Very simple. The atmosphere won't know the difference between fossil fuel or biofuel. The carbon emissions are the same. Growing more crops for biofuels won't cause the CO2 to go down, only slow it's rise at best. Most of the arable land on earth is already covered with vegetation, consuming CO2. Radically increasing the arable land on earth to supply all the biofuels as a direct replacement for fossil fuels is not a feasible option for a very long time.
In-short, "carbon-neutral" doesn't translate into significant CO2 reduction in the atmosphere.
When I heard this idea about 20 years ago,k it was a very fringe idea. Since then, it has gained credibility, not faded away. That's not the normal course for "hokum"
Harvard Magazine doesn't seem to agree with you:
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If you'd bothered to read any of this, the word "hokum" would only occur to a mindless idiot.
Both helium and methane are light enough that they would have long ago escaped into space, had they not been trapped in the earth's crust after having been formed somewhere below that impervious layer.
Did you ever stop to do a mental calculation of how much organic life would have had to be buried perfectly below an impervious layer before decomposition broke down the body mass, to account for all the world's known petroleum deposits? And after that, how much of the body mass would have remained buried instead of decomposing into the atmosphere? It seems a lot more far-fetched to believe the biotic origin theory than the abiotic one, where those compounds forming deep in the earth and percolating upward. The chemistry has been verified experimentally to happen at pressures similar to those found only 100 kms and deeper below the surface. Use some logic and save your skepticism for the least credible theory, not the most credible one.
Excuse me, but that's a tough one to swallow. There's far too much oil in the earth to have all been formed from "rotting plants and animal carcasses"
I'm sure you mean taxes. Remove them, and we're talking about 15-30% less, depending on where you live. That only increases the spread between petroleum and biofuels, so I don't see what you're getting at.
That seems almost incomprehensible that there aren't Ag Departments in at least some of the major Universities, regardless of where they are physically situated. Where are the Vet schools, the Animal Husbandry programs, the Ag Engineers, Milling and Grain experts trained?
There are of course, commercially developed varieties but most US-grown varieties are developed by the various University and Grower-sponsored research organizations. Example facilities in Kansas at Kansas State University include
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Dad did a sponsored Farm Tour to Au and NZ a number of years ago under aegis of US Dept of Ag but other than his tales of visiting and staying w/ various producers around and meetings w/ Wheat Board (or whatever it was called specifically) and other gov't officialdom I don't recall what they saw for the research end.
The "mid-chest" would have been a rare event as I noted, only occurring in very rare growing seasons.
That's going far farther back than what I would consider "traditional"... :)
There's not been much of that type grown in really large quantities for at least a 100 years, at least in the US. I was coming from the frame of reference of when wheat was introduced as a widespread grain crop in the US midwest in the mid-1800s which was primarily w/ the introduction here of hard red winter wheat, specifically Turkey Red.
The Duram wheats are grown farther north and west in the US from where we are located here.
I wouldn't like wheat quite that short for the reasons stated before--would force one to run the combine header nearly on the ground which makes for picking up lots of dirt and wear on the lower carriage in order to not miss the shorter than average heads.
I still think regarding your point regarding the total biomass per acre that the modern planting density compared to such hand sown fields of the reference time frame when such super-tall varieties were predominant will counteract a large amount of the difference in total plant volume.
No, I'm not talking about taxes that you see at the pump.
I'm talking about health subsidies, security subsidies, environmental subsidies, all those things that if the consumer paid for them at the pump instead of in general taxes on income and other sales taxes, would be indicated by $6 or more at the pump.
Direct payments to grain producers are less than $0.25/bu for corn which is something on the order of 12-15% of current market price. But, one can't just make the blanket assumption that this is paid on every bushel produced since there are significant other considerations every producer must take into account in deciding how to run his particular operation under current Farm Policy and Tax Law, just as in any other industry.
There is a tax credit which goes to the ethanol producer which I don't know the exact magnitude of under current law. It's intended, of course, to stimulate the expansion of production and is nothing dissimilar to other economic incentives which have been codified for such things as wind generation and solar.
One of the last data points I have states "...the costs to produce ethanol from corn starch and the capital cost of dry mill ethanol plants have decreased. In 1978, ethanol was estimated to cost $2.47 per gallon to produce (in year 2000 dollars). By 1994 this price had dropped to $1.43 per gallon 12 and current fuel ethanol production costs are estimated by the authors to be about $0.88 per gallon for dry mill operations. The cost reductions may be traced to various factors. The production of ethanol has become less energy intensive due to new techniques in energy integration and the use of molecular sieves for ethanol dehydration. The amount of pure ethanol produced from a bushel of corn has increased from 2.5 gallons to more than 2.7 gallons."
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I think it's clear that actual production costs are quite competitive w/ gasoline at or above the $1/gal mark.
But you intend to burn those plants, putting the carbon back into the air. So you are not reducing the carbon, just keeping it at the same level. To reduce the carbon you would need to grow the plants then take the carbon out of the cycle by not using the plants for fuel.
Brock Ulfsen wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@dnews.tpgi.com.au:
From time to time the bacterial origins theory rears its head and then disappears once again. Still one must consider the easter Ohio western Pennsylvania shallow oil fields originally tapped into by Drake.
During the soviet era the Russians used their sledgehammer-to-kill-a-fly routine with exploration for natural resources. It appears they weren't so selective as people who had to answer to shareholders every year, but lucked into some odd discoveries. We're probably not nearly as close to "the end" as the doomsday crowd preaches.
The carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been fairly stable until the industrial revolution started burning coal (A fossil fuel) and petroleum il, which may or may not be a fossil fuel, but in any case, niether were active parts of the atmospheric carbon cycle for the first million years or so of human use of combustion.
All depends...the pumpkin and sunflower foks are kinda' into that...
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I don't think they know anything about that... :) ....
I don't know what you're responding to here...the discussion (sorta' a sidebar, but the immediate discussion) was the height of (primarily) current wheat hybrids as opposed to those of some bygone time--the exact time of "bygone" is now apparently long ago as opposed to (say) early
19th century when really large scale small grain farming became prevalent as I initially assumed.
As a wheat/grain sorghum producer, I naturally got interested in what some others were up to in the same area. I did note that the very short varieties such as Brock is mentioning are shorter than I would prefer to grow simply owing to increased maintenance and wear on harvesting equipment and quite possibly higher loss from missing shorter than average heads.
This all sprang from the observation quite some time ago (in thread life terms) that modern agricultural varieties are much shorter than "traditional" thus reducing total biomass during (particularly) small/cereal grains production. I said I didn't think they had shrunk that much and that higher seeding densities w/ modern practices would compensate for much of the shorter growth anyway.
As at least one counter example, modern hybrid corns are much taller and denser plants than the (American) maize of the native Indians for the most part.
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