Food costs/prices rising, what are the causes?

In Brazil they produce ethanol from sugar, as they have plenty of
sugar cane to fuel. We in the US have plenty of corn.

"The IMF, glorying as ever in its failures, just like the Federal Reserve, now promotes the laughable idea to 'tackle' rising food prices by having donor economies give other people money to pay higher food prices! Hahaha!"

If you want to see why the damned government is continually raising your taxes, spending more and more money, growing bigger and bigger all the damned time and locking up a full one percent of the population in prison, part of the answer is in the Pinellas Park Beacon newspaper, which reported that federal search warrants were executed at three local pharmacies as part of an investigation into healthcare fraud. So far, so good.

The funny part is that "the agencies involved in the investigation are representatives of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Florida Attorney General's Office - Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, Health and Human Services - OIG, United States Office of Personnel Management - OIG, Drug Enforcement Administration, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, United States Attorney's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

It's like when there is a simple, everyday accident on the road, and suddenly the whole highway is completely shut down because there are police everywhere, police cars all over the place, hazardous materials handling people trundling around in their bulky suits testing for dangerous substances, bomb disposal people trundling around in THEIR bulky suits, SWAT teams taking up positions in the surrounding area, fire trucks, ambulances, police helicopters and even K-9 units swarming all over the highway!

I mean, it's amazing how many government employees are seemingly standing around looking for something to do with their latest equipment upgrades, and itching for a chance to put all that expensive training to work, to (I assume) hopefully show how all of those huge departmental expenses are "proving" to be of compelling value during the upcoming city/county/state budget reviews.

In a recent book Mr Nigel Lawson, Mrs Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer waved away, dismissively, the whole idea of bio-fuel.

Are there figures for the amount of energy falling on, say, a square kilometer of the earth's surface and for conversion coefficients of different crops for energy used by man.

Is there any chance of such a source of energy competing without tariffs and subsidies against energy collected over millions of years and stored in fossil fuels?

Can plant energy sources compete with photcells?

True enough, but the fact is that with current processes, the ethanol yield from corn is much less (per acre, or per unit of energy consumed in production) than that from sugar.

There is a lot of research gong on now for efficient ethanol production from cellulose, but it is hard to tell what it might yield, or when. If it is successful then we will have the ability to produce ethanol from grasses, cornstalks and many other sources, yielding a vast feedstock that doesn't compete directly with food. Until then, the fact is that our currently subsidized ethanol production from corn actually yields little more fuel than is consumed in producing it.

Other biofuels mostly involve the production of deisel fuel. The use of deisel engines in this country is severely constrained by legal limits on the particulate content in exhaust gases - even though these engines are usually a good deal more efficient than Otto cycle IC engines. That is a problem that more enlightened regulation and auto industry investment could (and should) solve.

Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.

George, solar energy is the answer

Nuclear plants are safe and very efficient (the lowest cost source we have, except for hydropower from dams). They can be used with equal efficiency in northern latitudes. The 98 operating nuclear plants we have today deliver 20% of our total electrical power and have a better operational reliability record and lower cost profiles than the coal & gas plants that compete with them. Merely doubling the number of these plants would achieve the goals set for us in the ill-conceived Kyoto treaty. The most amazing thing about the current energy "crisis" is that we haven't done so already.

This is the conclusion of Thomas Heff, a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who believes that the proposed escalation in the world's nuclear power facilities will lead to a shortfall in the quantities of fuel (mainly enriched uranium) necessary to run the reactors. He thinks that uranium "inventories" (reserves) are dwindling fast, and that there is a slackening in investment in securing future supplies, certainly in the face of proposed numbers of new nuclear plants to be inaugurated across the world.

The question relates to today's sunpower and the millions of years stored sunpower.

However, I do agree with you that in a long enough run, solar must be the answer.

Another thing to worry about, stem rust/wheat production -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/opinion/26borlaug.html?scp=1&sq=rust+never+sleeps&st=nyt

georgeob1 wrote:

Nuclear plants are safe and very efficient (the lowest cost source we have, except for hydropower from dams). They can be used with equal efficiency in northern latitudes. The 98 operating nuclear plants we have today deliver 20% of our total electrical power and have a better operational reliability record and lower cost profiles than the coal & gas plants that compete with them. Merely doubling the number of these plants would achieve the goals set for us in the ill-conceived Kyoto treaty. The most amazing thing about the current energy "crisis" is that we haven't done so already.

So you think, a Chernobyl cannot happen in the US? I'm not so sure,
and what about the radioctive waste, George - where do you burry that?
There is no safe way to dispose of it, as you know.

Nuclear plants need to be highly secured 24/7, and it costs additionally.

Is there enough uranium mining done to supply all the additional nuclear
plants, and for how long will the uranium last?