peristaltor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peristaltor) wrote2011-02-25 11:44 am
peristaltor) wrote2011-02-25 11:44 am
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Biofuels: Pros Obfuscated by Cons
Lenny loves to tell stories about his old Barracuda. One, I just realized, helps to illustrate the potential -- and more than a few problems -- with biofuels.
He got this 1971 Barracuda convertible through tragedy. It was willed to him after its owner, Lenny's uncle, died in Vietnam. Lenny's dad was smart enough to keep this inheritance in a garage until Lenny turned 16, and then showed even more smarts by not letting Lenny actually drive it until he turned 18. He had access to cars when he got his license at 16; but to make sure the 'Cuda didn't get wrecked by an inexperienced driver, dad pulled the engine. Lenny could tinker with it all he wanted in his auto shop classes, but by no means was the 440 Magnum V8 going back into the engine compartment until he was older.
So, what does a 16-year-old do with a big-assed engine, some modest disposable income, and dreams fueled by watching The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky & Hutch waaaay too much? He researched engines. The standard ignition was replaced by an electronic one favored by racers at the time. Far more torque got forced out of the crank when the low-profile supercharger, salvaged from a wrecking yard Super Bee, forced far more air through the 4-barrel carb. By the time the block went back into it's Barracuda home below the hood, Lenny had boosted the output to allow a decent 13.7 second acceleration from a stand still to 60 mph, far better than the stock components would allow.
What happened to that engine prompted me to think about biofuels.
Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about the topic of using food stock and other vegetable matter to drive our machinery. Every time I hear more about these so-called biofuels, I can't help but think there are missing pieces to the arguments, assumptions flung about like dogma that has never been empirically verified. For example, lots of folks are quite vocal against using our foods to brew fuels, saying that will lead to starvation. Can we really afford to drive when we are going hungry to do so?
This argument misses an essential facet of farming reality: farmers are going to sell their crops -- or personally use them -- to obtain the best return, to do what seems best for the farmer. If the price of the harvested crop falls, due to a glut for example, farmers have historically found other markets to exploit, among them fuel. New technology means new markets. Check out this July 1906 Popular Mechanics article for a good example:
When the internal combustion engines made their way into road machines, most models came equipped with alcohol-burning capacity, taking advantage of the modest distillation infrastructure already in place:
This push to legalize and decentralize fuel production was widely supported by farmers themselves. After all, when the price of their crops rise, they receive more profit; when the price falls, they can shift more into alcohol production. Furthermore, not all fuel stocks need be the best food crops; one can also use crop wastes (NB: Links to a Word Doc file):
Which should bring us back to Lenny.
Once his ride was souped up, Lenny found himself living with his Dad in rural California near his grandparents. One of his chores involved getting up at 0-Dark-Thirty to mow granddad's lawn before the desert heat made such tasks unbearable.
I should point out that, as far as I have been able to determine, none of Lenny's family members lack what authors often euphamisticly call "color." Granddad originally hailed from the Ozarks of Missouri, once served time for running moonshine, and still kept up his still for his prodigious personal consumption of about 6 ounces per day, more when partying. He had a watermelon patch on his spread dedicated to stocking the mash tun and still. When his brew sat for more than 90 days in a bottle, though, it "grew too nasty for even him to drink." He kept those bottles -- gallon jugs, actually -- in the tool shed. It was to those jugs Lenny was directed when he arrived one day to mow the lawn. He was to use that nasty moonshine to fuel the mower.
If it was sufficiently energy-rich to drive a mower, Lenny thought. . . . "Granddad," he asked, "would this stuff work in my car?"
Granddad reportedly froze, thinking about the implications. His face lit up, but his answer was not quite what Lenny had been expecting.
"I'll get my coat," Granddad said.
The two took a quick trip to the 76 station to load up on 12 gallons of high-test leaded. Ten gallons of 'shine topped off the tank. Granddad spent some time futzing with the "carburetor mixture screws for primary mix to lean it and secondary to enrich it." Remember that time he spent as a ridge-runner. The whole family was mechanically inclined, especially when it came to engines.
They then sped off, top down, to Interstate 10 between Indio and Blyth, California. When they hit a flat stretch, Lenny dropped the hammer. Granddad was feeling good. He started yammering about the cars he'd owned, the speeds he'd hit in them. One detail shut him up, though. Lenny said, "Granddad, we're almost doing 200."
"Aw, Lordy," Granddad is reported to have said in reply.
The ethyl alcohol farm movement was not without its detractors. After all, if one could easily get fuel for one's car from the local farmer, how could an industrialist bent on monopolization hope to achieve that goal? This was a lesson learned first-hand by Washington Grange leader Carey Kegley. From the Word Doc link once again:
He supported a decentralized Grange network of stills, places where local farmers could bring their excess crops for distillation. The laws of 1905, though, did not feasibly permit such a thing; "Alcohol was not illegal as a motor fuel, but the hefty $2.08 per gallon federal tax on denatured alcohol made it prohibitive." Kegley's Grange pushed for changes that would allow it, as the Popular Mechanics article related. No one, though, had actually read that law before it passed. It had snags:
John D. Rockefeller probably heard the nasty things Kegley said about the "Oil Trust" and fought back, but with money, not words:
I was going to include here the fact that Rockefeller also supported the Prohibition movement as these folks note, but this PDF paper makes a convincing case that Rockefeller, Sr. actually funded them modestly out of his personal convictions. The author looked through the letters of both Sr. and Jr. and found that, though the contributions were large, they were not so large as to be crucial for the survival of the agencies to which they were sent. A majority of the funding came instead from the rank and file members, not from the leaders of the Oil Trust.
To understand why so many were in support of alcohol repeal, one must dive into the historical context of booze in the United States. A fascinating study called "Nation of Intoxication" (IIRC) fell into my possession a few years ago. The author, a UW professor, pointed out in the introduction how very much the average tippler in the nation's earlier days drank. We were per capita the second largest consumer of spirits in the Western world, behind Sweden. Alexis de Touqueville noted that stage coach rides took forever in the young nation, because the coach had to pull over every few hours to "water the horses and liquor the gentlemen." Laborers digging the Erie Canal were paid $5 a day plus a ration of 5 ounces of bourbon -- two ounces in the morning before work, 3 at lunch. After work, most of the workers headed off for dinner and more drinking. Since everyone could see the amount being consumed on an almost daily basis, the anti-saloon leagues across the country had enormous public support.
This does not exonerate Rockefeller from monopolist behavior, of course; it simply forces one to focus attention on the graft he spread through the General Education Board to the USDA rather than on the back-door strategy of funding the Anti-Saloon Leagues. One he did for business; the other to follow his personal convictions.
Either way, if not single-handedly, Rockefeller at least helped kill the Grange's dream. The enthusiasm of farm alcohol's potential as a universal fuel driving our economy met the hard reality of Rockefeller's ability to get what he wanted buried actually buried . . . just as Lenny's alcohol-fueled ride met the reality of too much heat.
Where were we? Ah, yes: "Aw, Lordy!" at 200 miles per hour. According to Lenny, that lasted about ten seconds. Something popped. Speed was lost. And then it all went downhill in an awful hurry. When he and his granddad finally came to rest on the side of the desert highway, the car was belching more smoke than a James Bond car in getaway mode. Damage included:
It took a couple of hours to limp the miles home, and all the way the 'Cuda was "bellowing smoke like an old train steam engine." Granddad noted that "probably the only reason it never caught fire was that most of the oil shot out of the car through the tail pipe instead (of through) the many leaks it developed."
The dream of fast go-juice killed his car. Well, not "killed," but certainly sidelined. The 'Cuda sat in the "car hospital" for about six months awaiting a new engine and the modifications that would make it better, stronger, faster. The AMC Magnum was swapped for a 427 Hemi from a '74 Satellite police Interceptor. A $5,000 blue-printing and balancing, fuel injection, electronic ignition, and another low-profile supercharger brought the original 300hp engine to over 800, with a zero-to-sixty time of 7.3 seconds.
Like a Phoenix, the 'Cuda was reborn.
Let's cast our eyes to more recent times and re-examine biofuels. In either Eaarth or Deep Economy (maybe in both), Bill McKibben noted that biofuels were just a bad idea. Why take perfectly good food and burn it? He notes the old canard about how the rapid rise in ethanol plants in 2008 led to food shortages in Mexico as corn was turned more into car fuel and less into tortillas. I call that an old canard because so very many people quote it without really examining what it is they are quoting.
Really, why should diverting Midwestern corn to refineries have such a devastating effect on an economy thousands of miles south? Don't farmers in Mexico supply corn for their neighbors? The man who poo-pooed the biofuel conundrum himself gives background that might explain the situation. After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, McKibben notes:
He continues, further quoting Pollan's observation of what suddenly happened next to those former farmers: "Unable to compete, they have left their land to join the swelling pools of Mexico's urban unemployed," reports Pollan. "Others migrate to the U.S. to pick our crops -- former farmers become day laborers."
Which means that, yes, biofuel refinement does constrict the supply of corn and, yes, that will drive up the price; but if we want people not to starve when faddish diversions of food crops temporarily constrict supply, we should probably not destroy the local economies and force folks from down south to permeate our borders in the process.
Also, I can't see a downside to converting a bunch of corn to something other than animal feed and high fructose sweetener. First of all, cows aren't evolved to eat such calorie-rich crap. Cattle are ruminants, meaning they distill nutrients in their cavernous guts. Too many calories causes the guts to rumble with too much power, causing infection. A quick intro on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kmo's C-Realm Podcast (sorry, I've forgotten both the speaker and the episode) noted that cows actually prefer the left-over mash from corn distillation. This brewer's mash has fewer calories, making more amenable to those over-sized guts. Supposedly, revenue officials during Prohibition used to cruise the country side looking for small farms with big cows; this meant the beasts were getting the best food, and that food was probably left over from something outlawed by the 18th Amendment.
Speaking of cows, let's not forget what's happened to the American mid-section since that sweetener started tainting our sodas. Those beverages used to be fairly rare treats in my youth; they have since gotten so cheap as to be ubiquitous. Also, despite the nay-sayers, there is laboratory evidence confirming what many have long suspected, that "all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same." Said the researcher:
If burning this highly-processed corn extract in our cars will keep it out of the American diet, I say burn, baby, burn; it's time for another pointless road trip.
Here's a thought: who would spread the rumor that refining causes food shortages? Let's get another take on farm populism like the Grange's Kegley advocated. Thomas Frank notes:
Giving farmers a new market to supply would put a kink in the money hose currently fattening our nation's corn buyers. These firms are taking advantage of a condition that has long affected farmers. Frank explains:
Today, we have familiar faces pushing an end to those hard-fought protectionist regulations:
The ability to withhold a crop from the market when prices fall gives the individual farmer too much power to these deregulationists. Diverting even a portion of the harvest to fuel the tractors (as they still do in Germany) would drive down supply and drive up the prices those at the top of the supply chain would have to pay, not to mention the millions of gallons of petroleum fuel those farmers would avoid purchasing, softening that market.
Bottom line: there are very real people with a lot of money at stake bent on preventing a biofuel movement, especially if that proves decentralized. Those people have every reason to amplify reasons against building the infrastructure to burn less petroleum and more biomass. We are probably witnessing the corporate noise machine in just about every pronouncement of biofuel evil.
I know you're wondering: What about Lenny's Barracuda? That saga has a bittersweet ending.
He never told me whether or not he fed it alcohol after that fateful ride. It did get a NOS injection system and an on-demand clutch for the new supercharger, as well as decent tires and a roll cage (now that's another fun story). All in all, though, his ride suffered from, of all things, maturity.
He and his wife married when he was in the navy. They got a nice surprise when he was discharged; the new baby promised changes on the way. For one, he pretty much abandoned the family past-time and all but quit drinking the hard stuff. Given how much every male in that family drank, that was saying something. Second, his wife was unsure about keeping an 800-horse sport car in the family. He saw the wisdom of that, but rather than just get rid of it, he set the price at a steep $30,000. If it didn't sell, that wasn't his fault, now was it?
It sold.
To his credit, Lenny demanded cash. The dentist who bought it -- undoubtedly going through a mid-life crisis worthy of American Beauty -- brought the sackful of greenbacks and drove away happy. Lenny went shopping for a decent used minivan more appropriate for his family future . . . and a bottle of decent bourbon to toast his ride's farewell.
Too much alcohol destroyed that engine, but that doesn't mean the idea behind the fuel was a bad one. It just meant a stock engine wasn't meant to take the heat so many RPMs could generate, especially in the desert. Likewise, biofuels aren't the magic bullet that will replace petroleum fuels and keep us in the driver's seat in perpetuity. There simply isn't enough arable land on this planet to allow us both the luxury of endless daily commutes and food after one gets back from work. We will have to produce fuel efficiencies in our Western lifestyles, and many of them will be painful. That doesn't mean, however, that burning a bit of corn or potatoes or whatever during that transition won't help. We just have to prepare our economy a bit better, creating quite a bit less vertical integration, before we fire up the still.
And, perhaps most importantly, we need to dampen this damned noise machine cranked out by the people most invested in keeping ethanol and biodiesel from cutting into their petroleum profits. No society can think with all that inaccurate yammering constantly in their ears.
He got this 1971 Barracuda convertible through tragedy. It was willed to him after its owner, Lenny's uncle, died in Vietnam. Lenny's dad was smart enough to keep this inheritance in a garage until Lenny turned 16, and then showed even more smarts by not letting Lenny actually drive it until he turned 18. He had access to cars when he got his license at 16; but to make sure the 'Cuda didn't get wrecked by an inexperienced driver, dad pulled the engine. Lenny could tinker with it all he wanted in his auto shop classes, but by no means was the 440 Magnum V8 going back into the engine compartment until he was older.
So, what does a 16-year-old do with a big-assed engine, some modest disposable income, and dreams fueled by watching The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky & Hutch waaaay too much? He researched engines. The standard ignition was replaced by an electronic one favored by racers at the time. Far more torque got forced out of the crank when the low-profile supercharger, salvaged from a wrecking yard Super Bee, forced far more air through the 4-barrel carb. By the time the block went back into it's Barracuda home below the hood, Lenny had boosted the output to allow a decent 13.7 second acceleration from a stand still to 60 mph, far better than the stock components would allow.
What happened to that engine prompted me to think about biofuels.
Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about the topic of using food stock and other vegetable matter to drive our machinery. Every time I hear more about these so-called biofuels, I can't help but think there are missing pieces to the arguments, assumptions flung about like dogma that has never been empirically verified. For example, lots of folks are quite vocal against using our foods to brew fuels, saying that will lead to starvation. Can we really afford to drive when we are going hungry to do so?
This argument misses an essential facet of farming reality: farmers are going to sell their crops -- or personally use them -- to obtain the best return, to do what seems best for the farmer. If the price of the harvested crop falls, due to a glut for example, farmers have historically found other markets to exploit, among them fuel. New technology means new markets. Check out this July 1906 Popular Mechanics article for a good example:
For gas engines used for all purposes, alcohol has great advantages over gasoline and can be used in the engines now installed with only slight changes in the machinery. It will not even be necessary to send the engines back to the factory to rebuild; the new parts can be sent out and the change made by engineers of ordinary ability.
In 1887 Germany removed the tax on "denaturalized" alcohol; its manufacture and use, however, was comparatively small until 1901. In that year the potato crop showed an overproduction of 48,000,000 lbs., and in desperation at the enormous loss which seemed imminent, the potatoes were turned into alcohol. This so greatly stimulated its use that the following year the government held an industrial exposition in Berlin, devoted exclusively to a demonstration of the fuel, power and lighting qualities of the denaturalized alcohol. . . .
Cooking stoves of all sizes, forms and capacities, from the complete range with baking and roasting ovens, broiler, etc., to the simple tea and coffee lamp, are used in homes. In this country we may expect an enormous consumption, as the alcohol has all the advantages of city gas or gasoline for cooking purposes, while it is cheaper than gas and is free from the dangers of gasoline. It also makes a more intense heat than either.
When the internal combustion engines made their way into road machines, most models came equipped with alcohol-burning capacity, taking advantage of the modest distillation infrastructure already in place:
Most people are not aware that Henry Ford's Model T came in a variation that allowed the driver to switch the carburetor to run the engine on farm-made ethyl acohol (sic). This allowed the operator to stop at local farms (equipped with stills) to refuel his/her car during long trips through the backcountry. After all, the gas station wasn't exactly as ubiquitous in those days, as it is now.
This push to legalize and decentralize fuel production was widely supported by farmers themselves. After all, when the price of their crops rise, they receive more profit; when the price falls, they can shift more into alcohol production. Furthermore, not all fuel stocks need be the best food crops; one can also use crop wastes (NB: Links to a Word Doc file):
As a result of intense lobbying by the National Grange, Congress held hearings on a Denatured Alcohol Bill in February and March of 1906. The “Free Alcohol” hearings included testimony for abolishing the internal revenue tax on industrial alcohol. Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson testified that corn could produce a quantity of alcohol that would be “almost incredibly large,” suggesting that 170 gallons per acre was possible. He stated that the amount of potential alcohol lost in cornstalks alone was “so large as to be almost beyond the grasp of our conception.”
Which should bring us back to Lenny.
Once his ride was souped up, Lenny found himself living with his Dad in rural California near his grandparents. One of his chores involved getting up at 0-Dark-Thirty to mow granddad's lawn before the desert heat made such tasks unbearable.
I should point out that, as far as I have been able to determine, none of Lenny's family members lack what authors often euphamisticly call "color." Granddad originally hailed from the Ozarks of Missouri, once served time for running moonshine, and still kept up his still for his prodigious personal consumption of about 6 ounces per day, more when partying. He had a watermelon patch on his spread dedicated to stocking the mash tun and still. When his brew sat for more than 90 days in a bottle, though, it "grew too nasty for even him to drink." He kept those bottles -- gallon jugs, actually -- in the tool shed. It was to those jugs Lenny was directed when he arrived one day to mow the lawn. He was to use that nasty moonshine to fuel the mower.
If it was sufficiently energy-rich to drive a mower, Lenny thought. . . . "Granddad," he asked, "would this stuff work in my car?"
Granddad reportedly froze, thinking about the implications. His face lit up, but his answer was not quite what Lenny had been expecting.
"I'll get my coat," Granddad said.
The two took a quick trip to the 76 station to load up on 12 gallons of high-test leaded. Ten gallons of 'shine topped off the tank. Granddad spent some time futzing with the "carburetor mixture screws for primary mix to lean it and secondary to enrich it." Remember that time he spent as a ridge-runner. The whole family was mechanically inclined, especially when it came to engines.
They then sped off, top down, to Interstate 10 between Indio and Blyth, California. When they hit a flat stretch, Lenny dropped the hammer. Granddad was feeling good. He started yammering about the cars he'd owned, the speeds he'd hit in them. One detail shut him up, though. Lenny said, "Granddad, we're almost doing 200."
"Aw, Lordy," Granddad is reported to have said in reply.
The ethyl alcohol farm movement was not without its detractors. After all, if one could easily get fuel for one's car from the local farmer, how could an industrialist bent on monopolization hope to achieve that goal? This was a lesson learned first-hand by Washington Grange leader Carey Kegley. From the Word Doc link once again:
As State Master in 1905, Kegley urged the group to unite in opposition to business monopolies that affected their farms, such as the Harvester Trust (International Harvester) and the Oil Trust (Standard Oil).
Kegley pushed alcohol fuel to the group’s national convention in November, 1905. Cooperating with manufacturers who used alcohol as well as Grangers from across the country, Kegley thought they could “force an aggressive and determined fight” against “the most determined opposition of powerful monopolies.” Kegley viewed the “alcohol lamp, stove, engine, and still” as “perpetual Grange missionaries.” Exuding confidence, he predicted: “I believe kerosene and gasoline will soon be a thing of the past and alcohol, the farmers liquid fuel, will have taken its place.”
He supported a decentralized Grange network of stills, places where local farmers could bring their excess crops for distillation. The laws of 1905, though, did not feasibly permit such a thing; "Alcohol was not illegal as a motor fuel, but the hefty $2.08 per gallon federal tax on denatured alcohol made it prohibitive." Kegley's Grange pushed for changes that would allow it, as the Popular Mechanics article related. No one, though, had actually read that law before it passed. It had snags:
Initially, farmers thought they had succeeded, only to discover the 1906 law (and its subsequent revisions) actually worked against them. While the law did allow denatured alcohol to be produced tax-free, it stipulated that the process had to pass stringent regulations: a revenue official had to be on site at all times, the plant had to operate every day of the week except Sundays, and no plant that produced less than 100 gallons per day could operate. Because agricultural production would directly relate to seasonal crop production, no farm groups could produce alcohol year round. Perhaps at times of the year a plant would run full tilt, but there would be seasonal downtimes when fresh crops or waste were unavailable. There was no legal way alcohol cooperatives could work, and farm groups had no expertise to build or operate distilleries.
John D. Rockefeller probably heard the nasty things Kegley said about the "Oil Trust" and fought back, but with money, not words:
The Free Alcohol hearings held by Congress during February and March of 1906 were pivotal: representatives of the USDA testified strongly in favor of alcohol as a fuel as the hearings began. Yet, on April 20, 1906, the Secretary of Agriculture signed an essentially secret agreement with the General Education Board (GEB), a philanthropic arm of the Rockefeller Foundation and Standard Oil, which promised to provide nearly unlimited funding directly to the Department of Agriculture. After that, the USDA no longer supported alcohol fuel and in fact ordered the two bulletins on alcohol to be revised and reissued, taking a more negative stance on alcohol’s potential.
I was going to include here the fact that Rockefeller also supported the Prohibition movement as these folks note, but this PDF paper makes a convincing case that Rockefeller, Sr. actually funded them modestly out of his personal convictions. The author looked through the letters of both Sr. and Jr. and found that, though the contributions were large, they were not so large as to be crucial for the survival of the agencies to which they were sent. A majority of the funding came instead from the rank and file members, not from the leaders of the Oil Trust.
To understand why so many were in support of alcohol repeal, one must dive into the historical context of booze in the United States. A fascinating study called "Nation of Intoxication" (IIRC) fell into my possession a few years ago. The author, a UW professor, pointed out in the introduction how very much the average tippler in the nation's earlier days drank. We were per capita the second largest consumer of spirits in the Western world, behind Sweden. Alexis de Touqueville noted that stage coach rides took forever in the young nation, because the coach had to pull over every few hours to "water the horses and liquor the gentlemen." Laborers digging the Erie Canal were paid $5 a day plus a ration of 5 ounces of bourbon -- two ounces in the morning before work, 3 at lunch. After work, most of the workers headed off for dinner and more drinking. Since everyone could see the amount being consumed on an almost daily basis, the anti-saloon leagues across the country had enormous public support.
This does not exonerate Rockefeller from monopolist behavior, of course; it simply forces one to focus attention on the graft he spread through the General Education Board to the USDA rather than on the back-door strategy of funding the Anti-Saloon Leagues. One he did for business; the other to follow his personal convictions.
Either way, if not single-handedly, Rockefeller at least helped kill the Grange's dream. The enthusiasm of farm alcohol's potential as a universal fuel driving our economy met the hard reality of Rockefeller's ability to get what he wanted buried actually buried . . . just as Lenny's alcohol-fueled ride met the reality of too much heat.
Where were we? Ah, yes: "Aw, Lordy!" at 200 miles per hour. According to Lenny, that lasted about ten seconds. Something popped. Speed was lost. And then it all went downhill in an awful hurry. When he and his granddad finally came to rest on the side of the desert highway, the car was belching more smoke than a James Bond car in getaway mode. Damage included:
- 10 bent valve push rods
- Destroyed and spun main crank bearings
- 3 pistons with burned out holes
- 1 bent rocker arm
- Both blown out head gaskets
- 2 blown out freeze plugs
- Oil pan gasket blown out
It took a couple of hours to limp the miles home, and all the way the 'Cuda was "bellowing smoke like an old train steam engine." Granddad noted that "probably the only reason it never caught fire was that most of the oil shot out of the car through the tail pipe instead (of through) the many leaks it developed."
The dream of fast go-juice killed his car. Well, not "killed," but certainly sidelined. The 'Cuda sat in the "car hospital" for about six months awaiting a new engine and the modifications that would make it better, stronger, faster. The AMC Magnum was swapped for a 427 Hemi from a '74 Satellite police Interceptor. A $5,000 blue-printing and balancing, fuel injection, electronic ignition, and another low-profile supercharger brought the original 300hp engine to over 800, with a zero-to-sixty time of 7.3 seconds.
Like a Phoenix, the 'Cuda was reborn.
Let's cast our eyes to more recent times and re-examine biofuels. In either Eaarth or Deep Economy (maybe in both), Bill McKibben noted that biofuels were just a bad idea. Why take perfectly good food and burn it? He notes the old canard about how the rapid rise in ethanol plants in 2008 led to food shortages in Mexico as corn was turned more into car fuel and less into tortillas. I call that an old canard because so very many people quote it without really examining what it is they are quoting.
Really, why should diverting Midwestern corn to refineries have such a devastating effect on an economy thousands of miles south? Don't farmers in Mexico supply corn for their neighbors? The man who poo-pooed the biofuel conundrum himself gives background that might explain the situation. After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, McKibben notes:
Great floods of subsidized corn grown in factory farms across the Midwest have "washed away 1.3 million small farmers in Mexico," according to Michael Pollan. Mexican farmers can grow corn for 4 cents a pound, compared with the 6 cents a pound it costs to grow on American farms, but government subsidies bring our price down to 3 cents a pound, thereby setting the world price, wrecking he Mexican countryside, and enriching firms like Archer Daniels Midland.
(Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Times Books, 2007, p. 192.)
He continues, further quoting Pollan's observation of what suddenly happened next to those former farmers: "Unable to compete, they have left their land to join the swelling pools of Mexico's urban unemployed," reports Pollan. "Others migrate to the U.S. to pick our crops -- former farmers become day laborers."
Which means that, yes, biofuel refinement does constrict the supply of corn and, yes, that will drive up the price; but if we want people not to starve when faddish diversions of food crops temporarily constrict supply, we should probably not destroy the local economies and force folks from down south to permeate our borders in the process.
Also, I can't see a downside to converting a bunch of corn to something other than animal feed and high fructose sweetener. First of all, cows aren't evolved to eat such calorie-rich crap. Cattle are ruminants, meaning they distill nutrients in their cavernous guts. Too many calories causes the guts to rumble with too much power, causing infection. A quick intro on
kmo's C-Realm Podcast (sorry, I've forgotten both the speaker and the episode) noted that cows actually prefer the left-over mash from corn distillation. This brewer's mash has fewer calories, making more amenable to those over-sized guts. Supposedly, revenue officials during Prohibition used to cruise the country side looking for small farms with big cows; this meant the beasts were getting the best food, and that food was probably left over from something outlawed by the 18th Amendment.Speaking of cows, let's not forget what's happened to the American mid-section since that sweetener started tainting our sodas. Those beverages used to be fairly rare treats in my youth; they have since gotten so cheap as to be ubiquitous. Also, despite the nay-sayers, there is laboratory evidence confirming what many have long suspected, that "all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same." Said the researcher:
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."
If burning this highly-processed corn extract in our cars will keep it out of the American diet, I say burn, baby, burn; it's time for another pointless road trip.
Here's a thought: who would spread the rumor that refining causes food shortages? Let's get another take on farm populism like the Grange's Kegley advocated. Thomas Frank notes:
Populism tore through other states as well -- wailing all across Texas, the South, and the West in the 1890s -- but Kansas was the place that really distinguished itself by its enthusiasm. Driven to the brink of ruin by years of bad prices, debt, and deflation, the state's farmers came together in huge meetings where homegrown troublemakers like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorted them to "raise less corn and more hell." The radicalized farmers marched through the small towns in day-long parades, raging against what they called the "money power." And despite all the clamor, they still managed to take the state's traditional Republican masters utterly by surprise in 1890, sweeping the small-town slickers out of office and ending the careers of many a career politician.
(Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, 2004, p. 32.)
Giving farmers a new market to supply would put a kink in the money hose currently fattening our nation's corn buyers. These firms are taking advantage of a condition that has long affected farmers. Frank explains:
Farming is a field uniquely unsuited to the freewheeling whirl of the open market. There are millions of farmers, and they are naturally disorganized; they can't coordinate their plans one with another. Not only are they easily victimized by powerful middlemen (as they were by the railroads in the Populists' day), but when they find themselves in a tough situation -- when, say, the price they are getting for wheat is low -- farmers do not have the option of cutting back production, as every other industry does. Instead, each of those millions of farmers works harder, competes better, becomes more efficient, cranks out more of the commodity in question . . . and thus makes the glut even worse and pushes the prices still lower. This is called an "overproduction trap," and it can only be overcome by a suspension of competition through government intervention. Such intervention is what the Populists and the farmers' unions fought for decades to secure; it finally came with the New Deal, which brought price supports and acreage set-asides and loan guarantees.
(Frank, ibid., pp. 62-64.)
Today, we have familiar faces pushing an end to those hard-fought protectionist regulations:
The admirers of farm deregulation . . . see in it not some hideous power grab but a heroic "restructuring" of the food industry. This is "vertical integration," a more flexible and a far more efficient food-delivery system than the fragmented, disorganized, heavily subsidized system of the past. Cargill, ADM, and the rest of the giants are bringing order out of chaos; if we finally have to say good-buy to the Jeffersonian fantasy of the family farm -- if we have to transform the prosperous farmer into a sharecropper and turn the countryside into an industrialized wasteland and destroy the small towns -- maybe it's all for the best.
(Frank, ibid., p. 66.)
The ability to withhold a crop from the market when prices fall gives the individual farmer too much power to these deregulationists. Diverting even a portion of the harvest to fuel the tractors (as they still do in Germany) would drive down supply and drive up the prices those at the top of the supply chain would have to pay, not to mention the millions of gallons of petroleum fuel those farmers would avoid purchasing, softening that market.
Bottom line: there are very real people with a lot of money at stake bent on preventing a biofuel movement, especially if that proves decentralized. Those people have every reason to amplify reasons against building the infrastructure to burn less petroleum and more biomass. We are probably witnessing the corporate noise machine in just about every pronouncement of biofuel evil.
I know you're wondering: What about Lenny's Barracuda? That saga has a bittersweet ending.
He never told me whether or not he fed it alcohol after that fateful ride. It did get a NOS injection system and an on-demand clutch for the new supercharger, as well as decent tires and a roll cage (now that's another fun story). All in all, though, his ride suffered from, of all things, maturity.
He and his wife married when he was in the navy. They got a nice surprise when he was discharged; the new baby promised changes on the way. For one, he pretty much abandoned the family past-time and all but quit drinking the hard stuff. Given how much every male in that family drank, that was saying something. Second, his wife was unsure about keeping an 800-horse sport car in the family. He saw the wisdom of that, but rather than just get rid of it, he set the price at a steep $30,000. If it didn't sell, that wasn't his fault, now was it?
It sold.
To his credit, Lenny demanded cash. The dentist who bought it -- undoubtedly going through a mid-life crisis worthy of American Beauty -- brought the sackful of greenbacks and drove away happy. Lenny went shopping for a decent used minivan more appropriate for his family future . . . and a bottle of decent bourbon to toast his ride's farewell.
Too much alcohol destroyed that engine, but that doesn't mean the idea behind the fuel was a bad one. It just meant a stock engine wasn't meant to take the heat so many RPMs could generate, especially in the desert. Likewise, biofuels aren't the magic bullet that will replace petroleum fuels and keep us in the driver's seat in perpetuity. There simply isn't enough arable land on this planet to allow us both the luxury of endless daily commutes and food after one gets back from work. We will have to produce fuel efficiencies in our Western lifestyles, and many of them will be painful. That doesn't mean, however, that burning a bit of corn or potatoes or whatever during that transition won't help. We just have to prepare our economy a bit better, creating quite a bit less vertical integration, before we fire up the still.
And, perhaps most importantly, we need to dampen this damned noise machine cranked out by the people most invested in keeping ethanol and biodiesel from cutting into their petroleum profits. No society can think with all that inaccurate yammering constantly in their ears.