[Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?

Tue Dec 13 10:05:42 CST 2011

Ahhhh......the sounds of capitalism, republicanism, and the smell of sewage........I do understand why many of the communications I get from people are so full of venom. I just wish people in other lands knew of my hatred for this tyrannical bunch of unadulterated assholes. It is why I think I wish to find a way out of this country. Even Donald Trump publicly has called our Government "stupid people" and "idiots" 
Anyone got an idea where a guy might find a new neighborhood to live in where this shit doesn't happen?

Roger

From: crispinpigott at gmail.com
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:55:45 -0500
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?

Dear Otto and Roger >How can it be possible to think of useing food stuff as fuel in Automobiles, when millions of people are starving and struggeling for food? Any oil from a plant is 'vegetable oil'. Not all vegetable oil is food. Some of the oil is edible, some not.  >To turn vegoil into bio-diesel on top of that, sounds crazy to me. It certainly is not an economically viable thing to do unless the price of oil is very high. It seems the oil producing states and companies would like it to be high to make more money. >I Norway we utillize the vegoil for cooking and some restaurants and Take Aways, reuse the waste turned into biofuel, but thats a total different story. Why is it different? Do you mean people should not grow crops which could be eaten then use it for making fuel? Many years ago (perhaps 35) American farmers studied how to use their own crops to make fuel to run their own farming operations. That was sunflower-based biodiesel used in unmodified or slightly modified tractors. The land was available in many cases. The conclusion was that it takes 15% of a farm to grow the fuel crops needed to run that farm, based on a tractor-driven system such as we use today. Farmers would not need to buy diesel fuel any more, they could just grow their own. This thought scares the heck out of oil companies because it opens up the possibility that they will lose sales and income from distribution (trucks, pipelines, pumps and retailers).  There is also the possibility that farmers will get clever and start exporting fuel off the farm into trucks and cars, threatening Big Energy. Can't have that, you know. >I still cant belive that some people on this planet, can use foodstuff to move their vehicle from one point to another. It somehow some kind of lack of common sense and no respect for other people struggle for livlyhood and progress in life. It is necessary to look closely at who is hungry and why. It certainly is not because of a lack of food in the world. Enormous amounts of food are eaten each day but an almost equal amount is thrown away. In Africa 50% of all food grown is destroyed by pests.  People are in general not hungry because there is not enough food, but because they have inadequate access to food. That is a very different thing. Some of the poorest people are those living in cities where there is wealth and a great deal of food but they can’t afford it. That is an indication that the problem is not entirely or even mostly one of food being used for making fuels. Something like 40% of the maize grown in the US goes into ethanol but that is subsidised and is not viable on a massive scale. Basically it is a vote-getting trick. A lot of noise is made about the recent rise in the price of food, and people not being able to afford it, and certain political groups have said it is because of the big move in the USA to turn corn (maize) into ethanol, a fuel that has no net return on energy. (The discussion about the energy equations of ethanol can be taken up another time.) There are two important things to know about the rise in food prices since 2008 which led to food shortages in people’s homes, particular in urban centres. (1) The price rise did not affect all food/grain types which should raise suspicions and (2) The cause was not diverting maize into ethanol production or other crops into biofuels. Grain prices rose dramatically in a short time and people who were against using maize (which is a biofuel itself, like trees) for making starch-based ethanol opportunistically claimed that this switch was 'turning food into fuel'. I say 'opportunistically' because it was not the action which caused the spike in maize prices or a few other crops (but not all crops which should give you a big hint that something else was going on). The big change was that private sector money (George Soros and Goldman Sachs and you and me) was allowed for the first time to speculate on food futures. This has never been allowed before. Sales were restricted to those directly involved in producing or processing and distributing raw grains. Since 2008 all sorts of people have been able to get into the food chain to hog the market, to demand in collusion with others either by agreement or a wink, to speculate in the same way people speculate with land and diamonds. The result has been that those crops which were opened to speculation, and only those, have risen dramatically in price, a price which fluctuates a lot now because governments are trying to limit the impact of such useless greed on our food chain. No wonder the first people who are killed in revolutions are the speculators who are keeping the food supplies off the street in the hope of making even more money from desperate, hungry people. But that is not the present situation, even if it is one that will prevail in the near future. At the moment 'investors' are speculating that food will be in short supply. Liquid biofuels might be a way to create the shortage but I doubt it. It will require wholesale market fiddling and monopolies and cartels like is done in the oil and cement industries. The maize growing capacity of the US and Canada is enormous. Each government tries to maintain a balance between production and demand as a security measure. They need to keep farmers in business either growing something they may have already have too much of, or something they can export or turn into fuel. You have heard of farmers being paid for not growing anything on a portion of their land (USA) or being paid more than the crop is worth (Europe) or food being sold internationally at a price below the cost of production (USA and Europe and probably Brazil and Argentina). When food is ‘dumped’ below cost, it puts out of business the farmers in the dumped-on countries because local people can buy the food at a price below the cost of producing it locally. “Free trade” agreements prevent the dumped-on countries protecting their farmers.  This is a huge problem in Africa which has become dependent on food imports, not because there is no food available locally, but because it is not worth putting a plough into the local ground. Urban populations have become dependent on the subsidised price.   There are those who speculate that this is a conscious act by those countries wishing to destroy the food production capacity of other states. I partly agree. It is also partly short-sightedness and nationalism. There is something very wrong in the global economic system which is why the ‘occupy’ movement grew so rapidly.  Consider: One of the largest companies in the US (Halliburton) paid 308 million in taxes in 1998 and got 85 million in rebates (no tax) in 1999 while receiving 2.3 billion in government contracts and 1.5 billion in subsidies, while also moving 44 of their subsidiary companies to off-shore tax havens (1995-1999). That is how they already behaved 12 years ago. Imagine how things will go when such attitudes start speculating in the food and fuel markets. Roger you will no doubt enjoy reading http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/Pigs_at_Trough.html because it details how one of these corporate welfare recipients took over the White House. If a rural African can grow a little sunflower around the edges of their fields as a wind break and turn it into cooking oil and cooking fuel, they should do it. At the moment the products and processes necessary to do that are not available to them. RegardsCrispin 
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