ethanol – HystericallyBored

2024-01-042024-01-17

This is who you are

I have recently read and heard from Christian apologists who assert, in one form or another, that the Evangelical Christian community that passionately supports Donald Trump actually understands that he is an unworthy person of bad taste and style who is nevertheless God’s chosen vessel to restore America to holiness and conviction and the purity of our bodily fluids.

All right– sarcasm aside, some Christians say that while they are disgusted with Trump’s personal character they support him because he appoints anti-abortion judges, stands up for gun rights, opposes same-sex marriage and homosexuality, and resists the world-wide conspiracy to replace white Americans with people of color.

In other words, they believe that a man who is a serial womanizer, a materialist, a liar, a bragger, and vulgarity incarnated somehow, when it comes to issues that matter to the Christian community, acts in a way that Jesus would approve of.

I don’t believe they really believe that. They might say they do, but the evidence is overwhelming: they don’t. Trump is the evangelical community unmasked. He is what they are. Vulgar. Grasping. Materialistic. Cruel and dishonest.

They do not see Trump as a corrupt vessel of God’s will; to them, he really is God’s chosen messenger, an avatar of all the values and beliefs that they hold dear but don’t want to publicly acknowledge, a bully and thug who they really like because he is a bully and thug. The main body of Evangelical Christians will deny that they embrace Trump the corrupt vessel because he exposes them for what they are: raging hypocrites who have demonstrated over and over again that they never did really believe in the teachings of Christ or the bible.

A political scientist at Furman University, Jim Guth:

White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism, and nativism, as well as his “political style,” with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.

The Evangelical Christian community has always been pro-gun. They love guns. They have always been generously forgiving of war criminals like William Calley, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten, if they are Americans. They have consistently rejected the Bible’s clear mandate to care for creation as obedient stewards, not as exploitive pirates. They preach abstinence and self-denial but indulge in every possible form of acquisitiveness of property and worship church leaders who brag about their private jets and access to political leaders. They claim to admire integrity and character but they hated the two presidents with the most integrity and character in the past 50 years, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

As they sit there in their pews, chanting and singing, reciting from scripture, and folding their hands in prayer, they know, deep in their hearts, that what they like about Trump is precisely his pettiness, his vindictiveness, his vulgarity, his bullying, his meanness, and his materialism. They do not quietly accept him and hold their noses: they bless him and admire him and scream and cheer him when he is at his most divisive and vulgar.

He is you. And he has revealed to the world the truth of what it means to be an evangelical Christian in the United States in 2024.

Nothing.

I take note of a recent confirmation of this point.

Obama’s Next Compromise

Barack Obama supported and voted in favor of the recent wiretapping bill that grants immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the Administration’s illegal requests for wiretaps on Americans receiving or making foreign telephone calls.

The so-called liberal media has completely dropped the ball on this one. Why is this not a scandal? George Bush refuses to admit that his Administration acted illegally when they requested the wiretaps. He continues to assert that the requests were legal. If they were legal, there is no need for immunity. The courts, as is their role in a constitutional democracy, have the authority and right to decide the lawsuits filed by plaintiffs against those Telcos. This law circumvents the constitution by providing retroactive immunity for crimes the government refuses to admit were crimes. This is insane. This is impeachable. This is obscene.

This is an out and out betrayal of all the bullshit platitudes about constitutions and freedoms and due process that America constantly foists on the world as justification for all the lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama also supports the ethanol industry in its Disney-esque fantasy of replacing foreign oil with domestic plants. Everyone can already see what the results of this policy will be: oil will continue to cost more, and ethanol will have an absolutely negligible impact on domestic consumption while driving up food prices in the poorest parts of the globe. Even worse, Obama does not support dropping tariffs on imported Brazilian sugarcane ethanol which at least provides a far better return on the energy conversion (8-1, vs. ethanol’s 2-1). Why?

Because Iowa.

Because he wants the support of the Midwestern farmers who stand to benefit enormously from the ridiculous government subsidy of ethanol prices.

Put it this way: the oil industry is not worried about ethanol.

Think about that a lot. Think carefully about it: the oil industry LOVES ethanol. The oil industry’s stooges in the White House are pushing ethanol enthusiastically. The oil industry’s stooges in the White House have, so far, successfully torpedoed a bill that continues giving tax incentives to other alternative forms of energy like wind and solar power.

For those who think Obama will bring a sprig of fresh ideas to the White House, these two issues are bad omens. The first is a classic political compromise, an opportunistic sell-out to the enduring Democrat fear that they won’t appear to be tough enough to take on all those zillions of terrorists out there blowing up buildings in Des Moines, Iowa, or Cedar Rapids, or Flint, or Greensboro, and so on. Oh my God– we can’t let them think that John McCain will be more willing to undermine the constitution than we are!

The second is the classic trade-off of special interests against the genuine interests of the American people. There are numerous lobbyists or other agents associated with the ethanol industry working with Obama’s campaign. That’s disappointing.

The optimist hopes that Obama is making these compromises to get into office, so that once he gets into office he can resume his principled leadership and persuade Americans to support the right course of action. I tend to think it is more likely that once he gets into office, he will make the same compromises that most politicians usually make and things will not be so different after all.

It’s all relative. So we have here the shocking realization that Obama is human after all, and capable of making the same kind of moral and ethical compromises that most politicians make… it is still probable that the election of Obama will improve the U.S. government by a huge margin for the simple reason that we are more likely to have competent people in charge of government policy for the first time in 8 years.

Just how perverted is this generation of voters? McCain feels no need to hide the fact that he would allow the CIA to continue to use torture. TORTURE. On human beings. As if we were not morally superior to terrorists and murderers and torturers.

No candidate in this coming election– wait, is Ralph Nader running?– has proposed to return the U.S. to democratic constitutional greatness and honor and decency. There are no Christian candidates in this election. There is no god in this election.

Torturing the New York Times: Why, in this article, does the New York Times– supposed bastion of liberal dissent– refer to torture as “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Who the hell told them to use this phrase instead of the word “torture”? Is this because they are giving McCain and Bush the benefit of the doubt? Well, it might not be torture, after all? It might be the euphemism? Geez, where are the real liberals when you want one!

2006-05-152022-05-02

The Scam of Ethanol

From the New York Times, May 15, 2006: A. David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University, published a paper in 2005 with Tad W. Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley stating that the corn-to-ethanol process powered by fossil fuels consumes 29 percent more energy than it produces. The results for switchgrass were even worse, the paper said, with a 50 percent net energy deficit. “I’m sympathetic, and I wish that ethanol production was a net positive and a help to this nation,” Dr. Pimentel said in an interview. “But I’m a scientist first and an agriculturalist second. I don’t think the U.S. will meet its goals with biofuels.” He also said the United States did not have enough agricultural land to displace gasoline with biofuels. “Even if we committed 100 percent of the corn crop to making ethanol, it would only replace 7 percent of U.S. vehicle fossil fuel use,” he said.

I had read something like this years ago, so I was surprised to see and hear numerous articles and news stories praising the idea of ethanol as a gas substitute for North America, and, just maybe, the long-dreamed-of solution to our dependence on foreign oil. I started thinking– am I crazy? Did I dream that ethanol actually takes more energy to produce than it creates?

No.

Even “60 Minutes” recently rhapsodized about the possibility of filling America’s freeways, long after the Saud’s are depleted, with biomass-fuelled cars, without once mentioning that corn is produced with the help of fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, machinery, and transport, all of which consume vast quantities of…. fuel. In fact, if you had to use ethanol to produce ethanol instead of fossil fuels, the absurdity would become clear: it would take 1.5 gallons of ethanol to produce one gallon of ethanol.

In short, ethanol is not cheap, not sustainable, and solves nothing. There is no way America could ever produce enough corn to produce enough ethanol to even begin to replace fossil fuels.

Think that particular study by Pimentel is biased? You would think, then, that defenders of ethanol would be happy to show you different studies that show different results. On the contrary, they tend to damn with faint praise, admitting that corn-based ethanol may never be able to replace, at best, more than 1/3 of our current fossil fuel requirements.

In all fairness, some scientists claim that ethanol can be more efficiently produced. In all fairness, the scientists who say that appear to be employed by ethanol manufacturers. Archer Daniels Midland is the largest manufacturer of ethanol. According to the Cato institute, it costs taxpayers about $30 for every $1 of ethanol produced.

Except one thing: it gives the American government an excuse to bribe farmers in Iowa to support a particular candidate in the early caucuses come election year, as “West Wing” dramatized (Republican candidate Arnold Vinick refused to endorse ethanol and, in this fantasy drama, still won the nomination).

Ethanol is a scam.

Ethanol

The News Gets Worse.

From Cornell University: An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel’s analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

Some critics point out that, technically, it takes more than one gallon of gas to produce a gallon of gas too. Sort of. It appears that the amount of energy required to extract and process the oil used to make the gasoline is greater than the yield. Like ethanol. So what we have here is that we are paying a premium to make the fuel portable and usable by cars. Point taken. However, that doesn’t change the fact that using corn to make ethanol is not the economic or environmental solution it’s proponents claim, and, even more to the point, even if you used all of the corn crops in the U.S. for ethanol, it still wouldn’t be enough to replace even 1/3 of American requirements. (“1/3” is generous– some experts say it is much less.)

The farmer is America’s sacred cow. Literally. So when people say they support ethanol because they would rather give their money to American farmers than Arab sheiks, they have a point, right? Only if you also believe that the RIAA wants to stop piracy of music so it can pay it’s artists and composers. The fact this that most of the ethanol subsidies go to the corporations– like Archer Daniels Midland– that sustain this scam, not farmers who grow the corn, though they undoubtedly benefit from higher prices. Oh– the higher prices…