When will we stop burning our food?

Drought is driving corn prices to record levels as we continue to burn 40% of our corn in our engines. 

Researchers at Texas A&M University have estimated that diverting corn to make ethanol forces Americans to pay $40 billion a year in higher food prices. On top of that, it costs taxpayers $1.78 in subsidies for each gallon of gasoline that corn-based ethanol replaces, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The damage is far-reaching. Beef and pork producers are slaughtering their stocks at a record pace to cut use of corn feed that costs two-thirds more than three months ago. U.S. cattle herds next year are forecast to be the smallest since 1952, a guarantee of more expensive food in years to come.

On top of that, by some calculations, ethanol takes more energy to produce than it yields, negating the environmental benefits. Now the EIA says that ethanol is taking more money to produce than it yields. 

More than 150 House members and 25 U.S. senators, as well as the director general of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, have asked Obama to temporarily suspend the ethanol mandate in order to check the rise in food prices. He should listen to them, and Congress should permanently roll back the ethanol requirements.

http://huff.to/MSnsuD

Record Temperatures

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.


In fact there were 808 record highs across the continental US during the month of June, compared to 157 record lows during the same period. The ratio of highs temperature records to low temperature records in June was greater than 5 to 1, based on data from theNOAA National Climatic Data Center.   


To give you an idea of how dramatic a shift this is, the ratio of record highs to record lows during the 40 year period from 1950 to 1989 was .95 to 1. 

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”


One example of how this is making itself felt in local weather can be seen this year in Washington, DC where the record setting temperatures in June smashed all previous records by a huge margin.

These graphs were prepared by Steve Scolnik of Capital Climate.