Biofuels May Be Even Worse than First Thought

[Manuel]

An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven't gone that far in their estimates.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian

 

[dread]

So much for the wave of the future.

 

[Ravi]

An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven't gone that far in their estimates.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian

Arthur Daniel Midlands thanks you.

Funny, people have been pointing this out for years and Bush has been lying about it all this time?

LOL!

 

[MarlPot]

Yeah has nothing to do with the fact that China only exported 1.16 million tons of grain in the first 5 months of the year, which by is 77% less then last year.

 

[AllieBaba]

An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven't gone that far in their estimates.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian

Gee, I've been saying this for the last 2 years.

 

[Chris]

Corn based ethanol farms produce 50 gallons of ethanol per acre.
Algae based ethanol farms can produce 10,000 gallons of ethanol per acre.

Pond-Powered Biofuels: Turning Algae into America's Newest Alternative Energy Source - Popular Mechanics

 

[busara]

Corn based ethanol farms produce 50 gallons of ethanol per acre.
Algae based ethanol farms can produce 10,000 gallons of ethanol per acre.

Pond-Powered Biofuels: Turning Algae into America's Newest Alternative Energy Source - Popular Mechanics

now maybe the idiots in washington get off of corn ethanol and switch to more efficient plants. sorry iowa. welcome petrolalgae and sorganol

 

[AllieBaba]

I don't think it's a good idea to start messing with the first level of the food chain. You think we have issues when we use CORN for fuel, I can't even imagine the repercussions of depleting algae.

 

[SpidermanTuba]

An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven't gone that far in their estimates.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian

Why don't we stop paying farmers to not grow corn then?

 

[AllieBaba]

People have a really limited understanding of farming subsidies.

 

[editec]

Personally, I think we should eliminate all the middle men and just pay people not to drive.

Out of work, no place to go?

Get paid for NOT being part of that traffic jam.​

Unemployment seems to be our fastest growing industry, anyway.

We ought to capitalize on it before the genuses in Washington figure out a way to capitalize by outsourcing our unemployment, too.

 

[AllieBaba]

I wonder what the percentages are for fuel useage, i.e., the percentage used for transporting goods and the percentage used for personal to-ing and fro-ing?

 

[CSM]

Personally, I think we should eliminate all the middle men and just pay people not to drive.

Out of work, no place to go?

Get paid for NOT being part of that traffic jam.​

Unemployment seems to be our fastest growing industry, anyway.

We ought to capitalize on it before the genuses in Washington figure out a way to capitalize by outsourcing our unemployment, too.

They already do. They provide benefits to illegal immigrants....

 

[Charles_Main]

Personally, I think we should eliminate all the middle men and just pay people not to drive.

Out of work, no place to go?

Get paid for NOT being part of that traffic jam.​

Unemployment seems to be our fastest growing industry, anyway.

We ought to capitalize on it before the genuses in Washington figure out a way to capitalize by outsourcing our unemployment, too.

What a joke, even at 5% unemployment is LOW. You clearly were not around in the 70's or the 30's. 5% unemployment is pretty good bud. You will never see full employment anyways.

I am getting pretty fed up with all these mere babies acting like were living in the worst economic times ever, Not even close man. Stop talking out your ass and scaring people, and actual learn about our Economic History. You will see things have been much much worse in the past.

 

[busara]

I don't think it's a good idea to start messing with the first level of the food chain. You think we have issues when we use CORN for fuel, I can't even imagine the repercussions of depleting algae.

do you think we would just start collecting and converting any algae we could find? we would continually grow it for use, as we do all our foods.

Pond-Powered Biofuels: Turning Algae into America's Newest Alternative Energy Source - Popular Mechanics
UNH Biodiesel Group

 

[Taco]

5% unemployment is only one calculation, and not necessarily an honest one. Real numbers may be around double that....of course, that's not the only index that's been distorted...Kevin Phillips has a recent book out on the games politicians play with economic indexes...if you don't know who he is, look him up. He's a pretty smart guy.

 

[Taco]

Here's a little from an article by Phillips on the same topic (can't post URL's just quite yet....) but it's a Harper's article. Should be easy to find....

Numbers Racket
Why the economy is worse than we know
KEVIN PHILLIPS
Harper's Magazine v.316, n.1896 1may2008

SHORT HISTORY OF "POLLYANNA CREEP"

The story starts after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when high jobless numbers marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac and the new administration appointed a committee to weigh changes. The result, implemented a few years later, was that out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs—even if this was because none could he found—were labeled "discouraged workers" and excluded from the ranks of the unemployed, where many, if not most, of them had been previously classified. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, was widely rumored to have personally scrutinized and sometimes tweaked Gross National Product numbers before their release; and by the 1969 fiscal year, Johnson had orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in the former to mask the emerging deficit in the latter.

Richard Nixon, besides continuing the unified budget, developed his own taste for statistical improvement. He proposed albeit unsuccessfully—that the Labor Department, which prepared both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted unemployment numbers, should just publish whichever number was lower. In a more consequential move, he asked his second Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, to develop what became an ultimately famous division between "core" inflation and headline inflation. It the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of "volatility," categories that happened to he troublesome: at that time, food and energy. Core inflation could he spotlighted when the headline number was embarrassing, as it was in 1973 and 1974. (The economic commentator Barry Ritholtz has joked that core inflation is better called "inflation ex-inflation"—i.e., inflation after the inflation has been excluded.)

I n 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS's decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt—much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals. Also, on the unemployment front, as Austan Goolsbee pointed out in his New York Times op-ed, the Reagan Administration further trimmed the number by reclassifying members of the military as "employed" instead of outside the labor force.

The distortional inclinations of the next president, George H.W. Bush, came into focus in 1990, when Michael Boskin, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, proposed to reorient U.S. economic statistics principally to reduce the measured rate of inflation. His stated grand ambition was to move the calculus away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics, however, countered that the underlying goal, driven by worry over federal budget deficits, was to reduce the inflation rate in order to reduce federal payments—from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees, and Social Security recipients.

It was left to the Clinton Administration to implement these convoluted CPI measurements, which were reiterated in 1996 through a commission headed by Boskin and promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Clintonites also extended the Pollyanna Creep of the nation's employment figures. Although expunged from the ranks of the unemployed, discouraged workers had nevertheless been counted in the larger workforce. But in 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the workforce to include only that small percentage of the discouraged who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged—some 4 million U.S. adults—fell out of the main monthly tally. Some now call them the "hidden unemployed." For its last four years, the Clinton Administration also thinned the monthly household economic sampling by one sixth, from 60,000 to 50,000, and a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities; the reduced sample (and a new adjustment formula) is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.

Despite the present Bush Administration's overall penchant for manipulating data (e.g., Iraq, climate change), it has yet to match its predecessor in economic revisions. In 2002, the administration did, however, for two months fail to publish the Mass Layoff Statistics report, because of its embarrassing nature after the 2001 recession had supposedly ended; it introduced, that same year, an "experimental" new CPI calculation (the C-CPI-U), which shaved another 0.3 percent off the official CPI; and since 2006 it has stopped publishing the M-3 money supply numbers, which captured rising inflationary impetus from bank credit activity. In 2005, Bush proposed, but Congress shunned, a new, narrower historical wage basis for calculating future retiree Social Security benefits.

By late last year, the Gallup Poll reported that public faith in the federal government had sunk below even post-Watergate levels. Whether statistical deceit played any direct role is unclear, but it does seem that citizens have got the right general idea. After forty years of manipulation, more than a few measurements of the U.S. economy have been distorted beyond recognition.

 

[AllieBaba]

What a bunch of tripe.

 

[busara]

What a bunch of tripe.

who's making menudo soup?

 

[Taco]

Tripe?

Can you elaborate?