The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”
There are 4 types of corn. Dimple/dent corn, pop corn, sweet corn, and flint corn. Each variety can be eaten. Prepared differently of course as they have different starches and flavors but the vast majority of corn fields in the United States grow dent corn for feed and biofuels.
Heirloom is just corn passed down from your pop-pop ;) (though the category now stands for rare varieties of corn that came from family farms or from the years long since passed).
Corn is amazing. My favorite use of it is for alcohol though.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture.
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
Actually, the first thing we tried generally WAS ethanol. The company that made TEL discarded it as a fuel additive because they couldn't patent and control it.
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
Everyone, or at least almost everyone, acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?
How did you get the idea they think anyone is being altruistic? Usually the complaint that people won’t vote in rational self interest is suggesting that people are voting based on irrational evaluations of their self interest: for the benefit of their unlikely future selves.
Public choice theory explains why irrational collective results obtain from individual rational behavior. To get rational collective results requires that people act altruistically, favoring the collective over themselves.
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.