Backyard Wildlife Takes a Hit

I just got back from Birdwatcher's Supply where I buy my birdseed for all my backyard critters. Bad news for the wildlife I'm afraid. A 50 pound bag of oil sunflower has now risen to $48.00. That is more than double what it was a year ago and is going to cause a serious crimp in the backyard feeding. I can go through a bag in a month. Some serious cutback is in order. As much as I enjoy all my feathered and furry friends I can't afford to keep this up at the current level so it is going to be two small squirrel proof feeders.
Evidently the rise in corn prices and the follow on rise in corn oil prices has a lot of the big corn oil users like Frito-Lay and other switching to sunflower oil and driving up those prices. Bush and company's big hand out to ADM and the other ethanol producers is not only going to drive human food prices out the roof but everything else as well. This for a program that will not produce any net reduction in our carbon footprint or dependence on oil but actually make matters worse for the bulk of the planet. Good going guys!

Global Food Crisis Gets Worse

As I have mentioned here before and even as recently as yesterday the cost of food has skyrocketed in the last year. There are a variety of reasons including crop failures related to drought and such but the biggest cause is diverting food to biofuels (more profit to be had) and the increasing cost of fuel. The insane war in Iraq has added dramatically to the cost of oil.

Now we have the World Food Programme, for the first time in its history, asking for money.

Faced with the dramatically spiralling costs of wheat, rice and corn, the World Food Programme has made an unprecedented appeal for at least $500m (£250m) to help it continue supplying food aid to 73 million needy people this year.

[snip]

The WFP estimates that food prices rose by 55 per cent between June and the end of February, meaning it needed an extra $500m on top of the $2.9bn it had already budgeted for. However, prices have risen a further 20 per cent in the past three weeks, meaning the organisation's emergency shortfall could, in reality, be closer to $700m.

[snip]

Rice last week jumped to a three-decade high, experiencing the same sort of spike that has already affected wheat, corn and soybeans. The price of these staple foods has been driven skywards by increased demand for food from the newly prospering parts of south and east Asia, damage to crops by natural disasters, and by the growing demand for biofuels. "It's a global phenomenon which is hitting the most vulnerable populations hard," Ms Sheeran said.

In Bangladesh, those on a dollar a day are dropping the protein element of their diet because they can only afford the basic staple rice. "And even those earning $2 a day are forced into coping strategies which could lead to a malnutrition crisis," Ms Sheeran said. "They are giving up health or educational needs to get a basic food budget."

It is the people eking out an existence on 50 cents per day that are suffering most, however, like people in some parts of El Salvador who have been forced to halve their nutritional intake. "We now have a situation where there's a lot of food on the shelves but people cannot afford it," Ms Sheeran said.

We, in the more prosperous countries, don't think about it on a daily basis but, as an example, a substantial percentage of the population across southern Africa eats mealy-meal, which is cooked corn meal. Sometimes they may get a few lentils or beans and on a rare occasion some meat to mix in but this is what they eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner if, in fact, they can even afford three meals a day. Just small increases in the cost of corn hit these people hard. Over a billion people in the world today eek out an existence on a dollar or less per day. This is another subject that needs to be on the agenda when we are talking about what the next American administration is going to be.
Let's not even discuss the trillions of dollars being wasted in Iraq... only a fraction of which could solve this problem globally and permanently.

No Refuge in Alcohol

The news about ethanol keeps getting worse. The plans by Shrub and company to double the U.S. production of ethanol needs to be scrapped in the worst way. The world markets for grain are being horribly distorted by the shift of corn from food to fuel. The people least able to afford it are being hurt the worst. If ethanol were really the answer it might be a little different but study after study(not to mention common sense) shows that the net is that ethanol is worse for the environment than fossil fuels.

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. plans to replace 15 percent of gasoline consumption with crop-based fuels including ethanol are already leading to some unintended consequences as food prices and fertilizer costs increase.

About 33 percent of U.S. corn will be used for fuel during the next decade, up from 11 percent in 2002, the Agriculture Department estimates. Corn rose 20 percent to a record on the Chicago Board of Trade since Dec. 19, the day President George W. Bush signed a law requiring a fivefold jump in renewable fuels by 2022.

Increased demand for the grain helped boost food prices by 4.9 percent last year, the most since 1990, and will reduce global inventories of corn to the lowest in 24 years, government data show. While advocates say ethanol is cleaner than gasoline, a Princeton University study this month said it causes more environmental harm than fossil fuels.

``We are mandating and subsidizing something that is distorting the marketplace,'' said Cal Dooley, a former U.S. congressman from California, who represents companies including Kraft Foods Inc. and General Mills Inc. as president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association in Washington. ``There are no excess commodities, and prices are rising.''

Bad for the economy, bad for consumers, bad for the planet — what’s not to love?

Well, Shrub signed the pathetic energy bill today and is taking credit for making sweeping changes in environmental policy. Not too sweeping actually. You see the Chinese passed mileage standards for their vehicles four years ago that are more aggressive than our new "sweeping" ones and they apply to individual vehicles not fleet averages like ours. Did I mention that theirs go up to 38 mpg next year. The automakers are very happy with our delayed requirements and Big Oil is really tickled especially since we didn't remove their 13 billion in tax breaks either. Oh yeah, Big Oil and Big Coal, and Big Chemical won this energy bill big time.

Let's review what happened with the energy bill:

1. The House and Senate each voted through energy bills. The Senate's had a CAFE boost and a Renewable Fuel Standard; the House's had a Renewable Energy Standard and a tax package to take subsidies from oil companies and give them to renewable energy.
2. Nancy Pelosi battled for months with John Dingell, finally securing his support for a CAFE increase.
3. The House then passed a bill that had all the provisions in it -- CAFE, RFS, RES, and tax package.
4. The White House threatened a veto. Republican Senators whined.
5. Reid put the bill up for a vote; it failed.
6. Reid stripped out the RES but not he tax package and put it up for another vote -- it failed 59-41 to overcome a filibuster threat.
7. Reid stripped out the tax package and passed the bill more or less the way the Senate originally passed it: CAFE an RFS.

The White House's sole involvement in this process was to threaten Nancy Pelosi, vowing to veto any bill that didn't do exactly what Shrub's idiot "20 in 10" plan does, and no more. Republicans in Congress, as they have for seven long years now, went along lockstep with his wishes. The American people and the world loses another. We will have to wait until TEOB (The End of Bush) before we have a chance at any meaningful energy package. Once more the worst President in history has made his mark and it sucks.

Daily Bread

First it was corn prices moving up because of the demand caused by ethanol and some shortages due to weather. Now it looks like wheat is the next victim. For a lot of us a few pennies here and there on the cost of a "Twinkie" or a bagel is no big deal but for people already pinched by gas prices and other food prices going up this is going to hurt.

Wheat futures hit a record of $8.87 a bushel in Chicago trading last week before retreating to $8.75 on Monday. Still, that's a huge jump from $3.95 a year ago.

Oh, and never mind that Global Warming thing Bush.

Delusional Bulllshit, Exactly!

Time for a bit on the environment and Global Warming. There is an excellent and somewhat strong article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone called "Ethanol Scam."

Here's a taste of what Goodell has to say about the ethanol hype:

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

We really need to pay attention to the hype around this whole ethanol thing. Big agribusiness and other corporate carnivores are taking the nation to the cleaners with it. We will be very sorry if this whole scam doesn't get squashed for con game it really is. This is a very good source of ammo for those wishing to throw some water on the fire around ethanol.

They've Gone Too Far

I mentioned the other day the negative impact on milk prices driven by the increasing production of ethanol and the resulting demand for corn. The USDA just yesterday raised the wholesale price of milk again. The fact that milk prices are going up maybe didn’t hit close enough to home for some you.

How would you feel if you knew that not only is milk for the morning cereal going up as a result of the increased demand for corn but the price of beer and tequila as well. That’s right party animals according to the Financial Times the strong demand for biofuel feed stocks such as corn, soybeans, and oilseed rape (canola) is encouraging farmers to plant these crops instead of barley, driving up its price. What’s the number one ingredient in beer? You got it…Barley.

Futures prices for European malting barley have risen 85 percent to more than €230 ($320) a ton since last May. Barley and hops account for about 7 percent to 8 percent of the cost of brewing beer. Meanwhile, barley production here in the U.S. fell to 180 million bushels in 2006, the lowest level since 1936. Less land is being used for growing barley only about 2.95 million acres in 2006 where dedicated to barley which is the lowest since records began in 1866.

The rise in barley prices has also been driven by the drought in Australian which reduced the crop by two-thirds. Couple that with the heavy rains in Europe last summer which also reduced the quality and yield of the harvest there. Overall, global production of barley was down 10 percent from 2005. In the U.S., land that was cultivated for growing barley has been given over to corn because of the ethanol demand, said Levin Flake, a grains trade analyst at the U.S. department of agriculture.

The U.S., which in the 1980s was a leading exporter of barley, is now a net importer as barley acreage has shrunk from more than 13m acres in 1985 to 4m this year.

That’s only the barley and beer side of the party equation. About a quarter of Mexican farmers who now grow agave, which is used in the production of tequila, are expected to burn their fields to make way for corn, as prices have nearly doubled from what they were a year ago, due to US ethanol demand. Mexico expects to grow and additional 2.5 million tons of corn this year to take advantage of the 80 percent increase in the price of corn. It is not good news for everyone in Mexico though. Earlier this year corn tortilla prices doubled in some parts of the country, fueling protests and concerns for the 50 million poor Mexicans who depend on tortillas for the majority of their daily caloric intake.

So there you have it. Our leaders have decided that it makes more sense to give Archer-Daniels Midland windfall profits using your taxes while burdening you with higher prices for the necessities of life. The next time you have to dig deeper for your Doritos, beer and tequila supply you’ll know who to thank.

Marginal News on Energy

Well the Senate has at least done something this week in passing the revised CAFE standard. It boost the mileage requirement for cars and light trucks(including SUV's) to 35MPG by 2020. I guess we are going to have to live with this for a while but it is the first increase in nearly 20 years. Seems a little then though when we know that there are vehicles on the road right now that get over 50 and as much as 100 mpg. I guess you take what you can get and wait for the next election.

The bad news is, because of a GOP filibuster threat the 30 billion dollar tax increase on Big Oil didn't pass. This increase in taxes would have paid for research into renewable sources of energy. Leave it to the Rethugs to bow down before their masters and refuse to tax these highly profitable companies.

The really bad news is that the new energy bill includes incentives for Big Agriculture and the ethanol producers to increase production of ethanol to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. This is a sevenfold increase. This is a huge mistake and a big giveaway to companies like ADM who make a boatload of money from ethanol and then turn around and take the tax breaks. All this is going to come out of our pockets in continued high taxes in increasing prices for foods such as chicken, beef and milk which are heavily dependent on corn for their production. Don't even think about the increasing cost and availability of corn on the third world. Estimates are that an additional 25 million people globally have been pushed over the starvation line by the increased cost of corn already. Multiply by seven.

The tragedy in this is that producing ethanol from corn is a net energy loser. Corn requires more nitrogen fertilizer that any other crop and nitrogen fertilizer is produced from oil. Add together all the costs of production and the oil used in producing the fertilizer for the corn and you end up in the red. The only winners in this are the big industrial corn growers and the processors like ADM.

The house is fudging with their version and of course we still have to get numbnuts to sign the compromise bill. To early to chill the champagne.

Corn and Ethanol

Don't know if you noticed the news this morning that milk has reached a new high in price. These new high prices we are seeing for milk and meat are directly related to the higher prices for corn being driven by the ethanol production. What many people don't know about corn derived ethanol is that it is significantly more wasteful of energy that gasoline. The energy required to produce the corn, mostly in the form of nitrogen fertilizers, is much higher that the energy returned in the form of auto fuel.

Not only are you paying higher prices for food because of the use of corn for fuel but you are paying also for the subsidized production of the ethanol by way of your federal taxes. The only way corn based ethanol can be priced competitively at the pump with gasoline is by pumping massive amounts of federal dollars at the refiners. This is just a windfall for big agriculture and the refiners and really stupid environmental policy.

If you want to read more there is an excellent article over at the Gristmill in rebuttal to Dick Morris' article in support of corn base fuels. Well worth a read if you interested in environmental issues.