Here is a link to a Royal Society (Great Britain's Scientific society of note) article that might be worth a read:

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?tip=1&id=7366

It's still impressive that most of the media of note and our famous Main Stream Media (MSM) as well as a lot of normally progressive types just don't seem to "get it" in the following ways:

1. Farmers have to be able to sell crops for more than it costs to produce them. Otherwise they and the communities that depend on them eventually go broke, and no more food gets grown.

2. Prices for food have to rise when the inputs to make that food also rise. And all of those inputs (fertilizer, electricity, diesel fuel, property taxes, insurance, health costs, college expenses, farm machinery, etc) tend to be going up.

3. Removing the starch and sugar from grains to make them into fuels does nothing to the remainder of the protein, complex carbs, oils, vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc. Either DDGS or DDG's are available en mass - 30 wt% protein instead of 8% protein....and their are millions of tons currently available. All that has to be done is to pay more than those using it for animal feed, and you can feed a few hundred million people..or maybe a billion.

4. Removing the fossil fuels from the farm can be done, but it won't be cheap (see (1)). Are people willing to pay the slight increase needed to pay off the investments to get the petroleum off the farm, to a large extent? So far, no evidence of that.

5. At present, the primary fossil fuel inputs to farming are NH3 derived from Ngas or coal, diesel and gasoline derived from you know where, and any electricity derived from coal, nukes or Ngas. The electricity can be made from wind turbines in the U.S. midwest for about the same price as it is currently being obtained, or for up to 5 c/kw-hr more than that the dirt cheap stuff made by old fashioned and dangerous polluting ways. NH3 can be made from electricity and water and air. Fuel to replace diesel and gasoline can be made by either using NH3 or by using wind derived electricity to make H2 to reduce CO2. Gasoline replacements can also be made from the sugars and starches in crops. Diesel replacements can also be made from vegetable oils. Fertilizer can also be made from animal and composted plant material, which can also make methane in the process, avoiding the need to mine Ngas.

6. Ethanol (EtOH) can be made using little or no fossil fuel inputs, but this requires some additional capital investment - especially the dryers for DDG/DDGS. It might mean using some of the by-products from fermentation as fuel, and possibly more cellulose inputs, such as corn cobs. And it will require the use of more electricity...which is easily made by wind turbines.

7. The CO2 coming off the fermentations can either be buried (this is a case where plants absorb CO2 which is then REMOVED from the atmosphere) by sequestration or can be reduced by H2 derived from water and wind turbines. But either way, you need to be able to sell this EtOH for more than it costs to make it, otherwise, it won't happen. The same goes for burying CO2 (again, with energy provided by wind turbines)...somebody has to pay the bill. How about the ridiculously wealthy living along the coastline...unless they want their beachfront mansions buried by the melt-water from the Greenland icesheet...better pay up.

8. We won't be able to make 9.5 million barrels of EtOH/day (that's 146 Billion gallons/yr) - roughly equal to our current gasoline consumption. We have to quit pigging out at the gasoline trough. The only known way to do that in the U.S. is to have gasoline prices rise to the point where people get 40 to 80 mpg on average, or else they use mass transit that is electrically powered. Besides, thanks to Peak Oil, that will happen anyway. The question is, where do you want the money used to buy that gasoline and diesel to go - to oil companies, to foreign governments or to the federal/sate and local governments? It's an either-or thing.....And don't buy that line from the oil companies that they need the "even more money" to find more oil....most of the oil has already been found. And companies like XOM are not investing what they are currently hauling in.....

9. Perhaps as an alternative to converting carbs to EtOH, maybe we should just scale back the amount of grains grow....that would have the same effect on prices. At least prices would get to an economically sustainable level. And farmers might be able to use NH3 made by non-polluting means...

But I think the same ones yapping about the effect of EtOH on crop prices would scream about point (9). In their minds, are people supposed to make a living by growing food? Doubtful.

Nb41