Hucked and Shucked: The hidden costs of turning America's corn crop into fuel | Hacker News Reader

Hucked and Shucked: The hidden costs of turning America's corn crop into fuel

worldsensorium.com

19 pointsdnetesn5 comments

Curious why they don't grow sugarcane in the south. Seems like that would be the better crop than corn for ethanol. Is it not warm enough?

They do grow sugarcane in the south, it gets made into sugar. I’d guess that there’s orders of magnitude more land suitable for farming corn than there is for farming sugarcane, given the needs of sugarcane.

The explanation for that is that, perhaps surprisingly, there is a massive glut of oil in the world, has been for a decade and getting worse. It's just having some trouble to get out of Russia or through the strait of Hormuz. If you take your distance away you see that oil stocks and oil governments are doing well, but it really looks like a "last Hurrah".

Right now two words from Putin or a small believable commitment from Iran can take half off the gas price in a matter of days. Maybe 2/3.

Under those conditions only a fool invests in fuel production. The breakeven gas price for ethanol might be lower than the current price at the pump, but it looks like a very bad bet that this will last.

Ironically, this is also causing wars to break out. People can, and will, argue this point heavily, but it turns out a lot of countries weren't fighting each other because the US (and a little the EU) said to them "oh no you don't. Attack and no more oil exports/imports" (whichever is relevant for the country in question), and that stopped a lot of wars in the post-Soviet-collapse world. Of course, this put wars on hold, it didn't cancel them.

Then Russia came back, with oil and weapons, weaker, but it still came back. Then China gave them solar panels, and weapons.

There is a shortage of refining capacity, and has been for a while, as neither Europe nor the US expanded refining capacity since the 1970s, and Europe got rid of 1/3 of their refining capacity under their faith-based energy policy of "If we destroy it, we won't need it". As a result, Europe must now import crude and distillates from nations it likes to sanction, and because the refineries are working at peak capacity, any interruption results in a gap that must work its way through the system as there is no possibility of catch up via excess capacity.

In terms of there being a glut of oil, the measure of that can be seen in things like the median wage/productivity gap, which began to widen during the Arab oil embargo and has not stopped widening. We do not have abundant oil, if we did, the prices would be $40 per gallon and would be stable across weather events and other things that drive the price of oil up today. We live in an era of energy scarcity, which is why capital has the upper hand over labor.

Article barely touches on water use.

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