An enjoyable article. Our Tony has a need to boost his popularity in the polls with an anti-ethanol policy. Service stations offering alternative non-ethanol fuels increase pump sales dramatically.
Many people drive older vehicles a technology averse to ethanol. Small motors are particularly vulnerable.
Gillard quickly learned the lesson with her cash for clunkers policy, which was coupled with a programme to eventually eliminate fuels with no ethanol entirely.
More example of the tail of the greens, waging the dog of the majority, one could not find, have we forgotten?

Don't worry Viv, Mike Pope is going to get up in the morning and milk the cows to produce the milk for the cafe latte set. Aren't you, Mike?

Mike?

A good article, pointing out the madness of our politics, when perverted by the climate change fraud..
Viv did not mention that the reason for the aim to reduce emissions is the baseless assertion that that human emissions affect climate.There is no science which demonstrates any measurable effect of human emissions on climate.
The IPCC predicted global warming would be caused by the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, which they asserted was from human emissions.
There has been no global warming for almost nineteen years, so it is about time we stopped listening to the climate fraud promoters, and embraced the use of so-called fossil fuels.
We need a Royal Commission into the perpetration of the climate fraud, followed by legislation to bring it to an end.

Leo, you typify the idea that the more ignorant you are on a subject the more likely you'll hold strong views on it.

The idea that there isn't any scientific evidence for global warming would come at a complete surprise to climate scientist?

There is lots of evidence of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and where it has come from.

The idea that there has been no global warming in 19 years ( different number depending on which right wing opinion webs site you go to) is just display's your lack of understanding of trends.

Fossil fuels are called that because they are made from fossils ie long dead life forms, mainly trees.

I suggest you stop reading ring wing web site and have a look at a scientific journal or two. Better still expect your not intellectually capable to understand now matter how many blogs you read. Perhaps consider a relevant science degree and then see how you go.

Bet you don't though bet your just fine with being a internet expert, bugga all those years of training ( that book learning stuff).

The only ignorance to be found on this thread so far Cobber is coming from you.

Tell me, are you one of the global warming gravy train riders, or just too dumb to wake up when you have been conned?

The hound talking nonsense as usual.
Where is your link to the science which shows any measurable effect of human emissions on climate?
You did not supply it, because there is no such science.
You obviously have not read the climategate emails, or you would remeber one to the effect that the fraud-backers could not show warming, and considered it "a travesty that we can't".
You have a 100% record, hound, not one sensible post, ever.
There is a human effect. It is trivial, and not measurable. Not surprising when human emissions of CO2 are 3%, against Nature's 97%.

Ike Pope is as wrong about this topic as Stern and Garnaut, and has similar academic qualifications to them. He is certainly ignorant of climate, and believes the nonsense of failures like Hansen, who “ predicted that global temperature between 1988 and 1997 would rise by 0.45°C (Figure 1). Figure 2 compares this to the observed temperature changes from three independent sources. Ground-based temperatures from the IPCC show a rise of 0.11°C, or more than four times less than Hansen predicted. Lower atmosphere temperatures measured by ascending thermistors on weather balloons show a decline of 0.36°C and satellites measuring the same layer (our only truly global measure) showed a decline of 0.24°C.
The forecast made in 1988 was an astounding failure, and IPCC’s 1990 statement about the realistic nature of these projections was simply wrong”
http://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/kyoto-protocol-useless-appendage-irrelevant-treaty

Idiotic article! For decades the USA and Europe have been paying their farmers to produce far more than is needed, then dumping the surplus onto poor countries, devastating the agricultural industries in those countries. Now at last the subsidies are being directed in a way that doesn't do anywhere near as much economic damage. And it does result in a reduction in CO2 emissions, albeit only a slight one. It will also result in a reduction in emissions of carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

In Australia, and especially rural Queensland, it will result in a bigger reduction in CO2 emissions because more of the fuel will be manufactured locally. It won't resort in a shortage of anything, though there will be a slight price rise (good for farmers, bad for consumers, though probably too small to notice).

Claiming higher imported food prices in poor countries will lead to return of periodic famines shows an ignorance of the causes of famine; it's more a result of the failure of government than the failure of agriculture. And if anything, having farmers grow more crops that could easily be diverted to food use would reduce the chance of a severe food shortage.

Opposing the ethanol mandate is fair enough, but it's highly ignorant (or more likely, disingenuous) to claim it "threatens to take us back towards those hungry years before the kerosene-powered tractors arrived".

Hi Cobber,

So there hasn't been a hiatus, or even a slow-down, in the rise in temperatures since 1997 ?

So what has the rise been, roughly, more or less, ball-park ?

I'm not very enthusiastic about ethanol production, since it takes resources away from food production. On the other hand, I'm confident that if, say, basic infrastructure could be put into Africa, harnessing rivers, reticulated water supply, electrification, roads, rail, education systems, health systems, (and yes, manageable systems of loans) it could produce as much food as the world needs on its own.

Anyway, to get back to topic: taking sustainability and 'no impact on the Earth Mother' to a fairly logical conclusion, it's worth remembering that, pre-Agricultural and -Industrial Revolutions in Australia, Aboriginal populations numbered between half a million (in the best of times) and a hundred thousand (at the more common worst of times). People huddled around fires in winter, and scrounged for water in summer.

Economic and technological development is NOT a zero-sum game: advances in production techniques have been exponential, out-of-sight, in Australia since then - if it could be quantified, it may well be a thousand times greater now than in pre-European times. One could say that that is the differential between hunter-gatherer economies and modern economies, generally. A thousand times.

So 'sustainability' - if it is taken to that sort of extreme - would mean massive reductions in population, and in living standards, in Australia. Clearly, it would be a combination of insanity and idiocy to contemplate going back to that sort of society. But a correlation, which nobody wants to contemplate (it would be so politically incorrect), is that modern society - even for Indigenous people - is vastly more productive, more efficient, more innovative, than whatever came before. Thank god for cultural contact.

I hope the Goat Cheese Circle don't choke on their low-fat soy lattes and kale and quinoa salads over that this morning :)

Joe

There are a number of ways ethanol can be produced. The main ones are from sugar cane, from corn and from cellulose material. Sugar cane returns some 8 times the energy put into making it, on the other hand corn returns about 1.3 according to some estimates. The Americans rely almost solely on corn whereas in Australia we use sugar cane as the feed stock. Cellulose is not widely used and the technology does not appear to be mature yet.

I agree that using corn to make ethanol is not in the best interest of people in general, but on the other-hand using sugar cane seems to me to be entirely sensible especial as there is an overabundance of sugar supply, and it would be good to see a lot less of it added to food and soft drinks.

Methane emissions from cows are not that serious provided they are grass fed rather than grain fed, but in any event are part of the natural carbon cycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel

What utter garbage Warmy.

If that were true ethanol factories would be stand alone facilities, using only the fuel they produced to power their process, rather than being connected to the grid.

Why is it greenies talk such rubbish? Do they really expect to convince people? Oh wait a minute, I guess that is why they want to get their propaganda into schools, where their targets have little or no knowledge to refute their rubbish.

What utter garbage Hasbeen!

If the fuel the ethanol factories produce is more valuable than electricity, it makes sense to use electricity instead of that. But it won't make much difference to overall efficiency. Going off grid doesn't make economic sense now, and unless the grid companies persist with the current charging model which rips off electricity users, it never will.

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Loudmouth,
"So 'sustainability' - if it is taken to that sort of extreme - would mean massive reductions in population, and in living standards, in Australia."

Try to find out what sustainability actually means before telling us what you think its implications are!

Rubbish Aidan, If they are doing it t6o save CO2, & if it saves CO2, surely they should use it to generate their own power on the ethical basis alone.

If it is an economic proposition to produce it, they should use it to power their process, & become more profitable.

Of course they want mandates to make us use the junk, because first of all it is harmful to much machinery, & secondly it is uneconomic to use as a power source.

It is very similar to wind, a catastrophe caused by foolish people with a religious dogma, & used by the smarties to rip off the public.

Unfortunately I have discovered that most ethanol in Australia actually comes from wheat starch, which is not such a great idea, the energy return is to low and it is a waste of a useful food resource.

Quote Hasbeen

"if that were true ethanol factories would be stand alone facilities, using only the fuel they produced to power their process, rather than being connected to the grid."

They do something like that in most modern ethanol plants based on sugar cane by burning the bagasse waste to make the power to run the plant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse#Fuel

As regards using it in a car engine it needs to be designed to use the fuel, there are a wide range of vehicles in Australia that can use E10, but most manufacturers don't seem to bother labeling the cars as such. Despite the fact that pure ethanol is twice as expensive as petrol, there are certain advantages to using it, such as a fuel additive instead of MTBE, it allows engines run at higher compression ratios, it raises the octane level of the fuel, and it could reduce the amount of petrol we have to import into the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether

Hasbeen, businesses don't run on an ethical basis alone. And unless the purpose is demonstration or proof of concept, there's no advantage to actually closing the loop. If going off grid doesn't actually save any CO2, the ethical case for doing so is illusory.

An ethanol blend isn't at all harmful to most petrol engines. Its higher octane rating makes it technically advantageous.

Wind power isn't a catastrophe, it's a sensible way of generating electricity. What's not sensible is the way it's funded, but that's not catastrophic.

And pretending it's anything to do with a religious dogma instead of posting a rational objection really shows you've lost the argument.

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warmair, AIUI MTBE isn't used in Australia.