Bio-Diesel Makers Idled
As users are discovering, Bio-Diesel fuel is no ecological panacea. Bio-Diesel makers are sitting idle for lack of buyers for their product. But there is a deeper problem with burning our food - economics.Bio-Diesel can never be cheaper than mineral sources of energy - period. Government subsidies or mandates will be required to make crops a competitive energy source, which just means that they hide the cost or force us to pay it anyway. When any good is sold at a price that is cheaper than the cost to create it, there will be shortages. Best example is water. How can we have water shortages? Take South Florida. They have an average rainfall of about three inches per month (it takes much less than one inch to sustain life and agriculture) yet they still have shortages. If water was priced at what it cost to produce, people would use less of it, but more important, capitalists would build the infrastructure to make more potable water available, before it flows out to the sea. Now favors go out to favored constituents like the Sugar farmers, and tax money is spent on other things. If water were priced close to what is cost, sugar would not be an economical crop there, which would release enough water to double the residential population, and we would have a side order of a clean Everglades. But that is the logical route, not the political one.
The depth of the greed and mendacity of our governing class is beyond full understanding by normal people. The lies and fraud go so deep into government operations that the mind recoils at the thought. Can all politicians be criminals? We reject grokking the fullness of that truth, so we reelect the crooks for term after term.