Vilsack First to Officially Announce his 08 Bid...

[Jake Plane]

For those of you not lucky enough to be in Mt. Pleasant Iowa, you can tune into C-SPAN to watch his announcement speech.

In a nutshell description:

Vilsack
Former Governor of Iowa (also Mayor and State Senator)
Centrist Democrat
Gripping personal story (born in an orphanage, raised by an alcoholic mother, raised himself up by his bootstraps, adopted a son)
Balanced Budgets in Iowa
Resisted Calls to Raise Taxes
Strongly Pro-Choice
Central Policy of Candidacy Will Be Energy Policy
Personality Factor - Better than Gore, not as Good as Carter

Speech finally starting

[MarchHare]

Video of Tom Vilsack congratulating Canada on switching to the 24 hour day:

http://home.comcast.net/~wwwstephen2/iowa.mpg

[Charles]

Oh yeah, Rick Mercer, DESTROYER OF POLITICAL CAREERS.

Awesome.

[Guido Jones]

Video of Tom Vilsack congratulating Canada on switching to the 24 hour day:

http://home.comcast.net/~wwwstephen2/iowa.mpg

I love that this is the first response to the thread.

[Squirrel Killer]

Gripping personal story (born in an orphanage, raised by an alcoholic mother, raised himself up by his bootstraps, adopted a son)
Just to add to that a bit, he was elected mayor of Mt Pleasant after a disgruntled citizen shot and killed the previous mayor at a city council meeting. I thought that there was further connection there (specifically, I thought Vilsack was a councilman at the time), but none of his offical bios online mention anything. Regardless, his entry into politics carries a strong message in and of itself.

[Houngan]

Stance on gun control?

H.

[Phil_Stein]

Central Policy of Candidacy Will Be Energy Policy
Hmm... an Iowa politician big on energy policy. Let me make a wild guess that his energy policy leans heavily on ethanol from Iowa corn?

[Stroker Ace]

Is iowa corn any better for us than texas oil?

[steve]

Is iowa corn any better for us than texas oil?
If we switched to Ethanol as our primary fuel, what impact would it have on the planet's food supply?

I'm not being confrontational or anything; I'm curious if anyone knows of any studies that have looked at the impact. For example, I've seen that if we stopped using genetically altered food, we'd probably lose a third of the earth's population to starvation.

[Glenn]

Look, he's clearly competent and well-positioned on the issues, but his last name sounds like "ballsack", and besides, that Obama is just dreamy.

[Stroker Ace]

Barack Hussein Osama, amirite?

[Johan O]

Hmm... an Iowa politician big on energy policy. Let me make a wild guess that his energy policy leans heavily on ethanol from Iowa corn?
-Vilsack, I have heard that mother shares your enthusiasm for the fuel ethanol inititaive, is this correct?

[John Many Jars]

I vonder if he vilsack the oilmen who currently determine energy policy?

In a recent NYer there's an article about how sugarcane makes better ethanol than corn, but the corn lobby has blocked all suggestions of promoting sugarcane use.

[Phil_Stein]

If we switched to Ethanol as our primary fuel, what impact would it have on the planet's food supply?
Right now, the world has the capability for substantially more food production than needed to keep everyone alive.

Basically, you can look at food production as calories produced/person (where person is a citizen of the earth, not necessarily a farmer).

Calories per person have gone way up over the last few decades (probably centuries), hence the epidemic of obesity in wealthier nations.

Moreover, the 'quality' of those calories has gone way up too, in that people can now economically choose foods they prefer (fresh fruit, beef, cheese), but that cost a lot more to produce (per calorie) than the crops our ancestors relied more on (wheat/bread, potatoes, rice, cabbage, etc).

Keep in mind that the increase in calories and quality per person has occurred even as population has gone way up, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

Finally, in some countries (notably the U.S.), that excess production has occurred even as the amount of land used for agriculture has decreased. I'm too lazy to Google up the data, but I think I've read that before, and certainly you can find a lot of marginal land (generally hilly/rocky/poor soil) that once was used for agriculture or at least grazing, that is no longer actively cultivated. I believe the trend is strongest in New England, where there is a lot more forest than there was a couple hundred years ago, as marginal land has returned to wilderness.

So, devoting incrementally more land to corn/ethanol production wouldn't hurt much (to a point), as we basically have a surplus that seems to be growing steadily wider. If the earth's population, say, tripled in a relatively short time frame, we'd probably see people consuming less calories, lower quality calories, and bringing more land under harvest. But I don't think we're currently teetering on the brink, or anywhere near it.

Disclaimer - I'm no expert on these things - just regurgitating stuff I'm pretty sure I remember reading, and tidbits I've picked up being near/around rural areas over the years.

[LesJarvis]

If we switched to Ethanol as our primary fuel, what impact would it have on the planet's food supply?

Pretty much zero, at least according to what I've heard, and Missouri is a big corn producer, so it gets a lot of talk around these parts. I also used to produce a radio talk show, and we interviewed a lot of people on the topic.

The corn used to make ethanol is basically the crap corn that wouldn't be eaten by humans anyway, so in theory at least, using ethanol doesn't effect food productions. Globally it might be a different picture, though, so I guess it depends on what you mean by "we." Also, this information comes from people with a vested interest in the success of ethanol as a fuel source, so it should probably be taken with a grain of salt at the very least.

There are other reasons to think that ethanol is not the wave of the future, though. For instance, using current technology, ethanol is not very efficient to produce, i.e you use almost as much energy producing the ethanol as the ethanol itself provides.

[Phil_Stein]

The corn used to make ethanol is basically the crap corn that wouldn't be eaten by humans anyway, so in theory at least, using ethanol doesn't effect food productions.

It's not about the corn that's used, but rather, the land that's used. Presumably, if ethanol disappeared tomorrow, farmers would plant other crops. At the margin, this would increase food supply a bit, and probably decrease prices.

But as I said above, we're basically in a huge surplus situation anyways (at least relative to where we were in our parent's and grandparent's generations), so devoting at least some land to corn for ethanol isn't that big a deal.

[Nellie]

There are other reasons to think that ethanol is not the wave of the future, though. For instance, using current technology, ethanol is not very efficient to produce, i.e you use almost as much energy producing the ethanol as the ethanol itself provides.

You could perhaps argue thought that by converting it locally to ethanol rather than subsidising it at source and then shipping it halfway around the world you could substantially eat into the current energy usage, assuming final shipping is taken into the equation of course. But it is my understanding that current agricultural production whether for food or bio-fuel still requires huge quantities of Oil products at every step of the chain. And from a surplus perspective we're kind of back to the subsidy argument where a lot of what should be arable land, especially in the third world is basically ignored because it's cheaper to buy italian canned tomatoes or American corn than grow it yourself.

I can't find the study to link to, but I think they bandied around a figure of 30% as the amount of Oil you save by filling a car with Bio Fuel rather than Petrol/Diesel. I suppose that's a pretty decent saving to start with, but it's a long way from becoming the fuel of the future.

[shift6]

If we switched to Ethanol as our primary fuel, what impact would it have on the planet's food supply?

I'm not being confrontational or anything; I'm curious if anyone knows of any studies that have looked at the impact. For example, I've seen that if we stopped using genetically altered food, we'd probably lose a third of the earth's population to starvation.
Corn ethanol is a red herring, a placebo, and a farce. I refer you and the other posters in this thread to many detailed posts on the hippie commie liberal energy blog: http://ergosphere.blogspot.com

[Nick Walter]

Corn ethanol is a red herring, a placebo, and a farce. I refer you and the other posters in this thread to many detailed posts on the hippie commie liberal energy blog: http://ergosphere.blogspot.com

Nonsense. It's a developing technology and a renewable resource. Right now it nets very little energy once the fuel used to grow the corn is subtracted out, granted, but there are solid reasons to think that things will get better in the future.

Right now the ethanol industry is nascent and fast growing, which means there are quite likely economies of scale yet to be realized and are still some low hanging fruit in terms of improvements in techniques for ethanol generation.

No offense shifty, but that page you linked reads just like the all the prognositications that we'll be out of oil in five years. Those same prognostications I've been seeing every couple years since the 70s.

[DeepT]

Ethanol isn't really the fuel of the future, aka one day the world will be using Ethanol like they use oil today.

It is disputed as to weather producing Ethanol costs more then using refined gas when you consider the full cost of planting and growing the fuel crop.

Ethanol fuel is cleaner then gas fuel, but still produces a lot of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. However, it also contains less energy then gasoline so you need to burn more of it to get the same power.

Higher energy crops, such as sugarcane are better for Ethanol production then corn, however, these crops may consume more resources to grow. For example, sugarcane requires a lot more fresh water to grow then corn does.

The biggest benefit of Ethanol is that we can cut our gasoline with it to make it burn cleaner and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It is a good step to take from that point of view, but it will have little impact upon global greenhouse gas emissions.

[John Many Jars]

Higher energy crops, such as sugarcane are better for Ethanol production then corn, however, these crops may consume more resources to grow. For example, sugarcane requires a lot more fresh water to grow then corn does.

Ahh...Water demand alone should be enough to rule out sugarcane, given the water shortage that has already begun.

[shift6]

No offense shifty, but that page you linked reads just like the all the prognositications that we'll be out of oil in five years. Those same prognostications I've been seeing every couple years since the 70s.
None taken. I don't get the impression that the blogger is a wacky futurist making predictions about politics and so forth. He uses current science to calculate the costs and energy taken from many types of sources and puts it out there. Sure, he's a commie hippie lefty (I originally got that blog from Jason in a QT3 thread) and I ignore his subjective wah-wahing, but his number crunching is solid.

[Linoleum]

Correct, the number crunching doesn't lie. Ethanol is good pork, but poor energy policy.

[Nick Walter]

Correct, the number crunching doesn't lie. Ethanol is good pork, but poor energy policy.

The number crunching doesn't lie, but the inputs and assumptions underlying them may well be garbage.

Every analysis of Ethanol I've ever seen is static. if you read carefully you will note there is an implict assumption that the efficiency we have today in ethanol production will NEVER improve. They all use todays relative poor efficiency numbers and try to predict the future with them. Which of course paints a bleak picture that also happens to be garbage. That was my point in comparing this to the garbage almost-out-of-oil predictions from the 70s, many of which did similar bad math.

The oil companies kept investing in newer and better ways of extracting oil from the earth, so oil production kept ramping up despite the doomsayers' warnings. I think it perfectly likely that ethanol production will similarly outperform the cynical projections.

[Linoleum]

Not quite analogous. It would be more accurate to compare to advances in oil refining technology versus exploration/recovery.

Focusing on refinement also doesn't take into account the energy required to grow and harvest the biomass in the first place.

As far as targets for bioengineered bugs, I'd much rather target them for hydrogen production. Although I can't wait to see the fuss the environmental groups start kicking up once those gather steam.

[Moore]

Is iowa corn any better for us than texas oil?


NO BLOOD FOR CORN!

[Jason McCullough]

Quote of the day right there.

[Nick Walter]

Quote of the day right there.

That's a good quote, but it pales besides Rob's quote of the day in the classic nintendo controller thread.