134 comments on The Economics of Corn Ethanol
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
134 comments on The Economics of Corn Ethanol
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Unique Times -- and the Future
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Friday 27th November 2009
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“We have only two modes—complacency and panic.”
—James R. Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, in 1977, on the country's approach to energy
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
If it where so easy...
How about supplying the fuel for the fertilizer production, transportation, herbicides, insecticides, miners for the steel on your tractor, Oil production for your tires etc, etc, etc...
Once you really crunch the numbers you would have to devote your whole farm plus 20%...
Ethanol is a bad joke.
If you used a horse instead of a tractor you would only require 1/3rd of your farm..
We cannot go back to horses there is no way we can go to ethanol...
> If you used a horse instead of a tractor you would only require 1/3rd of your farm..
Do you have a substantive reference for this data point?
I can't say when, but we will go back to using horses eventually, especially if we don't conserve fuel sources by planning the weaning away from the ridiculous squandering due to automobility, which is a twentieth century historical flash in the plan. The way things are going, I foresee a terrible crash with respect to work and transportation needs currently subsidized by oil and other energy resources.
We probably should be Planning the conservation and population growth of draft animals so that we will not be left stranded with only human power to run our farms and deliver our goods. Such planning should be in the context of a larger plan that will make demand-side management the keystone, that is rebuilding our 20th century suburbs to make them walkable. We need to build and stock economic/community centers in all neighborhoods where all residents can get the things we need within walking distance. Let's bring the goods and services to the people rather than all this wasteful shopping behavior.
The assumption of automobility is absurd within a historical perspective.