[husainfazel]

You would think that with a food catastrophe on the way - the current administration's finest minds wouldn't be encouraging even higher corn prices (already at a 10 year high in April) with this mix of legislative action:

> Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels

Or with what I can only call absolutely diabolical sabotage of food production:

CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that:

"On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately."

"The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."

CF has made urgent appeals to the government for remedy, so far with no positive action

https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-living-bank-of-england-go...

Remember when the apocalyptic food crisis happens, it wasn't an accident OR bad luck, it was planned.

[martincmartin]

TFA talks about that. Before the food crisis was in the news, the energy crisis was in the news.

[AnimalMuppet]

Because Union Pacific is out to destroy food production? Riiiiight...

Or because the government didn't prevent a stupidity from a private company?

Never attribute to malice...

[husainfazel]

The man at the very top has warned us about food shortages:

https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2022/03/its-going-to-be-...

So why are CF Industries needing to beg the administration to intervene and allow shipments.

https://strangesounds.org/2022/04/fertilizer-giant-cf-indust...

Also ask yourself why Union Pacific is imposing these restrictions?

Maybe it might have something to do with the latest rage in the world financial markets? Blackrock and the WEF set up ESG certifying companies that award ESG ratings and punish those that don't comply. So you have companies forced to push for completely bonkers restrictions and policies because they're mandated to top down:

https://www.up.com/aboutup/esg/index.htm

If sometimes their incompetence lead to a winning situation for us, we could say it's just pure incompetence. But this is anything but incompetence.

[AnimalMuppet]

Union Pacific is acting to try to improve their "operating ratio" according to the current management fad that they've fallen prey to.

CF Industries is begging the administration, not because the administration is in a plot to cause this, but because Union Pacific isn't listening. (And also because the government just had hearings about the incompetence of railroads under the current management fad.) CF is just looking for some lever that will keep UP from damaging CF's business.

No, I don't think Blackrock or the WEF have anything to do with it. It has to do with Canadian National, and then Canadian Pacific, adopting Precision Scheduled Railroading, and improving their operating ratios by doing so, and every other major railroad (except maybe BNSF) jumping on the bandwagon. But in doing so, UP is driving away some traffic (not just food- or fertilizer-related), in the hope that net profit will go up.

This has all been building for a decade or so. It's nothing related to the current geopolitical and economic situation.

[germinalphrase]

Wasn’t there an HN discussion recently about how rail operators were running extremely long trains which are more economically efficient for the operators, but much more likely to derail (causing physical and pollution damage to communities)?

[vimy]

It's even worse when you realize biofuel is bad for the environment.

> Third-generation biofuels do not represent a feasible option at present state of development as their GHG emissions are higher than those from fossil fuels. As also discussed in the paper, several studies show that reductions in GHG emissions from biofuels are achieved at the expense of other impacts, such as acidification, eutrophication, water footprint and biodiversity loss. The paper also investigates the key methodological aspects and sources of uncertainty in the LCA of biofuels and provides recommendations to address these issues. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/

> Our study examined data from 2005-2013 during this sharp increase in renewable fuel use. Rather than assuming that producing and using biofuels was carbon-neutral, we explicitly compared the amount of CO2 absorbed on cropland to the quantity emitted during biofuel production and consumption. Existing crop growth already takes large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The empirical question is whether biofuel production increases the rate of CO2 uptake enough to fully offset CO2 emissions produced when corn is fermented into ethanol and when biofuels are burned. Most of the crops that went into biofuels during this period were already being cultivated; the main change was that farmers sold more of their harvest to biofuel makers and less for food and animal feed. Some farmers expanded corn and soybean production or switched to these commodities from less profitable crops. But as long as growing conditions remain constant, corn plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same rate regardless of how the corn is used. Therefore, to properly evaluate biofuels, one must evaluate CO2 uptake on all cropland. After all, crop growth is the CO2 “sponge” that takes carbon out of the atmosphere. When we performed such an evaluation, we found that from 2005 through 2013, cumulative carbon uptake on U.S. farmland increased by 49 teragrams (a teragram is one million metric tons). Planted areas of most other field crops declined during this period, so this increased CO2 uptake can be largely attributed to crops grown for biofuels. Over the same period, however, CO2 emissions from fermenting and burning biofuels increased by 132 teragrams. Therefore, the greater carbon uptake associated with crop growth offset only 37 percent of biofuel-related CO2 emissions from 2005 through 2013. In other words, biofuels are far from inherently carbon-neutral. https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...