Reply #63: What you're doing is known as "fisking" the argument.

[GliderGuider]

It's easy to look at this or that bit of evidence somone presents, find a piece of data that casts doubt on it, throw that up and go on to the next point. That's known as "fisking", and it's a common tactic on the net. Hell, I do it too. The problem is, that technique is usually used to avoid dealing with the core of the argument, it's logical underpinnings.

I claim that current biofuels and the lack of any global or national biofuel policies except for "More, please!" constitute a risk to the world's food supply. I arrived at that conclusion from a logical analysis of the systems of biofuel production as they now exist, agriculture as it is now practiced, what I understand about the energy flows of ethanol and biodiesel production, and what I understand about human nature.

I presented these stories as the kinds of evidence that I'm seeing crop up (sorry) all over the place that seem to form a consistent pattern. That pattern supports my pure-logic conclusion that inevitable excessive use of biofuels as they are currently manufactured will compete with food, raise its price and disproportionately impact people who can't pay the higher price. Does the fact that some people buy farm property and then don't farm it mean that logical conclusion is incorrect? Does it mean that rising land prices are only due to city slickers getting themselves a country retreat? I don't think so.

Why on earth would you think I want to bring back MTBE? My concern is the competition that large-scale biofuel substitution poses to the global food supply. MTBE replacement is a small proportion of potential ethanol use, and I have absolutely no problem with it in that application.

Regarding DDGs, I pointed out that weight for weight DDGs contain around 130% the nutrient value of corn. The problem is that there was also nutrient value in the carbohydrate that got fermented into alcohol. The original 56 lb bushel of corn shrinks down to just 18 lb of DDG solids during processing. So while the DDGs have a higher nutrient content by weight, they only weigh a third of what the original corn did. The original 56 lb bushel of corn, according to the link I posted, would have had 2.4 times the nutrient value of the 18 lb of DDGs that came out the other end, even though each pound of DDG has 1.3 times the nutrient value of a pound of corn. The difference is the energy that was left behind in the moonshine.

Is that clearer? I'm not saying that pound for pound DDGs don't have a higher nutrient profile than plain corn - they do indeed. However, the plain fact is that when you make ethanol from corn, some calories stay behind in the still.