Lindsay Leveen The Green Machine

By now we all have seen how the prices of milk, meat, and tortillas have risen because of the massive use of corn to produce bio-ethanol. This blog will help frame the magnitude of the problem. Corn is 8% protein, 3% oil, 62% starch and 27% water. You have all see the "Nutrition Facts" on food labels. Using the chemical composition of corn listed above a bushel of corn that weighs 56 pounds has some 80,000 food Calories. If we assume for the moment we could get all of our 2,000 Calories a day from just eating corn, a bushel of corn would feed an adult for forty days. Accordingly, Noah would have had to store a bushel of corn for each person on his ark to weather the forty day storm.

The alternate use of corn for bio-ethanol yields between 2 and 2.5 gallons of ethanol per bushel. This amount of ethanol equals between 1.3 and 1.6 gallons of regular gasoline as ethanol only has 65% of the heating value of gasoline. The average American motorist uses just more than 2 gallons of gasoline a day in their personal vehicle. Therefore the amount of equivalent corn used by each vehicle operating on bio-ethanol is about 1.25 bushels a day or 50 days of the recommended 2,000 Calorie diet. That is to say a personal vehicle is on a 100,000 Calorie daily diet. Now that is a mega size meal. This simple comparison shows that to "feed" the vehicles with bio-fuel we have just increased the adult population of the US 50 fold to approximately 10 billion. Suffice to say we know the US cannot support a population of 10 billion adults in the fashion we have become accustomed to. Even the substitution of 10% of our gasoline equals the addition of 1 billion adults to our population. On top of all these added people, fermenting and distilling ethanol from corn requires a great deal of energy. Some have argued more energy is consumed in producing ethanol than is actually contained in the ethanol.

The corn belt politicians and the lobbyists for the bio-fuels industry would have us believe mother nature in the form of photosynthesis will save us. Forget this! This is just another mega-sized trick being played upon us. Noah only had to weather a forty day storm, we will have to weather 6 more months till the next election and hear all the nonsense about bio-fuels and American energy independence