Eighty-eight year-old US Senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley says: “Homegrown Iowa biofuels provide a quick and clean solution for lowering prices at the pump, and bolstering production would help us become energy independent once again.″ He was among nine Republican and seven Democratic senators from Midwestern states who sent Biden a letter last month urging him to allow year-round E15 sales.
Grassley has represented Iowa in the US Senate since 1981 and been a figure in Corn State politics since 1959, about 72% of his life.
The letter sent to Biden was either the impetus for his decision to increase the percentage of ethanol in US motor fuel or an acknowledgement of its wisdom and necessity. It's unlikely that the doddering president came up with such a tactic on his own so it's probable that whatever caucus the rurals belong to set this process in motion.
Ethanol in motor fuel has a complicated history in the US. In the era before the dreams of electric vehicles, it was touted as the replacement for expensive fossil fuels and meant to decrease urban air pollution. The development of hydrofracking and the subsequent drop in oil prices together with an increase in corn prices made the ethanol hysteria obsolete. In 1987 a bushel of corn was worth $1.63, in April, 2022 it brings in almost $8.00.
It was always a consideration that using a food product for transportation purposes raised ethical issues. Yet the expensive distilleries still existed and continued to ferment alcohol to mix with gasoline. An interesting aspect of the situation was that the equipment farmers employed to raise the corn to make the ethanol was propelled by diesel fuel, an all-fossil product.
Evidently, it was generally unknown to the public that Ukraine and its adversary Russia, are among the world's largest producers of corn, or as it's actually called, maize. That area of the world is also a major producer of the fertilizer that makes maize production on a commercial scale possible. Who would have believed this to be possible when not all that long ago agriculture there was dominated by the failed collective farms of the Soviets? And that Russian oil and gas had become a necessity to European life?
It's even more complicated than that. The whole, sad scenario is playing out as a climate disaster, according to these people. For them, an expansion of cropland to grow the food that must be produced to replace that which won't now be grown in eastern Europe is the death knell for planet Earth.
fullhdpictures.com
USAID administrator Samantha Power looks at the food/fertilizer situation as an opportunity to change the techniques and economics of farming by using manure and compost fertilize commercial crops. Evidently the career bureaucrat is unaware that the relatively new infrequency of famine is a direct result of the use commercial ammonium nitrate fertilizers.
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