Ukrainian Corn

 Did you read that Ukraine is the "bread basket"?  This blog will reveal the truth;

I checked the internet and found that the USA produces 43% of the worlds corn.  There are at least t states in the USA that produce more corn than the Ukraine. The best numbers that I could find show that the Ukraine only produces about 1.5%  the world's corn.  That is a drop in the bucket;  I also found that the USA uses 40% of the corn we produce to make ethanol for fuel.  That amounts to 17,2% of the world's production of corn,  That is over 11 times the amount of corn produced by Ukraine.  If Biden would allow more drilling, we could use all that corn for food.

Why is it that we seem to allow people around the world to starve before we would drill rather than using our corn to make ethanol?  You would have to be very stupid to agree with the current policy of Biden. In a prior blog, I pointed out that plowing to grown corn actually causes more Carbon Dioxide to be emitted from the soil than that take out of the air by the growth of corn.  The solution of global warming is not producing more ethanol from corn, but a reduction in human population.  Why do you never hear anyone proposing that?  '

PS-- How much corn did Ukraine "not" grow for the world in the last couple  of months?  The answer is "zero".  The impact of "zero" is "zero" on the supply of corn.

Over Population And Global Warming

 If we really have global warming, then the cause is over population. I will explain what I have found in this blog.

First off, it is almost impossible to find data on the internet about population distributions.  It would seem that it would be easy to find data showing the number or percentage of people at every age for most countries of the world, but it is not.  I can find data showing the average and median age, but not much more.  Why is that?  The median is better than the average because it shows that there are 50% older than this age and 50% younger.  The USA has a median age population of about 38.8 while Canada has a median population of about 41.2.  It is clear that Canada has an older population than does the USA.  Further the data shows that the countries with the highest per capita income and net worth also have the oldest median populations.  Population density is another problem, but those countries with the lowest median age population tend to have the highest population density.  It is my position that the way to get global warming under control is to lower the population of us human here on Earth.  Sounds like a cruel solution, but it is not.  If we don't get things under control we can look forward to a lot of starvation and that would not look too good.

What I was looking for on the internet was clear data showing the distribution of age of the population of different countries.  What I was going to do was to assume that all countries had a median population of 40 years of age and propose that they get their under 40 years of age population down so that it equaled that of the over 40 age.  The idea was to see how far and how difficult each country would have to work.  It would not be too difficult for the USA since we are starting at about 38.8, but for some of the African countries who have a median population of less than 20 years of age they would have a lot of work to do.  It would also make clear just which countries are the biggest problem when it comes to global warming.

It is clear that the standard of living has a lot to do with energy use and thus global warming and it would seem to me that all people around the world would like to enjoy the highest standard of living. I don't see how any country could expect to have a high standard of living if they had a low median age population.  The Ukraine has a median age population of over 41 and Japan has a median age population of over 45.  I don't think that anyone would claim that these countries have serious problem of "not enough workers".  If you look at what is happening on our southern border with all the illegal immigrants. do you think it is helping the USA raise our median age or raise our median standard of living?  How about its impact on global warming?  Is it helping there?  You know the answer if you are honest.

I am still looking for the data to support my position and am concerned as to why this simple data is so difficult to find.  I am not claiming that there is some kind of conspiracy , but the possibility does exist.

Truth About Electric Cars #2

 I think that I may have gone thru the numbers a little fast on my last blog regarding electric cars so this time I am go a little slower and show more numbers.  Read on.

Much of the data on electric cars is misleading because it does not explain "duty cycle" very well.  If you start with a cold electric motor, you can put several times the amount of amp's thru it and generate several times it's "continuous" horse power rating.  That is why electric cars are so impressive in short races or how fast they can get to 60 mph.  The problem is that an electric motor will get hot and thus has to run slower for continuous duty.  Example, pulling a trailer up a long steep grade.  If you were to try, the motor would over heat.  People need to focus on the continuous performance rather than a 10 second burst from time to time.

The power needed to drive a car down the road is a function mostly of weight and speed no mater what kind of energy source you are talking about.  For the record, electric cars are heavier than gas cars of the same capacity.  Cost is also a function of the weight of the car so heavier cars cost more than light weight cars.  That is a fact.  The energy needed to build the car is also a function of weight and price and here again electric cars cost more and consume more energy to build and thus generate more waste in the form of Carbon Dioxide.  I do not have good numbers on this but it is clear and one needs to take into account the energy necessary to build the car as well as the energy needed to operate it.  One final point in this area is that the efficiency of electric cars declines over time as well as solar collectors that produce electricity.  Both of these factors are over looked by most promoters of electric cars.

Here are some of the numbers that I will be using.  I got these off the internet.

(1)  In the USA we produce 0.85 pounds of Carbon Dioxide to produce 1 kwh of electricity

(2)  In California the retail price of electricity is $0.20/kwh as of 2021.  It is higher now

(3)  Theoretically 1 horse power is equal to 0.7457 kw

(4)  The efficiency of a DC motor/battery system is between 70-85% under normal load

(5)  Lead acid batteries are the most efficient and decline over time.

I am going to calculate the true cost of running a car at 50 mph for one hour where both need to produce 40 hp.  In the case of the gas car it is easy to prove by checking the gas mileage.  It is not so easy for the electric car that is just one reason to be cautious about the electric car numbers. We are looking for two numbers here, (1) True cost per mile (2) Carbon Dioxide produced per mile by both types of cars.

First the electric car:

(.40hp x .75kwh  x $0.20)  /  (.70 eff x .95 eff  x 50 miles} = $0.18 //mile

Now for the gas car:

( $4.10/gal / 33  mpg)  =  $0.12  / mile

It seems clear that gas cars cost less per mile than electric cars.

Now for the Carbon Dioxide:

First the electric car.

(0.85#/kwh x  .75 kw/hp X 40 hp ) / (.70 eff x ,95 eff x 50 miles) =  0.81#/mile

Now for the gas car"

(19.64#/gal / 33mpg) =  0.595 #/mile

From my numbers the electric car produces more Carbon Dioxide per mile than does the gas car by 24%.  How can that be, you may ask?  My Subaru is lighter and gets 33 mpg. For the gas car to be equal to the electric it would have to only get 24 mpg.  I think that is about the national average.

For the gas car to cost as much per mile as the electric car it would have to only get 22.8 mpg.  It seems to me that there is a bigger pay off from increased mileage for gas cars than switching to electric.  Next time I am going to get into this whole ethanol business.  It seems that there is a lot there that is not being reported or understood my the voters.

I hope that you can follow my calculations this time.

PS--I did not take into account the car heater or the loss of charge while your car is siting in the garage or in the airport parking lot nor poor performance during cold weather.  It gets even worse.  How about the time to charge your battery compared to the time to fill your tank?  What if you live in an apartment that only has a 100 amp service?  What then?

Truth About Electric Cars

 I did some research comparing electric and gas cars.  The results are interesting. Read on in this blog.

Few of the voters in the USA are mentally qualified to honestly compare electric and gas cars, so how can they come to an accurate decision about them?  I have relied on data from the internet so my conclusions have to be qualified some what.  Here is what I found.

First off the cost of a car is a very good estimate of the amount of energy that it took to make the car.  That means that an electric car that cost more than a gas car had to create more green house gas and use more energy to build than a gas car.  I could go into all the details, but the cost of the car is 99% correlated with the amount of energy that it took to make it.

How about the operation of the car?  Both need some kind of fuel.  The electric car needs electricity and the gas car need gasoline.  The heavier the car is the more fuel that it needs to run.  I think that electric cars weigh more than gas cars, but I am not going to split hairs over this point in this blog.  The data shows that to produce electricity it produces 0.85# if carbon dioxide per kwh.  The data also shows that burning a gallon of gasoline produces 34# of carbon dioxide.  Most cars have a lot more horse power than needed to just drive down the road at 50 or 60 mph.  In prior blogs I calculated that to drive the average car at 50 mph requires about 40 hp.  It is the same for gas or electric cars.

Here is some more data.  It takes about .75 kw to produce one horse power.  We know also that there are a lot of losses in the electric power before it gets from the generator to your electric car so I am estimating that you actually need 1.00 kw per horse power for your electric car.  That means you will use 40 kwh for your 40 hp electric motor to drive 50 mph down the road  That works out to 34 # of carbon dioxide having to be produced back at the power generating plant.  Remember that 34#.

Now for the gas car.  That data from the internet shows that the average car produces .78 3 of carbon dioxide per mile.  That means driving at 50 mph for an hour and will produce 39 # of carbon dioxide.

Now we have our comparison.  The electric car produces 34# and the gas car produced 39#.  The data shows that we saved 12.8%.  That may be a big deal to some, but when you look at the cost of the electric car and how long it will last the savings disappears.  Remember that the average gas car only gets no more than 25 mpg.  My Subaru gets 33 mpg.  If we take that into account the gas car only produces 29.5 # of carbon dioxide per hour.  The Subaru is better than the electric car by almost 15%!

The big payoff with the electric car is that the pollution  is "not" in your own back yard.  Is that the real problem that these green people are out to solve?  You tell me.

Ethanol Screw Job

 I have not visited this topic in a while so here are some interesting facts.

Most of us have been following what is happening in the Ukraine and its impact on the price of gas and cost of food.  I think that the Ukraine is second behind the USA in corn and wheat production and war could cause some unfortunate countries to starve.  That is aside from the impact on energy costs.  

I have been driving a Suburban for the past few years that gets about 18 mpg/  I recently switched to a Subaru that gets about 33 mpg.  My regular gas here costs me $4.10/gal.  It may cost more where you live but these are my numbers. By purchasing the Subaru, my calculations show that it is equivalent to paying $2.24/gal for my old Suburban.  That does not sound too bad. 

The problem that I have is that now most of the gas has ethanol in it and with that gas, I only get 29.5/mpg on my Subaru.  I know that most of you have had no way to really compare your mileage with ethanol with your old 10% gas.  If you did you would realize how bad you are being screwed.  Regular gas has about 114K BTU's per gallon while ethanol only has about 54k BTU's per gallon.  If you are using E85, it only has 88K BTU's per gallon.  That mean you are only getting 77% of the value compare to pure regular gas.  That is a screw job in my book.

It gets even better.  The USA is the largest corn producer in the world and 40% of our production goes into the production of ethanol.  In the case of my Subaru, the addition of 10% ethanol to my regular gas has reduced my mileage by 11%.  It is totally worthless.  I now burn more real gas than after they put the ethanol into it.  That is clearly a screw job.

How logical is it to have to USA grow 67% "more" corn in order to make us get 11% less gas mileage on our cars?  Notice that the 40% is the percentage of what we now produce, but if you go back when we did not use corn to make ethanol we only produced 60% of the corn we do now.  Do the calculations and you will see what I mean.

I did not mention sugar in this blog, but if you were to look at how much of our corn is now used to make high fructose corn syrup to replace sugar, you would be amazed.  The fact that the USA, due to federal import limit laws, pays about $0.60/# for sugar that sell on the international market for less than $0.15/# is another screw job.  

When will we stop our own government from screwing us?  The green movement is killing the wrong people and now Biden is more worried about the green movement than the people of the USA or Ukraine.

PS--About 3.8% of the USA corn crop is used to make high fructose corn syrup and cereals.  That means that if we did not make any ethanol or high fructose corn syrup we would have to produce 6.8% more corn to make the high fructose corn syrup.  Just another screw job.

PS--Why do the gas pumps tell you the octane when they should be telling you the number of BTU's per gallon?  In the case of propane they do tell you the BTU's.  It is energy that we are buying so tell us the number of BTU's!  Are we just that dumb?  Don't answer.

 

Shipping Cost

 I just heard the Democratic leader of the Senate propose lowing the shipping cost for imported goods as a way to help  lower the cost and help USA citizens. Nothing could be farther from the truth as I will point out in this blog.

Think about it.  I pointed out in a prior blog that the evolution toward super tankers and giant container ships has revolutionize economics world wide.  Now a company around the world can compete with the factory down the street from you.  That means your job and work has to compete with third world countries where people work for a fraction of what you expect.  

What if your son worked for a shoe company down the road from you and he made shoes that cost $50 per pair.  He was able to compete with a company from China that made equivalent shoes for $45 but it cost China $10 for shipping.  Than means the retail cost of the shoes from China had a cost of  $55 per pair.  I know that you would not buy the shoes from China nor would anyone else.  If we could get the shipping cost down to just $4 per pair, it would make the shoes from China cost just $49 at your store.  Now, what would you expect people to do?  They would buy the shoe from China and your son would be out a job!

Remember your history lessons about the "spice trade"?  This was when they used camel trains to haul the spices across Asia to Europe.  What happened when they figured out how to sail ships around Africa to haul the same spices much cheaper?  A lot of camel herders were put out of business and their towns became ghost towns.  The same happened with textiles that used to be woven in England but are now mostly made in India and China and a lot of Englishmen are out of work.  Interesting.

High shipping cost protects your jobs here so it has to be clear that Democrats have lost their minds and so have the people who have voted them into office. They want to increase the minimum age to help the people who voted for them too.  How do you think that will work?   Insanity!

 became go 

Infrastructure

 Exactly what is "infrastructure"?  Most people have never thought about it, but in this blog I will try to shed some light on the subject.

Infrastructure is things like roads and sewer systems so that is what I am going to focus on. Biden wants to spend "your money" on these types of things because it appears that you and me are so stupid that we don't want to pay more taxes locally to do these things.  If we had felt that these types of public infrastructure were worth spending our tax money on them, they would all be done.  You have to realize that we may have actually made the correct decision a long time ago.

Biden sees spending our money on infrastructure will improve our quality of life, but will it?  If you had the dirt road in front of you house paved, would you have a better quality of life?  Would you have more food or newer shoes?  Would you have a higher paying job working at the local hardware store?  I don't think so.  I might point out that most of the stuff in that local hardware store was made some place out side the USA.  How about those shoes?  Would your now be able to make your own shoes here in the USA  at a price equal to those imported?  No again.

Look at the dirt road in front of your house.  What are they going to use to pave the road, oil or concrete?  Where is the oil going to come from and how much more will it cost?  Most people do not know that concrete is one of the most energy demanding products.  That is why so many cement plants have closed in the USA and have moved to Mexico where they promote oil and gas production.  It is true that your neighbor might get a job driving a truck to haul the cement needed to pave your road.  I can tell you that his pay is only a fraction of the cost we will pay for the concrete and paving oil.  In the end Mexico will get more of your tax money than your neighbor if your road is paved by Biden.

What our economy needs is a way for us to produce products that we can export and sell around the world to pay for the product we import.  How does a new paved road help?  We can not compete on simple minded physical labor with most of the world so why don't we focus on technology and our natural resources?  Our literacy rate is among the lowest in the world.  Even Guatemala has a higher literacy rate.  The illegal immigrants coming across our Southern border are "raising" our literacy rate.  How sad ts that.  Remember that most of the cement used to construct "bridges" is imported.  Do you feel that we need more paved roads or more oil well drilling and frac'ing on public land?

 are closing in the USA and