IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1210.6080.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Food for fuel: The price of ethanol

Author

Listed:
  • Dominic K. Albino
  • Karla Z. Bertrand
  • Yaneer Bar-Yam

Abstract

Conversion of corn to ethanol in the US since 2005 has been a major cause of global food price increases during that time and has been shown to be ineffective in achieving US energy independence and reducing environmental impact. We make three key statements to enhance understanding and communication about ethanol production's impact on the food and fuel markets: (1) The amount of corn used to produce the ethanol in a gallon of regular gas would feed a person for a day, (2) The production of ethanol is so energy intensive that it uses only 20% less fossil fuel than gasoline, and (3) The cost of gas made with ethanol is actually higher per mile because ethanol reduces gasoline's energy per gallon.

Suggested Citation

  • Dominic K. Albino & Karla Z. Bertrand & Yaneer Bar-Yam, 2012. "Food for fuel: The price of ethanol," Papers 1210.6080, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1210.6080
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.6080
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Rupert Read & Raphaël Douady & Joseph Norman & Yaneer Bar-Yam, 2014. "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)," Working Papers hal-01479405, HAL.
    2. Baines, Joseph, 2015. "Price and Income Dynamics in the Agri-Food System: A Disaggregate Perspective," EconStor Theses, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157992, July.
    3. Krishnan, R. & Pearce, J.M., 2018. "Economic impact of substituting solar photovoltaic electric production for tobacco farming," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 503-509.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1210.6080. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.