|
|||
The US has price supports and quotas on sugar, and as a result Americans pay more for sugar than the prevailing world price. This has hurt our friends in the Philippines; after Marcos was finally kicked out, Aquino was visited by American congressmen and they asked what kind of aid she might want for her nation. Her response was "I don't want aid, I want you to get rid of your sugar import quotas." But it didn't happen. A lot of people grumbled about the power of American sugar producers -- but there aren't actually all that many and they don't have real power. It wasn't them, it was ADM. ADM wants sugar to be expensive so that ADM can sell corn syrup for less. In a free market, corn syrup would not be competitive; it doesn't really taste as good and it would cost more. But the US market is artificially manipulated to make corn syrup cheaper, which is why it's what you see used almost exclusively in soft drinks in the US. Good old ADM... ADM is also behind a recent movement to try to force all American gasoline producers to include a certain amount of ethanol in gasoline, a move which has met with stiff protests in a number of places. Per volume or per weight, ethanol doesn't have as much energy as gasoline and it actually costs a lot more, too, but ADM has been arguing "It's renewable" (read "It's made from ADM's corn"). That's actually open to considerable doubt; farmers who grow corn and distillers who convert it into ethanol consume a lot of energy most of which comes from petroleum; it may actually cost more petroleum than it saves. The only thing which is certain is that it will put dollars into ADM's pocket if we do it. But what goes around, comes around. There's a kind of coal called lignite, also known as "brown coal", which is generally not preferred for power plants and similar applications. They'd rather use anthracite, hard black coal which is nearly pure carbon. Lignite has a lot of other organics in it; it's sort of like buried peat. When burned in a powerplant it creates a lot of pollution. Anthracite is much cleaner. The US has a lot of lignite, and now someone is looking into the possibility of fermenting it to produce ethanol for fuel. This is nice because it would release a lot of the energy stored in it without releasing a lot of the pollutants in it (especially sulpher), since it wouldn't be directly burned. The dual irony is that it may actually be energy-positive (unlike corn-based ethanol) and of course it won't put any dollars into the pocket of ADM. (discuss) |
|||
