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Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey
Oh, and an increase in inflation isn't just something that might happen, it's already happened. The price of food staples like milk, eggs, meat, etc. have all gone up 20-30% in the last year. Anyone else been looking at their grocery bill and wondering why it seemed so damned high these days? You're not just imagining it, things really are more expensive now.
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I read an article on this exact topic months ago. It put 90% of the blame on the current ethanol boom. Bush gave a speech a while back promising subsidies to increase ethanol production and a lot of farmers have started selling corn and other crops to refineries (or whoever makes ethanol from plants).
Since the crops used to be used for everything in the grocery store, including feeding livestock, the prices have gone up. There are hundreds of ethanol refineries under construction, and when they all start demanding corn and other crops in the next few months/years, the situation will get even worse.
The ironic part is that if every singe crop grown in the US was converted to ethanol, it would only cover 4% of the current energy use (and in the process the population would starve and the revenue from food exports would dry up). Awesome!
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