Yes, bioplastics are a most excellant use of non-food biomass!

You raise valid issues. I too argued against using corn from the beginning, but as I mentioned, it was the easy, inevitable choice for politicians to make in the U.S. since we already had a surplus and the land/means to grow a whole lot more corn quickly. But while the corn lobby was instrumental in banging the drum in Washington and pushing through the overly-generous incentives and mandates, from what I can tell the majority of the people actually growing the corn and building/running the ethanol plants are honest, hard-working people who stepped up to the plate to do what the government told them we wanted them to do. Even with the government support, it was still a far riskier undertaking than they “needed” to take. There were plenty of other things they could have spent their money on which would have given them a larger, quicker return on their investment rather than take a chance on large-scale biofuel production. So they can even be considered more visionary and altruistic than the average American entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They deserve better than to have the rug pulled out from under them after they’ve already committed their money and time at the government’s urging.

I agree that North America is in a different position from the “third world” where it comes to using food crops for biofuel, but the article we are commenting on was specifically about corn ethanol in the U.S. and our governments policies towards it. .

But, just to be certain on recent data, I checked the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture website at:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/corn/trade.htm

US corn exports in the 2007-08 market year were 6 percent higher than in 2006-07 and the highest since 1990. The corn export market has always fluctuated wildly, as the chart at the URL above shows. But from 2005 on — at the exact same time that we were ramping up our corn ethanol production — our yearly exports of corn-as-food increased steadily from 45 million metric tons in 2005 to 61 million metric tons in 2008. Clearly, the U.S. surge in corn ethanol production in recent years has NOT prevented the U.S. from growing and exporting more corn-as-food than ever to the rest of the world. We started this corn ethanol production thing from a base point of having a whole lot of excess corn production capacity in the U.S. and we are producing enough corn for both uses and not taking food out of anyone’s mouth.

Yes, the price of corn has gone up and that makes it harder for poorer countries to buy it — but the price of ALL food and has gone way up the last few years because food production and distribution is energy-intensive and crude oil went for $50 a barrel in 2005 to $140 a barrel in 2008. The rise in the price of corn seems to track with the rise in the prices of other food commodities.

It has gone from an average high of $2.50 per bushel in 2004 to as much as $5.50 per bushel in mid-2008 (when oil prices hit their peak). Note that the price of corn has also dropped significantly of late, still tracking with the price of crude oil as crude dropped from $140 a barrel just 6 months ago to around $45 a barrel today.

U.S. corn exports are expected to drop in 2009, but that is because of the worldwide economic collapse, not because ethanol plants sucking up all the corn. This popular and widely-circulated idea that making corn ethanol in the U.S. was starving the poor people in the rest of world made for a lot of nice media stories and moral outrage, but the facts are it was just that — a story. It was not and is not true.

Theres an interesting book called “Good News; For A Change”, written by two Canadians, that documents situations all over the world, where locals have taken things into their own hands and solved problems that big mega projects, western farming, etc. were just making worse. Areas like farming, fishing, aquifer improvement and water supply, forestry, energy etc.
Showed how small and simple is sometimes better.
It’s also refreshing to hear good news about the environment and other issues.

Aren’t bioplastics a smart use of biomass and crops? Some are now completely compostable and can replace up to half the different types of plastic in use. We use 5% or more of our oil to make plastic and then throw most of it away. Non food crops can be used, like switchgrass.

Which may, in fact, have started to begin changing their views after Malawai’s success in “I’ll do what you do, not what you say”.

Your point regarding government pulling the rug out from under investors is well taken. Such action raises both ethical (bait and switch) and trust issues. How will investors react to the next energy incentive when they just got screwed? However, I’ve gotta tell you I don’t have a lot of sympathy for these guys. It was always obvious that corn ethanol made no sense, and that the mandates were driven by ADM and their buddies. These guys knew they were investing in a business that would never exist without government mandates. I don’t call people like that businessmen, I call them leeches.

Regarding the food issue, you are looking at this from a purely domestic point of view, while it is a global issue. I’d encourage you to put some time into understanding why food to fuel is such a problem, and how it has affected third world countries who have counted on the US to feed their people.

Perhaps the corn ethanol infrastructure could be taken over, and gradually converted to ethanol from cellulose.

But really, we are just fooling around with processes here that are more or less carbon positive.

We need carbon negative sources of energy, like biocarbon/carbon capture and storage.

Electric cars or plug in hybrids running on carbon negative electricity could make a huge impact on the whole problem.

The problem with all of this, of course, remains carbon capture and storage.

Carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation would be much better, I think.

Here’s an interesting article on in situ sequestration by mineral carbonation:

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/futures/36550

Speeding up Rock Reaction Could Lock away Carbon Dioxide

Natural carbonation reactions in rocks in Oman are faster than scientists believed and are currently locking away 10,000-100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. That’s according to a team from Columbia University, US, which proposes that speeding up the reactions by increasing the temperature of the gas could help store more than one billion tons of carbon dioxide per year in Oman alone.

“Solid sequestration is a lot safer than pumping supercritical carbon dioxide gas into underground pore space,” Peter Kelemen of Columbia told environmentalresearchweb. “In addition, in situ mineral carbonation can use the huge reservoir of potential energy created by plate tectonics, which exposes deep earth materials on the Earth’s surface. There are positive feedback mechanisms in which far-from-equilibrium reactions between rocks from the Earth’s interior and surface waters liberate heat – which accelerates reaction rates – and cause fractures that expose fresh minerals for continued reaction.”

Sure would be nice – use positive feedback reactions run partially on geothermal heat to fight positive feedback reactions occuring in the atmosphere, leading to runaway global warming.

while true, overlooks the need for a PHEV to have some liquid fuel, and the fact that it’s going to take 20 years to replace existing ICE vehicles. When ethanol refineries and ammonia synthesis run on wind and solar electricity, the CO2 footprint of maize based ethanol will be lower, especially if stover is also converted to ethanol.