[Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?

Tue Dec 13 16:07:11 CST 2011

Hello,

Just being off-topic again, sorry, but I just wanted to dig into the
interesting subject of government-subsidized economic liberalism (yes
nothing less than that) and submit a fun and enlightening paper about how
business climate is good in Texas (depending on what side of the fence you
are of course):
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rick-perry-the-best-little-whore-i
n-texas-20111026 

Pure liberalism: rules are the same for everyone, it's the Adam Smith
invisible hand, everyone for him/herself
State intervention: everyone will feel the hot breathe of the government on
his/her neck
False liberalism with truncated rules, what we have today: if you are strong
and you can pay for lobbies, government officials and legislation are on
your side, you get public contracts and even subsidies. At the same time you
also play in the market economy with the smaller fishes. A win-win
situation, for you only.

Cheers,

Xavier

-----Message d'origine-----

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:55:45 -0500
From: "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <crispinpigott at gmail.com>
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?
Message-ID: <0eb601ccb9a7$4c814900$e583db00$@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

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.

Regards

Crispin