In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
Corn is the leading food and feed crop of the United States in geographic range of production, acreage, and quantity of product. The vital importance of a large acreage of this crop, properly cared for, therefore, is obvious.
When you look at the social cost of carbon - and there is a lot of ambiguity around that - what you also need to be doing is looking at the benefits of carbon and what that has on increased agriculture production.
Carbon is the stuff of life, and it's the stuff of everything used by human society. All of our materials are made of carbon or of substances, such as steel or glass, which are produced through the utilization of carbon.
If you could eat portions of pine trees, you could eliminate corn in many ways.
We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.
We all know that cattle and beef are among the biggest contributors to carbon emissions.