Well, it's easy to check the history of who has and has not supported the farm lobby generally, and the ethanol subsidy specifically. To see this as a solely Democratic effort gets pretty hard in light of that. The long-time GOP senate leader Bob Dole used to be known as "The Senator from Archer Daniels Midland".

It's not so hard really to support both the farm lobby and big oil. You just give "incentives" to both. The oil companies, by the way, are smart enough to know that their futures lie not just in oil. They are not mad at ethanol.

If we get into running factoids about which party passed which piece of legislation (maybe not mentioning which party signed it) and what each one did, this could be a long, long discussion. Do we really want to do that here?

 

I like long discussions! Sure, I left out that a Republican president signed most of those bills, but a president has to consider a bill pretty damned onerous before he vetoes it.

I was just taking issue with plumsauce's contention that the Republicans are friends on the corn lobbyists. There's no clear-cut party line when it comes to farm subsidies, but in general, the dems support farm subsidies and the republicans oppose them (although not very vociferously).

By the way, I'm neither a republican nor a democrat. I'd like to be a Libertarian, but my state keeps outlawing the party.

 

Hey, Lets get off of politics they have no bearing on the Jaguar Forum. If I want to discuss politics, There are plenty of forums to go to. As individuals we have no say to the policies our elected officials will ram down our throat. The "CORPORATIONS" are making those decisions for us.

 

Aviation fuels are rated on a different scale than motor car fuels making it difficult to compare the two.

Two quick points-

The term 'low lead' is relative to other aviation fuels. The amount of lead in 100LL is approx. the same as leaded regular (87 octane) car gasoline. This mean almost instant death for catalytic converters.

The 100 octane rating is roughly comparable to 104AKI on the rating scales used for car gasoline.

As always, unless an engine has sufficient compression to require higher octane fuel to prevent pre-ignition, it's a total waste of money.

 

Agreed. At my local airport, which is realy more like a farm with a runway, the '60s and '70s muscle cars come around for an octane/lead fix and the owner is more than happy to take care of them at ~ $5.50 / gal.

These guys would pay twice that to keep the cars happy. Who could blame them?

 

As you said, not hard at all. Oil interests are not averse to the requirement, so long as they are able to make money at it, or at least break even as compared to the alternatives.

 

Well, me for one. I'm a '60s-'70s muscle car guy and I'll share a secret with ya- 99% of all the American muscle cars out there will run just fine on straight unleaded premium pump gas. They also didn't need the lead back then, now or ever for any other reason. Can't convince them though- it sounds much cooler telling your friends that your 'car is so powerful it needs airplane gas to run properly'.

 

No argument here. I'm not qualified to have an opinion one way or the other on this stuff. Wasn't there something about valve seats of that vintage needing lead? Like so much from back then, it's all just a dim memory. "If you remeber the '60s, you didn't really participate."

I do have a friend, a pretty serious hot rod builder, who says he needs to get to ~ 100 octane one way or another. But the stuff he works on is nothing like production cars.

All in all, it sure is fun to see these cars, however deluded the owners might be. Hell, I pretend all sorts of things are true just to get through the day.

 

The valve seats are a concern for heavily loaded vehicles- a family wagon pulling a house trailer over the Rockies or a dump truck, but medium/small size sedans or sports cars with big engines never get the valve seats hot enough for long enough to do any damage.

 

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley commented recently on the ignorance of Washington on Ethanol. That ignorance extends far and wide in the mainstream media with many intelligent people who are operating off of an incomplete and erroneous fact set in reaching their conclusions on ethanol. This ignorance is not confined to just ethanol but to their understanding of food and ag issues in general.
Most media is urban and rural media is focused mostly as advertisers for ag industry looking to sell farmers something or superficial news reporting. The investigative reporting that is done about agriculture is typically an endeavor of someone with an axe to grind or on some self appointed crusade to save the world, reshaping agriculture to fit their perception of utopia. As I glean the proliferation of anti-ethanol editorials from the Wall Street Journal to the Chicago Tribune one connecting theme is their lack of broad perspective and assumptions based on errors in facts.
Nearly 40% of U.S. corn production goes to the ethanol industry. That is true. What they don't say is that prior to the ethanol industry being developed there was a persistent glut of corn stocks depressing prices which were consistently below the cost of production which was the motivation for farm subsidies in order to stabilize the ag economy. Farm subsidies, some of which are still being paid, are the carryover vestige of that era that can be phased out because of ethanol. How is that not a good thing?
The price of corn has improved to the point corn growers are being well paid after a couple decades of low returns. U.S. corn production has expanded by the amount used by the ethanol industry over the course of its development. Ethanol naysayers would have everyone believe that ethanol has taken corn out of the mouths of babies and hogs. Food and feed usage of corn has not conceded any corn to ethanol production and corn exports have expanded during this period on the productivity of US corn growers. We produced enough corn for the ethanol industry by making the pie bigger and in doing so brought economic prosperity to the heartland.
Another very important fact that the ethanol naysayers leave out from those calculating net energy to those simply stating ethanol usage of corn is the production of the co-product distiller's grain and the contribution that it makes to the feed supply. Roughly one-third of the nearly 5 billion bushels of corn going to ethanol comes back pound for pound as an enhanced feedstuff. I say, enhanced because the feed value of the corn and soy meal that it displaces in feed rations is closer to 40% of the amount of corn used by the ethanol industry. Distiller's grain will exceed soy meal as the second largest feedstuff utilized in the U.S. this year and the anti-ethanol pundits appear oblivious to that fact. If the displacement shared between corn and soy meal from distillers grain were all factored against corn, it equals 2 billion bushels.
In other words, the ethanol industry only has net consumption of 3 billion bushels of corn instead of the 5 billion touted. Every time we hear that the ethanol industry uses 100 million bushels of corn, 40 million bushels of feed value is returned through distiller's grain. The availability of this economically sold feedstuff has shifted the cost of gain advantage in the beef industry in particular from the southern plains to the Midwest where ethanol plants are concentrated and the wet product is available. Dried distillers grain exports are surging as well adding a feedstuff to the export market. These are all facts that are omitted from the ethanol debate because they favor ethanol so do not interest the prime media that appears to like the story that ethanol is bad, much better.
Other distortions of facts read in editorials are that ethanol is subsidized and oil is not, farmers receive ethanol subsidies when they do not, and that the ethanol tariff is restricting ethanol imports and that the increase in corn prices is starving impoverished populations. One by one. . . the oil industry receives multiples of the subsidies through tax benefits and other incentives baked into the system so long that they are considered sacrosanct, not to mention the military subsidy estimated at $84 billion annually to provide public security service to guard the private oil companies' oil infrastructure without charge.
It is amazing how many oil Congressman and Senators who favor subsidizing big oil think ethanol is a boondoggle. Farmers do not receive any ethanol subsidies. The Blenders credit goes directly to the entity that blends ethanol into gasoline, typically a petroleum industry distributer. The consumer benefits indirectly from the subsidy in the form of lower gas prices resulting from ethanol production which is now only second in equivalence to Canadian oil imports, having exceeded the equivalent of oil imported from Saudi Arabia. Gas prices are surging because of political turmoil in the mid-east but without ethanol adding to aggregate U.S. fuel supply, the impact on U.S. energy costs of the oil price shock would be significantly magnified. Gas would be nearly $5 gallon today without ethanol in the U.S. fuel mix citing an editorial by the Chicago Tribune.
Ethanol is doing exactly what it was supposed to do, help provide a buffer for the U.S. to foreign oil dependence and energy cost price shocks. We should be jumping up and down in glee over the positive impact that ethanol is having on fuel costs today and instead the anti-ethanol media isn't running that story.
Is the ethanol tariff restricting ethanol imports? That the impression that the anti-ethanol press leaves with the public. They assume that Brazil has ethanol that would be loaded on boats the second the tariff was eliminated. They are uninformed. Brazil is importing ethanol. There are reports of them importing U.S. ethanol. The price of sugar has climbed so high that refiners are selling sugar rather than convert it to ethanol. Sugar is being priced out of ethanol production more than corn has been. Brazil uses an E-23 blend where we use E-10 and 100% ethanol where we use E-85. Every vehicle GM sells in Brazil is flex-fuel and their economic growth rate is stronger than ours so fuel demand growth is more accelerated.
The U.S. ethanol industry exported nearly 400 million gallons of ethanol last year and expectations are that Brazil will buy more U.S. ethanol deflating those who think that the tariff is somehow holding back a wall of ethanol imports. The Caribbean Initiative was a measure passed to create a loophole for ethanol to be imported into the U.S. tariff-free through Caribbean countries and none is coming in, even tariff free.
The basic premise that there is a surplus of ethanol someplace restricted from being imported into the U.S. is totally false. Demand outside the U.S. for ethanol is so strong there is an export market for it. Few even understand the relationship between the blender's credit and the ethanol tariff. All ethanol sold in the U.S., domestic or foreign, gets the blenders credit. It has to be paid to all to be WTO compliant. In order to offset the blender's credit that foreign ethanol would receive so that U.S. taxpayers are not subsidizing foreign ethanol, a tariff is assessed because that is a WTO compliant way to even it up. There is only a few cents difference between the blender's credit and the tariff so there is virtually no net tariff on foreign ethanol.
The ethanol tariff under current market condition of global supply and demand is a non-issue. Some who do understand this do not want the public to have the correct picture because they can rail about the unfairness of the tariff when it makes perfect sense. One other point - corn does not compete with sugar for acres, so it is not contributing to the shortage of sugar. The shortage of sugar is from strong demand from a growing world economy.
Is the ethanol industry starving anyone? I believe that food costs are climbing because of global economic emancipation of millions and millions of new consumers, EU rejection of biotechnology (GMOs), weather events, energy cost hikes, protectionist government food policies, and then maybe ethanol. You would think from ethanol critics that it is number 1, number 2 or number 3 when it is far down the list.
The U.S. ethanol industry is nearly built out to capacity near 15 billion gallons as allowed for in the RFS. The U.S. can spare 3 billion bushel which is the net corn consumption of ethanol when adjusted for distiller's grain. The U.S. is in a unique situation in being able to produce corn for ethanol relative to the rest of the world. No one I know is advocating any significant aggregate build up of ethanol production from food crops any where in the world beyond the current U.S. industry which is nearly complete. Next generation ethanol production would be cellulosic having no impact on food unless you are into eating corn cobs and wood chips. Those that think that higher grain prices will starve someone do not understand economics. The markets are calling for more investment and more production with higher prices. Higher prices will increase food production and wealth in both developed and undeveloped regions of the world as global food production capacity is increased - which is the only solution to growing demand.
Ethanol is not the problem, it is not the challenge nor is it even an impediment or obstacle to the solutions as to how agriculture feeds the world. As Senator Grassley says, Washington and the public are ignorant about ethanol and the primary media is making them dumber.

 

Dammit, I must have blown his skirt up!! I just want GOOD gas

 

Filoli1993's post is a copy and paste from and article in Farm News. Here's the original: DAVID KRUSE - Farm-News.com - farming news and information for Iowa - Farm News

As I read news stories I usually do so with a critical eye, looking for inconsistencies or obvious errors that show the bias of the author. If I notice something I think is incorrect, I look it up just to make sure. If I notice too many of these errors I just quit reading the article because it is propaganda and misinformation and I'm not going to learn anything from it.

The first "big" thing I noticed in the article was the author's claim that the US military spends "$84 billion annually to provide public security service to guard the private oil companies' oil infrastructure". The total military budget for 2011 is $689 billion. He's claiming that 1/8th of the entire military budget is spent protecting oil companies' assets. But $230B of that budget is for procurement of new planes, ships, trucks, etc., and research and development of new weapons. Take those away and his claim is even more outrageous. He's claiming that nearly a fifth of the military's budget goes to "guard the oil companies' infrastructure". I'd like to see how he backs up that claim.

Then he claims that the oil industry gets taxpayer subsidies. He didn't name any of these alleged subsidies because they don't exist. It's just one of those lies told by the media that everyone has come to believe. Here's a good article on these "subsidies": American Thinker: About Those Oil Subsidies

So at that point I just quit reading the article. I read to become better informed, and I can't become better informed by reading lies.