WI: Early food vs. fuel dilemma

What if the food vs. fuel problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_or_fuel (I.E where creation of bio fuels leads to higher food prices and famine in developing countries) occurred earlier, perhaps in the 60s or 70s? For this to happen, there would have to be something that would trigger high gas prices, leading to higher demand for Ethanol. What would the POD have to be? What would the consequences be?
 
What if the food vs. fuel problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_or_fuel (I.E where creation of bio fuels leads to higher food prices and famine in developing countries) occurred earlier, perhaps in the 60s or 70s? For this to happen, there would have to be something that would trigger high gas prices, leading to higher demand for Ethanol. What would the POD have to be? What would the consequences be?
Well, it PROBABLY wouldn't be corn ethanol.

It would more likely be Brazilian sugar ethanol or soybean oil, IMO, but it's certainly possible.

Yuck. Millions more starve around the world, especially in India?

It's kind of hard to imagine, though, any event that would raise oil prices THAT much. Oil was cheap, cheap, cheap in the 60s.

After the Oil Embargo of the 70s, if the US invaded Saudi (why?) and the oil fields were destroyed in the fighting (how? maybe ASB), then maybe, just maybe, you might get prices high enough long enough. But I don't see it.
 
Yuck. Millions more starve around the world, especially in India?
It could possibly have some negative effects in Southeast Asia as well.
It's kind of hard to imagine, though, any event that would raise oil prices THAT much. Oil was cheap, cheap, cheap in the 60s.
Yeah. It might be possible to have a POD in the 60s, but I don't think the consequences would happen for awhile.
After the Oil Embargo of the 70s, if the US invaded Saudi (why?) and the oil fields were destroyed in the fighting (how? maybe ASB), then maybe, just maybe, you might get prices high enough long enough. But I don't see it.
I don't know too much about it, but maybe if the oil embargo lasted longer?
 
MUCH earlier...

The earlier Model T's could run on ethanol or gasoline, so farmers could grow their own. If that mentality continued, (Higher distribution costs due to monopolies on transport, perhaps?) perhaps the biofuel idea would catch on, and remain a part of things. If food prices stay low, then making their own fuel is well worth the time--especially if it can be done durring down time, such as winter...
 
The earlier Model T's could run on ethanol or gasoline, so farmers could grow their own. If that mentality continued, (Higher distribution costs due to monopolies on transport, perhaps?) perhaps the biofuel idea would catch on, and remain a part of things. If food prices stay low, then making their own fuel is well worth the time--especially if it can be done durring down time, such as winter...

I'm not sure... were there very many farmers who could afford earlier Model T's?
 
Some

I'm not sure... were there very many farmers who could afford earlier Model T's?

There were a fair number of them when the price came down. It was not only a car/truck, but could do a lot of other things. The rear could be easily jacked up, and used to power anything that could be run with a belt.

If there was a fight over oil monoploies, or oil shipping, there's some incentive. Or, at any time, adding ethanol to the fuel--perhaps fermenting anything that was otherwise inedible...
 
You could always propose a much earlier (deep prehistory) POD leading to much smaller world oil reserves, with a butterfly net to prevent this changing human history.

Though you might also have to shrink coal and natural gas reserves dramatically or people would switch to natural gas or coal-derived liquids.

I did some research on this way back and as I remember supporting present transportation culture on present biofuels would be pretty hard, the scale of land conversion that would be required would be immense. I could see a widespread switch to batteries (with people mostly just having to deal with any performance inferiority) or away from cars and back toward railways (which could be powered by nuclear-generated energy).
 
You're not going to get a much earlier food vs. fuel debate without a very major POD, and the problem isn't with oil prices. Even if oil prices increased to the extent that biofuels were ramped up as an alternative in the 60s and 70s, you'd still have the Green Revolution dramatically increasing the efficiency of agricultural production across the board.
 
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