Chinese Cropland and Thermodynamics

All of this grandiose talk about alternative energy sounds delightful doesn't it? Economics, unfortunately, involves the most efficient use of resources given certain constraints and opportunity costs. And some truths are inconvenient regardless of whether we're talking about (supposedly) price-fixing pseudo-free market oligopolies, or states based on central planning. For example, according to the U.K. Times Online:

China’s communist rulers announced a moratorium on the production of ethanol from corn and other food crops yesterday at the very time that Western leaders are rushing to embrace alternative food-based fuel technology. Beijing’s move underlines concerns that ethanol production is driving up rapidly the costs of corn and grain. It appears to reflect a growing reality about food-based alternative fuel: it is far more expensive both economically and environmentally, than Western politicians are likely to admit.

Hmm. Turns out people in China value basic sustenance - grain, crops, livestock - more than grossly inefficient land usage. It's a no-brainer. Chinese politicians understand history. Social stability is the key to retaining power, and this is more easily controlled when the population has enough to eat. They don't have time for the quasi-religious environmentalism that is currently in vogue among Westerners.

Even our president - always derided by ultralefties as coked up on oil money - is pushing the alterna-hooey. From the same article:

President Bush, who with Britain wants to see a huge increase in corn-based ethanol, called in January for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in the US.

Although that is a hugely popular rhetoric in the Mid-west wheat belt states — the heart of America’s political battleground — environmentalists soon pointed out that such a goal would require an additional 129,000 square miles of farmland, an area the size of Kansas and Iowa combined.

Whoops. Looks like we slammed back into the laws of science and basic economics again. Renewable resources need to put more energy into the system to renew themselves, and this takes photons, and therefore land.

The tricky double-bind of total energy cost manifests itself with each alternative. Windmills? Let me show you the energy-guzzling aluminum factory that cranks those suckers out. And sure you can power Silicon Valley on sunbeams ... provided you cover half of California with solar panels.

There's no easy way around it. But while we're coming to grips with the problem - if we're serious about solutions that don't involve fuel buried beneath nutjobs - and if we lack the stomach to annex Canada to force them to farm ethanol - and if we can't fathom the notion that nuclear waste ain't so bad given the tremendous output - then we can at least learn something about efficiency from our friends in China.

(Thanks for the link, Dad.)