LUST:abnormal necessity for humanly pleasures.
I only have, like, one hour -ish before my booty call gets here, but I wanted to enlighten you to the next sin in the Heathen's Guide. Lust is an incredibly tempting sin to commit (multiple times a night if you please). I mean just thinking about it makes me...wait, sorry back to the point.
America's population has an especially difficult time not submitting to lust, and we are suffering dearly for it. The problem is increasingly getting worse. In fact, last year there was a 24% increase in the spread of the problem. Everyone has it and no one is immune. That is right: America has an illicit lust for corn.
First Article: The High Costs of Ethanol
According to this editorial piece we are rushing down a bad path by thinking corn is the solution to all of our problems. Naturally, with fuel prices skyrocketing, we want to lessen our dependency on foreign oil. The logical solution (since using irreplaceable resources such as oil is only temporary) is to use alternate energy sources. Right now the only one that works for fuel (that is being marketed) would be corn based ethanol. Go corn!
But what does it mean to increase our independence for our economy? Sure, we are not paying foreign countries for their oil, but that is only the surface of the matter. The estimate in this first article, written in September 2007, is that corn prices raised 50% this last year, most likely because of the increasing demand for corn based products. But this does not just affect the cost of ethanol, this affects everything that uses corn (and trust me, there is alot, but that is another article). So now any livestock (dairy and poultry are specifically named here) based products are forced to raise prices as well as most processed foods made with corn starch or high fructose corn syrup. This doesn't even include the most obvious: your corn on the cob for the BBQ this summer.
Second Article: A Movie That Scrutinizes Your Popcorn and Soda
If you were a big fan of documentary films like Super Size Me or anything done by Michael Moore have I got a movie for you. Next on the list of disturbing information to absorb like a sponge is King Corn. In this story two friends go to Iowa to plant one acre of corn. They then proceed to follow this acre to all the different locations it goes to for production. This includes from being made into livestock feed, fructose corn syrup, amongst other things.
As they say, there is nothing wrong with corn, but you have to admit there is too much of it out there. There is such a surplus that any normal acre would lose a farmer $19.92, but now with government subsidies ($28 per acre) it is worth $8 profit. But why do they continue producing excess corn (besides the obvious government subsidies that make it profitable)? Probably because consumers continue to gorge themselves on products that deal heavily in corn and the government is going allow it to continue, encouraging even more over production until we no longer have enough cotton, soybeans, and other products because everything is corn.
Third Article: Ethanol's Issue: Getting Acquainted with Drivers
The ironic thing about this increase in ethanol production (and the desire of America's desire to increase use) is the price we as consumers pay for this new fuel. Looking at the basic price, sure you can save 40 cents at the pump, but is it really a savings?
Reading this article the math does not add up. Since ethanol contains less energy than gasoline you lose gas mileage. And we not talking just a couple miles per gallon, we are talking more than a 25% drop in gas mileage. For a GMC Yukon, according this article, you are losing 40 cents per gallon. That means 80 cents more expensive to use corn. Talk about unproductive!
And to top it all off the cars that are flex-fuel and can accept ethanol (which most consumers are unaware or uninformed of when they buy a new car) cost $100 more to make. One hundred more dollars to spend 80 more cents at the pump. Talk about twisted economics!
The further you read the less wonderful this ethanol revolution appears. Our system can only manage 15 billion gallons a year (caution on the side of the normal food production market) which is less than 7% of our gasoline usage in America. All that work, time and money and it hardly begins eating into the dent into the goal that congress wants us to achieve in less than 15 years.
Fourth Article: As Ethanol Takes Its First Steps, Congress Proposes a Giant Leap
Hence where this article takes over. By 2022, Congress wants us to produce an additional 21 billion gallons per year over that maximum 15 billion gallons we believe we can achieve. More than double the allowable production (without screwing up our food production system). We are talking a complete reformatting of farmland in America. They want to replace 30 to 50 percent of oil dependence, which is good for us, but this does not appear the best way to go. It seems like they are talking an infant concept that works (poorly, I might add) on the small scale and attempt to transform it into a monster system that makes America only dependent on America.
Right now, 20% of our corn production is going into ethanol and that is 7 billion gallons of ethanol or about 4% of gasoline consumption for 2007. If we are as energetic about increasing production and use by 2022 to the level Congress prescribes we may be looking at a country that is more involved in finding ways to make all of America farmland corn producing and will be having to seek outside our borders to find enough food to service us all.
*End of Part I*
Please continue onto The Heathen's Guide: LUST (Part II)
