When the nation gathers around its television sets this upcoming Sunday to watch the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers face off for best title in the NFL, Americans everywhere will be feeling the effects of our weak energy policy (even if they don’t know it).
Chicken wing consumption during this year’s Super Bowl is estimated to be 1.23 billion wings, down 12.3 million from last year. One of the culprits culpable for the decline is high ethanol prices, which have driven chicken companies to produce one percent fewer birds due in large part to “record high corn and feed prices,” according to the 2013 Wing Report by the National Chicken Council. Meanwhile, the Renewable Fuels Standard diverted 40% of the nation’s total corn production to be used as motor fuel, in the form of ethanol. This, combined with severe drought conditions last year, has driven the price of ethanol to record highs, which in turn forced chicken farmers to reduce the size of their flocks. Thus, Americans are seeing painfully higher prices at the grocery store.
According to Gallup, nearly 76% of Americans say higher food prices are hurting their family’s finances, and this year’s Super Bowl festivities will be the latest manifestation of that fact. Prices are only estimated to get even higher. Converting 40% of our animal feed to gasoline because of the renewable fuel standard is not helping consumers or their pocketbooks, as misguided energy policies continue to “peck” away at our recovery.
There is another reason why corn prices are so high that usually gets ignored or overlooked, and that is the artificially high price of sugar in this country. This forces the widespread use of corn sugar (fructose) instead.
Get rid of the sugar tariffs, plant a bunch of sugar cane in Haiti and help everyone. (except the Florida family who currently controls the US sugar policy.)
Having fewer chicken wings available for the Big Game (Can’t say Superbowl) is only an inconvenience to us, but there are millions of people in the world who are having problems getting enough to eat. One of the most shameful things driving up food prices globally is the diversion of grain to produce ethanol-based fuel. I say shameful because the Greens’ pretense at saving the earth is causing hunger by driving up the cost of mealies and tortillas. This does not concern people whose tastes are so refined that they would never stoop to eating mealies or tortillas.
The worst part about Ethanol subsidies is that any green that has any real scientific background (not all that many) agree that they are beyond stupid, just as they would agree that having the U.S. consume sugar cane ethanol from Brazil would give U.S. ethanol producers some say in the farming laws in Brazil (right now, there isn’t much in the way of sustainable farming policies, making clear cutting rainforests more profitable in the short term, rather than helping educate the farmers in crop rotation and other 18th and 19th century basics). Plus, with reduced sugar prices, and cane sugar (which is actually better for your health than high fructose corn syrup), Pepsi, Coke, and the few families that control the small U.S. sugar supply would soon have to drop prices significantly, because a place like Haiti could produce significant amounts of cane for either ethanol (which is dumb because ethanol is massively energy inefficient, unless we were using it as part of the fuel to transport cane from Haiti to the U.S., or from Brazil to the U.S.), and the price of food all over the world would go down, helping many poor people, and allowing the aid we do give other countries to be more helpful (in my opinion, we shouldn’t be giving any country that can’t feed itself, like Egypt, tanks, when we can give them food instead, if we are going to give them foreign aid).
So some poor brown people may starve? With all the news recently about there are too many humans and that humanity is a plague, the greenies see some poor people starving to death as a feature, not a bug.
it’s true. The Greens would like to see millions starve, if it fulfills their agenda. To them, Human beings are the parasite on the earth that need to be removed. It really is kinda sick that they put the lives of a Delta Smelt( a tiny fish the size of a sardine) ahead of the massive agriculture potential of California. What used to grow millions of tons of vegetables of all varieties all year long, has been shut down and thousands of people put out of work, for a tiny fish.
Killing or starving millions more people with misguided agendas for renewable energy will earn somebody within the Earth First crowd an award. These people need to be stopped.
As long as they are the last to fall to the alligator that is.
Boycott the Super Bowl. Screw CBS and Steve Koft—— get the skinny purple lipped maggot back in there and ask him why he watched our Benghazi staff murdered in real time.
Until then—- CBS is OFF in our house.
Why is anyone here acting surprised? Obamee said his goal was an energy policy that made gas unaffordable. The byproduct of that is for an increasing number of Americans, food is unaffordable too.
And all those Americans are going on food stamps and will vote Democrat to continue to get the money rolling in, because they know Republicans will make them take responsibility.
When the State provides the means of day-to-day living for an increasing percentage of American citizens, this is what we mean by the fact Obamee is a Socialist.
Just a few problems with the story: http://www.ethanolrfa.org/exchange/entry/tar-and-feathers-coalition-fumbles-again/
Just because a tool of the farm lobby says so doesn’t make it true, not by a hell of a long way. Archer-Midland-Daniels’ money is just as “dirty” as any other lobby’s.
It doesn’t take a genius to see what has happened to corn prices over the last few years. It also doesn’t take an expert to figure out that any fuel (corn ethanol) that takes more BTU’s to produce than it yields is dumb as a box of rocks.
Corn ethanol is OK (sans bullcrap federal subsidies) as a replacement for MTSB or other mandated oxygenators in gasoline (in small amounts) but at the E-15 or E-85 level it draws water, rots steel, and robs performance. As a primary fuel it is not even environmentally responsible.
I have to give the farm lobby credit. This has been one of the most successful scams ever perpetrated where billions in public funding were in essence stolen and nobody is going to jail. I live in corn country and the farmers I know are laughing all the way to the bank. The old idea of the country bumpkin being taken advantage of by the city slicker has been turned on its head by corn ethanol.
Suckers!
Converting 40% of our animal feed to gasoline because of the renewable fuel standard is not helping consumers or their pocketbooks, as…
The only time the feds give a you-know-what about consumers and their pocketbooks is at tax time.
You should start with facts instead of the crap printed in this article. When corn is made into ethanol, only the carbs are used. The remaining amount is protein which goes to feeding livestock. So if you start with 56lbs of corn, (eight pounds of the 56 is water), 24 pounds remains as feed, and 24 pounds are consummed making ethanol. Proteins are what makes meat on animials.
When the price of corn was low, $2 -$4, the complaint was corn was making Americans fat. American corn farmers were putting the rest of the world’s farmers out of business, because they could not compete with our under priced corn. Now all a sudden, the world is starving because our corn is too expensive! Well, it has more to do with Asia being able to afford to buy American corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans, as well as $100 a barrel oil, and a drought than the fact that a little over 20% of the food value of corn is converted to ethanol. Besides corn, sorgum (milo) is now used to make ethanol.
I wish people would get some of the basic information about ethanol correct. you don’t have to like it, but you should know what’s really going on. First of all, the 40% corn being taken for ethanol. The majority of that is still used for livestock feed with distilled grains. It’s just corn that has the ethanol taken out first. The corn isn’t” thrown away” after it’s use. Secondly, Brazil has been importing ethanol from the U.S. lately. Thirdly, food prices overall have gone down since the ethanol mandate kicked in. Fourthly, the Brazilian Govt. has reported A significant drop in deforestation. I don’t have the figures in front of me so I cant’ give you a percentage. It’s okay if you’re against ethanol but I urge you to check up on it yourself and you might find that a lot of your assumptions are not or never were correct.