So, remember way, way back when you were just a kid and you were sitting there at the dinner table fiddling with your food, stirring it around and trying your best to have your mother just give up and release you to go outside and play? It never worked, did it? No, she would hound you into cleaning up your plate because "there are kids starving in China."
I never did subscribe to the rationality that me somehow eating everything on my plate would fill the belly of a starving child in another country. I always thought that by throwing my leftovers in the garbage, the kid would at least have a stab at retrieving it, if he happened to make a quick trip over here and cruise on up and rifle through the dump a while.
Nonetheless, I'm sure we've all lived through a similar scenario.
Well, fast forward to oh, say, right about now. You're an adult - at least physically - and have a different mindset about wasting food. It just isn't a good idea. Why? It ain't cheap. A quick trip to the grocery store can snag a C-note out of the wallet wid a quickness.
What with our old friend Economy - as in inflation/recession - well, no matter what president you blame it on, something is usually skyrocketing or something is in the toilet. Either way, people get financially hurt because of it, which does nothing but cut into businesses profits, forcing cutbacks, which cost people jobs, which causes slowdowns in spending, which cut into businesses profits, .... rinse repeat.
But, and here is the original point I was trying to make, people in [insert third-world country] are still hungry. Even if it ain't "some poor kid in China", there are people all over the world still starving.
But instead of the world growing more food to help solve this hunger, the trend seems to be to grow all sorts of plants - including food plants, to make ethanol.
The latest craze is to hoard and overprice rice. Rice fer hell's sake! There is no shortage, there is (and this may sound like a very 70's fuel shortage) an artificially created shortage by dumb-asses though.
So we have rising fuel prices which of course cause rising prices of well, everything including food, and we have rising prices of food because of food being used for something besides food. I don't fucking get it. Double whammy caused by greed maybe?
The United States has fuel reserves enough right here to be self sufficient for hundreds of years. There are hundreds if not thousands of drill sites that have been drilled, proven productive, then capped. There are thousands of tons of coal. There are thousands of cubic meters of untapped natural gas. But no, we import almost all our petroleum products, and grow food to convert to 'green' fuels because that seems to be the trend of the decade. Remember how all goofy and 'Earth First' the country went back in the seventies? How we were going to run out of oil? How everyone started making economy cars? How gas prices doubled overnight? Sound familiar?
This doesn't need to happen again but it is. We have the oil. Now we do need alternate forms of energy - and bio-fuels could very well be one - but it can't and won't be a light switch that is suddenly flipped. There are mass consequences to jumping on this bandwagon and I think we're right in the middle of witnessing the beginning of some of them.
How do we fix it though? To start with, we should all take a few minutes and choke the fuck out of a greenie or three for causing enough 'do good' shit to where we now have so much undue regulation we haven't even built a refinery in 25 gawd-damn years. . We can't process the oil we have here because what refineries we do have are overloaded
Next, maybe nuke a raghead country or two, for not only being dumb shits, but for continuing the agreements stupid fucking politicians made with OPEC back in the day forcing us to import our oil instead of using what we already have.
I won't even bother with politicians. You would run out of bullets before you ran out of idiots.
I dunno. It just doesn't make sense to me.
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8 comments:
Ethanol is the biggest sham in the history of America if you want my two cents (and if you didn't, to fucking bad)...
Something with 85% of the efficiency of a gallon of gas, that costs MORE than a gallon of gas, and that consumes food supplies. Then people get crazy and start ripping out cereal grains and hops (see where the beer man is going) to plant corn and now WE are facing a barley and hop shortage... The environmentalists that got us into this one are going to end up getting publicly hanged when the public runs out of beer.
As a homebrewer, I know all about the stupidly rising prices of grains and hops. I can imagine how you must feel about it.
And to add on: If we took every bushel of corn now produced in the US we would be able to supply barely 50% of the fuel needs of this country in ethanol. So we would have only have half the fuel we need and none of the grain. Sounds like a fucking genius plan to me.
No doubt.
And I'll add: Ethanol is at least 20% less efficient that gasoline. So your mileage goes down.
Of course. So it will still cost more to drive your car.
And ADM, the nation's largest producer of ethanol gets $.51 of TAXPAYER dollars for every gallon produced. That equates to about 2 B a year...
talk about a scam!
Nice.
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