[cruiser_guy]

Originally Posted by Deny

True, but currently alot of the biodiesel is made from Canola Oil, and I know up here in the Peace reagion, only the best soils are good for growing canola, and a lot of local farmers are jumping on the Canola bandwagon (switching from growning wheat and barley), because fuel production has pushed the price of Canola from $8 a bushell last year to $14 a bushell this year.

This is the problem I'm talking about! Biodiesel can be made from food crops but doesn't HAVE to be made from food crops. Here we see farmers switching from wheat and barley to fuel, unconscionable in my opinion though I can't blame them.

Originally Posted by M John Galt

For every liter of petro energy used to produce biodiesel, 3 liters of biodiesel are produced. For every liter of petro energy used to produce ethanol in N.America they might get a liter of ethanol if everything works at it's best. Grain ethanol is a scam.

The "Biofuels Take Food From Our Mouths" argument is based on fallacy. The two most common biofuel feedstocks, corn and soybeans, are grown for animals to feed the industrial meat business producing pork, poultry and beef. Processing these feedstocks to extract sugars or oils to make biofuels, makes the byproduct 'seed cake' and 'spent mash' more digestible as animal feed. Same with the 'seed cake' from canola. Thus the animals get more nutrition from the byproduct than the original feedstock, and less is crapped out as waste. We can get food and fuel from the same crop.

Granted that the feedstock grains and legumes could be exported to feed the starving millions instead of being used to feed meat animals. But that practice has been going on for decades, is not likely to change, and is totally external to the biofuels issue.

The world's poor are not starving because of biofuels but rather due to a variety of causes including local corruption which 're-directs' food aid, and the fact that 50% of the world's population no longer lives in rural areas where they fed themselves, but now live in sprawling mega slums where food has to be shipped in at ever increasing transportation costs due to rising petroleum prices.

John, Deny's example is a large part of the problem. I don't know how this is all playing out in Canada but I do know that here in Guatemala basic food supplies like rice and wheat have increased by 50% and more in the last year alone. Why is that?? Because land that was growing wheat is now growing corn for ethanol or canola for bio-diesel, that's at least part of the reason why. These folks did not move en-masse in the past year, the governments, while corrupt, did not increase their "take" by that much in the past year but the whole "Go green!" B.S. HAS increased big time in the past year! The cost of locally grown produce has increased but not near to the amount that things like wheat, rice and corn have.

If, as is the case here, corn and other staples play a large part of your diet and food costs eat a large part of the paycheck those increased costs REALLY start to add up and cause significant problems.

We in the developed world can choose to ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist but it is NOT going to go away.