World Bank chief: Ethanol cars run on human misery

How about

Instead of turning 10% of the increasing consumption of hydrocarbons into "renewables", having a goal of having the amount of hydrocarbons burnt be 10% less in coming years than it is currently projected to be?

Then we don't have to argue over relative efficiencies nor push food prices through the roof.

Or maybe this is all about putting a crimp in China's style. And sod the other net importers who can't afford it. Or maybe it's the other way around and is a 2nd World plot to drag the decadent West's living standards down to their level.

No need for conflict

There's no need for there to be any conflict between food and fuel production. Biofuel can be manufactured just as easily from the *inedible* parts of plants. You have to grow the plant anyway for food, so you may as well use the parts you can't eat to manufacture fuel.

And fossil fuel powered cars run on human joy do they?

Way past time for everyone to unbunch their underpants, and start growing hemp again.

Colza oil

in diesel engines. cheaper and easier than any other "biofuel" scheme. you can add 20 to 50% of oil in the regular gasoil, and it's better for the engine than regular gasoil. The problem is, Texaco don't get money from that. They don't get much from ethanol either. Which might shed a new light on Zoellick's position.

And let's face it, all actions by the world bank so far tended to increase poverty and hunger in developping countries.

What about beer consumption...

Obviously people at the World Bank dont own ethanol cars... I bet they drink beer though!

There are all kind of statistics that show the grain consumed in beer production could easily feed the world many times over, but they are not attacking that.

@JonB

"Little economics teaser for you...

If the price of coffee doubles, is Ethiopia a) Worse off or b) Better off?"

As I understand it, the price of coffee hasn't increased quite as much as theat of cereal crops has.

This is because:

A) You can't make a decent biofuel from arabica.

B) Coffee-growing conditions are quite far removed from cereal-growing conditions.

Coffee is not in competition with maize, so does not benefit from an increase in the price of basic food crops.

In fact, coffee is technically a luxury good.

Little economics lesson for you:

When the price of essentials goes up, disposal income goes down.

As disposable income goes down, so do the prices of luxuries.

We have encouraged our poorer neighbours to base their economies on luxury cash crops. Which won't make them cash now. Or feed them. We are b*st*rds, basically.

Biodiesel...

Biodiesel is ridiculously easy to make. Go to your local McDogfood, nick the used cooking oil (they LOVE to not have to pay for disposal!), and run it through a coffee filter. BAM! Biodiesel.

It requires no modifications to a diesel engine to run biodiesel. My old garage manager used to use it in his 2007 Ford F350, and he actually got BETTER mileage than using traditional #2 diesel. And far cheaper, with diesel at $4.859 a gallon at our fuel station.

@lglethal

Hmm... seems Ford was also into the nuke biz... or wanted to be :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

@A J Stiles

True but since those methods are uneconomical, the "big companies" wouldn't bother and it's back to ethanol and the starving millions !!

@Pierre - that's because the World Bank is an American-run organisation that is for the benefit of the Americans. It is better to take a look at what the Asian Development Bank, the African Bank and, now, the Latino Bank are doing !! Starved peons cannot work hard for their multi-national massas !!

@Oxfam can go fish - Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit on the river bank, drinking beer all day !! :-)

What about the economy?

So many comments about politics, but none about economies. I tried the E85 fuel in a couple of my cars and found that the fuel economy took a decided dip (5%+) and the get-up-and-go had got-up-and-went. I switched back to the real stuff a bit sharpish!

Carts pull the horses in the developed world

Correct observations above of developing world economies are tending to confuse causes with effects. (I'll spare the Grauniad my ire).

Follow the money. First, the USA has been dumping foodstuffs into developing countries at prices at which the farmers there cannot compete in the open market, and so are driven out of agriculture. Second, the terms of reciprocal arrangements mean that developing countries are forced to produce for export rather than for the domestic population, so as to procure dollars to repay foreign loans.

I wonder what the World Bank has to do with all this - not.

So what's the plan?

Are we going to ban bio fuels? Becuase if farmers can make more money selling crops for fuel rather than food that's the only way to stop them.

It seems the issue is not biofuels being inherently evil (much as I know the reg despises anything that may be good for the environment) but that the increases in oil prices have made previously unprofitable crop uses the cheaper option.

@Its how i would do it

> bit of starvation based depopulation, disease, war and famine

Starting with, presumably, those countries whose tiny agricultural sectors have no hope of feeding them like, well, Great Britain? Be careful whatyou ask for...

No good deed goes unpunished...

It is the law of unintended consequences. Usually governments invent "good deeds" and we go from there.

Oh, goody. E85. Now what was the price of that corn tortilla?

Never mind!

Naive?

>The comments above seem a little naive..That is standard capitalism, where

>short term profit is put before long term investment, note the quick fix ethanol...

That's beyond naive.

Ethanol had nothing to do with capitalism and market forces.

It got it's start in dunderheaded environmentalists.

Back 20 years ago they required oxygenators in the fuel in certain parts of the U.S. to reduce pollution. The industry chose the cheapest one -- MTBE. Which is a water soluble carcinogen. Ok, that wasn't smart.

So the laws started to change that said no more MTBE -- you need Ethanol instead!

Problem was...you don't need oxygenators today. Advances in the computer controls for the cars address the problems that chemical additives like MTBE or Ethanol are meant to address. But dunderheaded environmentalists wouldn't accept fuel with oxygenators.

Then the farm lobby -- about as warped as you can think of from capitalism with a large number of federal programs and subisidies that muck with the market -- realized that having 10% of the fuel supply be ethanol was a way to increase farm profits...and they took up the cause of requiring Ethanol everywhere, not just where oxygenators had been needed twenty years ago for pollution control.

Big oil's response? Shrug their shoulders. Ethanol can't be mixed at the refineries, nor pumped by existing pipelines. And you need a lot more of it the MTBE to achieve the same effect. So they bought the extra tanker trucks, barges, and rail cars...and removed petroleum storage capacity at terminals to store ethanol instead, and did all the other steps to meet the law requiring ethanol to be used -- much more expensive, but they don't really care, they just add on the standard 15% profit to whatever it costs them to produce the fuel.

That Ethanol has a lower energy content which means you need to consume a few percentage points more fuel to drive as far...oh well, oil companies get to sell more fuel, too. Oh, that of course stresses a refining and distribution network already maxxed out driving up costs to constrain usage somemore...

Ethanol has nearly nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with out-of-date environmentalists who like to make nice incomes going by continously suing somebody for something, combined with a farm lobby that would make Karl Marx proud. Plus politicians that pander to both of those groups, and healthy dose of bureaucrats who enjoy their government jobs in [agriculture|environmentalism], and corporations that just shake their head at stupidity and simply tack on their pre-determined profit margin to whatever the cost of producing goods are...even if substantial parts of those costs had nothing to do with their own decisions or how they would have made investments in a free market.

@ Ishkandar

"that's because the World Bank is an American-run organisation that is for the benefit of the Americans."

That was exactly my point. Ethanol is BAD for World Bank because Texaco doesn't get money from it. Recycled (or brand new) oil in unmodified diesel engines is BAD for World bank (and for most of "Western" govs) because Texaco, Shell and company can't make money out of it. Lobbying at its worst. I must mention here that putting 20 to 50 % oil in your diesel engine actually helps your local colza producer, which re-equilibrates "world economy" because we don't need to flood third-world countries with our heavily-subventionned excedents anymore. Still the World Bank (and consorts) will never agree to that, because it goes against their very aim, which is to get as much money from developping countries as they can. And that implies the need to keep them "underdevelopped".

Correct

Too many people in the world already, bit of starvation based depopulation, disease, war and famine will sort it out and reduce C02 levels.

Quite Correct..

The Barstard from the Bush

Biodiesel is more difficult?

No. Just no. I work for an environmentalist organization (we do electronic waste disposal), and we operate a fleet of stonking huge trucks that get 5 miles to the gallon on near-$5/gallon diesel and have saddle tanks that you could store dead bodies in. This situation was naturally at odds with our mission. So we made some friends in the local restaurant and snack food production industries, built a "small" refinery (about $25,000 investment), and now we produce enough biodiesel at the cost of something like $0.05 per gallon in consumables to feed a fleet 3 times our size.

The only problem comes when we have to send a truck outside range from our facility and run it on regular diesel.

We've also received a visit from the police because our neighbors (read: The town council) were concerned that we weren't participating in the mandatory local recycling program... Nevermind the gigantic "WASTE DISPOSAL" and recycling logos painted on the side of our vehicles. Unfortunately that program is mandatory in the sense that you "must participate in the program" and not "must recycle" - so we stick the stupid little bin out on the curb once a week with one aluminum can in it, and the rest of our waste goes onto our own trucks. But that's another issue.

Bye-bye rainforests

The high value of biofuel crops is leading to deforestation in Brazilian rainforests to grow biofuels. It is likely that we are nearing a 'tipping point' where the rainforest is no longer able to generate the rainfall it needs to sustain itself and so will collapse.

I think that's what they call irony.

Eat beef and starve a child

While ethanol might use up some grains that could otherwise be used to feed a starving child, so too could the grains that are wastefully converted into excess quantities of beef in feedlots.

There is no real grain/soy/whatever shortage. Instead, various consumptions rise to consume the production. When a new consumer emerges then other consumption needs to adjust.

The major buffer between production and consumption is the production of feedlot animals using the surplus grain/soy.

I'm not a vegetarian. Animals-as-food make a lot of sense, but raising them feedlot style does not. There is a lot of land, for example hill country, that cannot be used agriculturally except by running cattle and sheep etc. Traditionally animals have been used to convert waste and marginal resources into food: a few pigs and chickens fed on scraps etc, but now we use prime agricultural land to raise grains and soybeans to raise feedlock animals.... and for those that have eaten both: grass fed beef really does taste better.

Feedlot animal production, however, is extremely wasteful. The food input is many times the food output. Raising one food unit of feedlot output to give a Westerner an extra heart attack could feed many tens of starving kids.

What really screws things up are the various agricultural subsidies that encourage inappropriate production and consumption models.

The trick to making ethanol is to not use grains but instead use grasses and sugar cane etc. These don't compete for the same land as grain production (the optimum land for grain/soy != optimum land for grasses/sugar cane).

Well, well, well

I'm not a specialist on energy, but sometimes I get pissed off with the poor and untrue discourses people, which we hope to be well informed, do. Ethanol cars run on misery? As far as I know, there is no "misery" in the developed world. So, what is it about?

Well, here some points:

- ethanol production is inefficient in North America and Europe. Does it take place from food production? Certainly yes. There. Whatever it is for, fuel or food, the crops are financed with heavy subsidies anyway. The only way food get to poor places is from donations! Well done! Great way not to feed misery!

- Brazil has been producing ethanol for 30 years, from sugar cane. This month the comsuption of ethanol has been larger than gasoline. Cars run on 100% ethanol or whatever the mix of ethanol and gasoline you prefer. An uninformed person would say: You are destroying the Amazon forest! Bullshit. We have huge areas occupied by cattle that still can be used for agriculture. The Amazon issue is totaly another discussion...

- What about other poor countries? Just like Brazil itself, it has never been a problem of land, but of public policies of distribution. And, as a matter of fact, Brazil is "giving away" technology to other countries to produce ethanol. Not because we are the nice guys, but as a market strategy to make ethanol worldwide viable.

Now, is it a food issue? Well, here we go again! A new environmental/human rights bullshit, to sell the idea that initiaves like the Brazilian one are stupid, wrong, as a practical way to convince legislators in the consuming centers (oh! would it be the rich countries?) to adopt restrictions to what could be a source of income to poor regions. Let's just pretend it is about about food, ethanol and environment.. and forget about subsidies, market access restrictions, and where exactly the pockets are going to be filled with money...

@AC & heystoopid Ethiopian food production.

From the world food porgram:-

Facts & Figures

Population: 77million

Land area: 1,104,300 sq km

Climate: Tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation

Terrain: High plateau with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley

Food Production: Cereals, pulses, oilseed, sugar cane, potatoes, quat, hides, cattle, sheep, goats

Right, my coffee point was (I thought obviously) fascetious, the shortage of food production in ethiopia isn't actually relevant in this context, the point is that it is a country with an economy dependent on agriculture, such an economy is better off from high food prices (whether at war or chanting at a hippy tree hugging love in).

Similarly to the obvious statements that ethiopia has spent a significant time at war, the growth of food prices actually has broader causes than bio-fuel alone.

The growth of wealth in India and China has meant that people who previously existed on the bread line, can now buy more food, so they do. Oil prices, and as has been observed in numerous other Reg articles farming uses rather a lot of fuel, have gone up.

The bottom line is that it's time to hand out condoms with the food parcels.