[OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

[Chris Olson]

From: Rick Bowers 
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 9:03 AM
To: Cafe 
Subject: [OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

> I almost hate to interrupt the flow of the Cafe 
> with a new topic, but I received the following 
> except in an email today. Does anyone (I *know* 
> Chris will) have any details on this or maybe some pro/con discussion?

Well, Mailman has the links all mangled to hell, which wouldn't happen with HTML.

Anyway, biofuel is great, but the majority of it is made from grain.  If you haven't noticed, the price of grain (corn, beans, wheat, you name it) has absolutely gone right off the edge of what's considered reasonable in the last two months.  There's such a world food scare with a major failure of much of the corn crop in the US Corn Belt that the Chinese have bid grain commodities so high on the Chicago Board of Trade that no bio-fuels producer can afford to operate right now without being subsidized.

Cheryl and I have set up our farm with much the same type of goal that Derek has where he lives - to be self-sufficient.  We heat our farm shop (which is quite big), our house (which is quite big) and our garage with biofuel - wood harvested from our own farm.  We set aside part of our acreage and grew canola on it this year to make biodiesel right on the farm to run our trucks, tractors, and our Cummins/Onan diesel genset that generates the electrical power for our farm.  We grow, hunt or fish our own food and only buy things like spices (salt and pepper), some dairy products, and other misc small food items from the store.

So biofuels do work, and they're a great option.  But they're only a practical option for those of us who have the resources to make, grow and use them.  To think that biofuels are going to replace petroleum for the hordes that live in big cities is nothing but poppycock because we all have to eat too and those Big City Slickehs don't contribute anything to the situation except being a load on the system - a system that's already overloaded.
--
Chris