I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum.
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).
US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.
So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).
I thought they discovered at least decades ago that our oil is actually largely inorganic? It's not dinosaurs & ferns but a direct chemical & physical process. I know a lot of people still say it's just a competing theory but they have found many large deposits in places where it's not possible for it to have been organic. (too deep, in the middle of pure granite with only raw volcanic material and no other organics, etc)
Oil is fluid, so it will not necessarily stay where it is formed, but it will flow through the rocks until it is stopped by impermeable rocks, like granite.
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
Once you realize how much more efficient solar panels are (compared to plants) at capturing energy from the sun, the next logical question is: could it make sense to synthesize food with the help of electricity from solar power?
There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
Yeah, you only get out something like 30% more energy than you put in[1]. So this isn't so much about how great solar is but is more about how bad corn ethanol is...
I think the theoretical idea is that we want to ensure that there is always a very large domestic corn supply, in the event of war or something. Corn is a crop that has a lot of uses; it can be refined into sugar, it can be used as flour, it's relatively energy dense food-wise, and it can be fairly easily converted into fuel if necessary.
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
I would say it is even worse, it is a scam to feed $ to the rich due to Gov subsidizes.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process.
Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem.
Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money?
It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever.
Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
Preserving farmland and maintaining a one- or two-year reserve supply of crucial cereals makes sense for food security. In the event of a global food crisis, getting fallow land under plow should be relatively straightforward. It isn't like manufacturing where the skills and jobs and factories just went overseas. Farmers and farming aren't going away.
Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security.
> Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production.
I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost.
> Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security.
If food security were a motivating factor in policy, we would be diversifying away from corn, because drought and aquifer depletion are threatening the ability to continue to grow it.
Nope, that's the cover story. The US subsidizes production, not capacity, which results in lots of excess crop that gets dumped on the market and depresses prices and impoverishes competitors. The ethanol mandates were created partly as a response to the problems that this created. But they are mandates for blending in a certain amount of ethanol, producing artificial demand, and putting us in the ridiculous situation where 40% of corn production goes to ethanol that nobody needs. It's the dumbest thing ever and makes no sense, but is very popular with farm states for obvious reasons.
If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn).
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
Switchgrass isn't all that uncommon in parts of the US that process corn into ethanol, and it is more efficient but less subsidized, so corn beats it out. Sugarcane is even more efficient, but it doesn't grow in most of the US.
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
Joules per acre seems an odd thing to maximize. Solar and corn don't require the same land. And we're not running out of land.
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
It's not just the farm lobby, it's baked deep into the constitution and the political geography so that vast empty land stretches have hugely disproportional political power.
Leasing land for solar installations is popular with rural land owners. Or at least popular enough that there's rarely an issue finding enough willing owners to develop a new project.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
operating at median loads, transmission losses over a distance of 1,000 miles generally range between 6% and 15%
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
The last point is what they mean. The Senate causes a number of problems with it's setup. But even the House and how small it is causes further problems. The number of reps there needs to go up by many many times.
And that's not baked into the Constitution—it was set by law in the early 1900s, and could be changed by law.
If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)
I believe the grandparent is referring to the US Senate, which was designed as the state's representation in the federal government, and where each state gets 2 senators.
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
I have a different reason why the conclusion doesn't follow: while it's true that less populous states have outsized influence in the senate, the constitution doesn't require (and in fact, originally discourages) the federal government to engage in the kind of activities being discussed here. These activities should be the domain of the states. But a long history of expanding federal power (and various supreme court decisions affirming those expansions along, in my opinion, dubious interpretations of both the constitution and various statutes, especially the commerce clause) has led to this issue.
The fact that North Dakota has a lot more influence in the US Senate than California on a per capita basis shouldn't be that big of a deal, because the US Senate should be doing a whole heck of a lot less than it is, and states should be picking up that slack.
The more power and responsibility we have given the federal government, the more the issues appear....because it's doing things never intended or envisioned by the founders.
It's not that our leaders are uniquely bad (do you think the CCP leaders are better?) but that the incentives for that kind of economic development aren't there.
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
At a 30,000 foot view the purpose of politics is to keep corrupt people and stupid people away from the levers of power. Voting is one possible way, fiat is another.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
It’s not about what I want. The view I shared above was shared the Founding Fathers of the US, and the writers of its constitution. For example Federalist 57, 68, and 76.
So I’m not talking about “politics” as an emergent social phenomenon I am talking about the deliberate process of setting up a government.
I think phrases like 'love China' set this up as an emotional argument when it isn't one.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.
I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.
You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
While the young Bill Gates did many disgusting things, after retiring he behaved quite decently in comparison with other similarly rich people.
In any case, he would have been an infinitely better president than people like Bush Junior or Trump. Probably also better than people like Biden, who is not remembered for doing something good, but only for not being so bad as his predecessor and successor.
> The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
I'd say it's partially that, but it's also priorities.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago, they didn't want to work in factories like their parents had, and they didn't want to pay the prices necessary to pay American workers to make goods in an environmentally-responsible manner.
So they gladly bought things made in China where - at the time - the average person would rather work in a factory than on a peasant farm, the labor was cheap, and whining about things like "air quality" and "potable water" were either not a high priority, or would get you dealt with by the local Party representatives who had been told that putting that new factory in was the difference between them advancing up the ranks or being sent to a re-education camp.
If anything, China was the ultimate caterer to special interests, those being the Western companies who wanted to do business there without having to deal with hiring Westerners.
> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
It depends on what you're doing. Steam turbines are absolutely full of exotic alloys. But I tend to agree that large-scale geothermal would be an important component of our all-of-the-above energy policy, which would profit from our existing expertise in punching holes in the ground.
I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum.
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...
The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).
US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.
So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).
Random question and memes-aside, is there oil on other planets?
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.
I thought they discovered at least decades ago that our oil is actually largely inorganic? It's not dinosaurs & ferns but a direct chemical & physical process. I know a lot of people still say it's just a competing theory but they have found many large deposits in places where it's not possible for it to have been organic. (too deep, in the middle of pure granite with only raw volcanic material and no other organics, etc)
Oil is fluid, so it will not necessarily stay where it is formed, but it will flow through the rocks until it is stopped by impermeable rocks, like granite.
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
Wikipedia seems to disagree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Abiogenic_petroleum
Well, there are a lot of planets, and a lot of time.
So I would say yes.
On average though, I would say no.
We can't be sure, but probably not on the solar system.
solar panels dont convert air into fuel
Thank you?
Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Solar panels generate energy which can be used for a variety of purposes. One of those uses is converting air to fuel.
If it helps you, think of it like money. You cannot eat it or be sheltered beneath it, but you can use it to purchase food and shelter.
Of course they do. They convert anything you want into anything else you want.
Once you realize how much more efficient solar panels are (compared to plants) at capturing energy from the sun, the next logical question is: could it make sense to synthesize food with the help of electricity from solar power?
There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016777992...
Corn ethanol fuel has been a known scam for decades.
Yeah, you only get out something like 30% more energy than you put in[1]. So this isn't so much about how great solar is but is more about how bad corn ethanol is...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
Just another handout. Ironically many of the recipients of said hand outs oppose social welfare programs.
I think the theoretical idea is that we want to ensure that there is always a very large domestic corn supply, in the event of war or something. Corn is a crop that has a lot of uses; it can be refined into sugar, it can be used as flour, it's relatively energy dense food-wise, and it can be fairly easily converted into fuel if necessary.
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
I would say it is even worse, it is a scam to feed $ to the rich due to Gov subsidizes.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
Socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor -- MLK
Corn is grown for food security as far as I'm aware. Corn ethanol fuel is just an outlet so that the corn grown doesn't go to waste.
Ethanol corn is the same as the corn grown for animal feed. https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fu... It isn't human-grade corn.
What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food.
Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process.
Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
But what is this system trying to secure against?
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem.
Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money?
It’s not sweet corn, but it’s still edible.
It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever.
Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
Preserving farmland and maintaining a one- or two-year reserve supply of crucial cereals makes sense for food security. In the event of a global food crisis, getting fallow land under plow should be relatively straightforward. It isn't like manufacturing where the skills and jobs and factories just went overseas. Farmers and farming aren't going away.
Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security.
> Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production.
I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost.
> Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security.
Between the ethanol and the animal feed, we are encouraging growing way more corn than is needed for food security.
If food security were a motivating factor in policy, we would be diversifying away from corn, because drought and aquifer depletion are threatening the ability to continue to grow it.
Nope, that's the cover story. The US subsidizes production, not capacity, which results in lots of excess crop that gets dumped on the market and depresses prices and impoverishes competitors. The ethanol mandates were created partly as a response to the problems that this created. But they are mandates for blending in a certain amount of ethanol, producing artificial demand, and putting us in the ridiculous situation where 40% of corn production goes to ethanol that nobody needs. It's the dumbest thing ever and makes no sense, but is very popular with farm states for obvious reasons.
If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn).
It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles.
(Iowan)
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
Switchgrass isn't all that uncommon in parts of the US that process corn into ethanol, and it is more efficient but less subsidized, so corn beats it out. Sugarcane is even more efficient, but it doesn't grow in most of the US.
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
Joules per acre seems an odd thing to maximize. Solar and corn don't require the same land. And we're not running out of land.
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
Technology Connections covered this a few months ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM - from about 22m to 38m
The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
Leadership that caters to special interests instead of the overall, long term benefit of citizens and organizations.
Nothing illustrates this better than energy policy and the foibles thereof.
Ethanol is a particularly bad idea that only came about due to the farm lobby.
Solar and renewables are progressing despite policy oppostion.
Cheap energy offers a significant competituve advantage --- that USA policy openly and stupidly rejects.
It's not just the farm lobby, it's baked deep into the constitution and the political geography so that vast empty land stretches have hugely disproportional political power.
The more acres you have, the more kWh you can generate each year
Why wouldn't land owners want to farm the sun?
Leasing land for solar installations is popular with rural land owners. Or at least popular enough that there's rarely an issue finding enough willing owners to develop a new project.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
Energy can't be moved as easily as food. If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
The Eastern and Western grids are interconnected.
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.IAAEE
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
Energy can't be moved as easily as food
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
> Farm the sun
Fantastic messaging! I could see this being a great way to market this, especially with something mentioned in the article:
> Farm the sun to make 3X more money
How do you think energy policy is baked into the Constitution?
People vote, so how does land have political power? Presumably you mean people in low population density get disproportionate representation in USA?
The last point is what they mean. The Senate causes a number of problems with it's setup. But even the House and how small it is causes further problems. The number of reps there needs to go up by many many times.
To add, there are many proposals[1] for Senate[2] reform[3]. Even a cursory glance reveals[4] an abundance[5] of different[6] suggestions[7].
1. https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1378&con...
2. https://casten.house.gov/imo/media/doc/senate_constitutional...
3. https://democracybillofrights.org/how-and-why-to-reform-the-...
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626...
5. https://casten.house.gov/media/press-releases/casten-introdu...
6. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI...
7. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/when-it-comes-to-fair-votes-...
And that's not baked into the Constitution—it was set by law in the early 1900s, and could be changed by law.
If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)
I believe the grandparent is referring to the US Senate, which was designed as the state's representation in the federal government, and where each state gets 2 senators.
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
I have a different reason why the conclusion doesn't follow: while it's true that less populous states have outsized influence in the senate, the constitution doesn't require (and in fact, originally discourages) the federal government to engage in the kind of activities being discussed here. These activities should be the domain of the states. But a long history of expanding federal power (and various supreme court decisions affirming those expansions along, in my opinion, dubious interpretations of both the constitution and various statutes, especially the commerce clause) has led to this issue.
The fact that North Dakota has a lot more influence in the US Senate than California on a per capita basis shouldn't be that big of a deal, because the US Senate should be doing a whole heck of a lot less than it is, and states should be picking up that slack.
The more power and responsibility we have given the federal government, the more the issues appear....because it's doing things never intended or envisioned by the founders.
People are represented by Representatives, real estate is represented by Senators.
It's not that our leaders are uniquely bad (do you think the CCP leaders are better?) but that the incentives for that kind of economic development aren't there.
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
> do you think the CCP leaders are better?
Based on their public statements and policy actions, absolutely. America these days sounds and behaves like a country being run by absolute cretins.
At a 30,000 foot view the purpose of politics is to keep corrupt people and stupid people away from the levers of power. Voting is one possible way, fiat is another.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
What you want out of politics is not the purpose of politics. Politics is an emergent phenomenon that appears naturally within groups of people.
People/groups engage in politics to exert control over the social environment.
It’s not about what I want. The view I shared above was shared the Founding Fathers of the US, and the writers of its constitution. For example Federalist 57, 68, and 76.
So I’m not talking about “politics” as an emergent social phenomenon I am talking about the deliberate process of setting up a government.
CCP leaders are largely technocrats unlike in the US. There are many engineers and doctors in the upper ranks.
Many of us have personal experience watching good engineers become bad managers.
Politics is harder than it looks.
In theory an engineering background should help make better politicians. In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
In practice, China is very different from the USA. For example, China doesn't have open presidential elections.
I think phrases like 'love China' set this up as an emotional argument when it isn't one.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
"do you think the CCP leaders are better?"
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
You just need to stomach slavery, violent repression of political dissidents, live organ harvesting and a handful of other unpleasantries.
I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.
We still have a lot to answer for.
If it's already changed don't you think it's answered for? What level of performative apologetics will make it better in your estimation?
I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.
You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.
I made clear that some of these were past (and they reverberate still today), and some are present: "America still has or once had"
> exaggerating the scale of things that are still present
What am I exaggerating, exactly?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/nx-s1-5734051/measles-outbrea...
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_school_curricula...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-whats-behind-the...
Yeah, people here are insane to believe the CCP is some kind of technocratic benevolent autocracy.
It helps that they spend billions to manipulate public perception on forums like this one
How about Bill Gates as US's Benevolent Dictator For Life?
While the young Bill Gates did many disgusting things, after retiring he behaved quite decently in comparison with other similarly rich people.
In any case, he would have been an infinitely better president than people like Bush Junior or Trump. Probably also better than people like Biden, who is not remembered for doing something good, but only for not being so bad as his predecessor and successor.
> The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
I'd say it's partially that, but it's also priorities.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago, they didn't want to work in factories like their parents had, and they didn't want to pay the prices necessary to pay American workers to make goods in an environmentally-responsible manner.
So they gladly bought things made in China where - at the time - the average person would rather work in a factory than on a peasant farm, the labor was cheap, and whining about things like "air quality" and "potable water" were either not a high priority, or would get you dealt with by the local Party representatives who had been told that putting that new factory in was the difference between them advancing up the ranks or being sent to a re-education camp.
If anything, China was the ultimate caterer to special interests, those being the Western companies who wanted to do business there without having to deal with hiring Westerners.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago
When the Boomers were coming of age, there was no trade with China.
> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).
Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
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Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...
Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
It depends on what you're doing. Steam turbines are absolutely full of exotic alloys. But I tend to agree that large-scale geothermal would be an important component of our all-of-the-above energy policy, which would profit from our existing expertise in punching holes in the ground.