Friday, May 2, 2008

Biofuels Yes Food based biofuels No

I was watching a newsvideo stream from Cnn.com and they were saying that biofuels grown and sold in America reduce the cost of every gallon of gas by 50 cents a gallon. Right now with regular gas right now at 4$ a gallon where I live 50 cents makes a lot of difference.

However, I think only non-edible biofuels should be used because of how many on earth that are presently starving because of high food prices. It is also important to note that growing food based biofuels is only one of multiple factors causing high food prices.

First of all, there IS enough food worldwide to feed everyone. It is just priced way to high for many people to buy food so that they can eat and survive these times. So many are starving to death right now around the world.

Of the main reasons food is priced so high worldwide food based biofuels would be last.
The main reasons:
1. Droughts in Australia and elsewhere were very serious this year.
2. the dollar falling 40% in value against the Euro caused those investing in both dollars and dollar based stocks to panic and pull their money out and reinvest it for safety in food commodities and oil commodities. This caused oil which should be around 80 dollars per barrel without the dollar panic to cost around 115 to 120 instead.
3. Oil is harder to get out of the ground because ALL oilfields except Saudi Arabia have now peaked and no big new ones have been discovered since the late 1960s.
4. 24% of corn in the US is now grown for biofuel which reduces the average price at the pump for americans by 50cents. Next year 32% of corn will be grown for biofuel.

However, stopping biofuels completely will likely within a few years cause the death of billions as oil begins to dry up in more and more worldwide fields. So, stopping biofuels might save millions now but kill billions within a few years because we stopped making biofuels.

So, I believe the solution is to make biofuels out of something other than foods like Corn, and soybeans. Then the growing of non-food biofuels should effect the price of food much less. The only effect then should be the use of some fields to grow non-food based biofuels. Switchgrass might be one of the non-food biofuels that is possible to grow.

Also, Corn tend to deplete soil anyway and can't be grown every year in the same soil without seriously devitalizing the soil. So other crops that tend to renew the soil must be grown every other corn crop or every other year.

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