0.8 Japan is 1.5 as is Canada the US is 1.6
So while the actual population is increasing in a lot of these countries, the rate of increase is slowing down and eventually the death rate will outnumber the birth rate and the population will start going backwards as is happening is Japan & Korea right now. In Japan it is quite marked as their population is substantially older than Korea
China's population will take a lot longer to decline because their population is quite young and the death rate is dropping .
China had to go down the One Child path because the movement of people from villages where they would be looked after by the village till they died to the new cities where they will be looked after by the state would have cost the country more than it was making .
If those who moved to the cities to work in factories had to provide for their retirement then the wages would have needed to be a lot higher so the exchange rate would need to be almost zero to give China the international competative rate on manufacturing to encourage greedy Western countries to shift their manufacturing to China to the detriment of their own population as the USA, Germany, Australia have all done where out economies are dominated by multi nationals who have no patriotic ethics, just the thirst for finding the biggest profit margin for the least capital outlay .

Note these numbers exclude migration.
Without the economic activity generated by migrants then Australia would have been in a recession for the past 10 years .
And I would imagine the USA would be even worse as your debt to GDP ratio is off the charts

There is a joke in academic circles about US "research"
European research is driven by universities that are mostly state funded so they get figures then postulate theories to account for the numbers
US universities postulate theories for the benefit of their sponsors then find numbers to prove it ( smoking & cancer is the perfect example of this )

Oh boy! If you think the UN doesn't have a 'strong political agenda,' I have a nice shiny bridge I'd like to sell you, along with some oceanfront property in Oklahoma. I got my numbers from WorldData.info and several other sources. I'm not a big fan of Fakebook.

In your earlier post, you didn't even mention birth rates. You referred to "population growth," "population growth rate," and "negative population growth." Yet, as all the examples you cite show, a birth rate lower than 2.0 does not necessarily equate to "negative population growth." In the case of the US, thanks mostly to insane immigration policies adopted over the last 35 years, the rate of population growth has actually accelerated, despite a declining birth rate.