Ethanol from corn oil's problem is not cost. Ethanol's problem is that it takes almost as much energy to produce as it provides. It has only recently gone above 1.0, to a staggering 1.2. It is a subsidized loser.
Sugar Cane Ethanol is much better, at about 8, but it is not a solution for the US.
Biodiesel is 2.25. Straight vegetable oil is even higher, but interestingly very hard to find in literature.

Again, your question is irrelevant to greenie hypocrisy, but the answer:
one acre yields about 150 gallons of oil, using rapeseed (canola), which grows pretty much anywhere in the US and Canada.
We use about 140B gal of gas a yr.
This requires 930M acres of land to produce.
The present US cultivated land is about 400M acres.
To produce this oil and continue other production for food, the farmland would have to triple.
Algae may work someday, but not yet. We designed some portable algae biofuel units for the Army. Very cute. Very useless.

Is this a problem? Perhaps so, perhaps not. However, this is a physics-based, steady-state solar operating point. Nuclear and fossil fuels are limited. Therefore, I assert, there are too many people. The land we have can not support the people we have in steady state. With the technology we have today. Fortunately, we will have better technology tomorrow, or we would be SOL.

The US need not be the only ones to implement such a steady-state reduction in oil use. However, the US uses the most oil by a factor of almost 2. The US uses 19Bbbls/yr, about the same as the sum of the next three users: China, India and Japan. Saudi Arabia, is #5 at 3.9Bbbls. The US is a very big part of oil consumption.

How big of a problem was the Middle East in 1930, when they had little money? They can not continue to cause trouble if they have no money.
"I think" and "I doubt" are not arguments. They are just argumentative. Objectivists, use facts, established algorithms to analyze and logically induce information.

My original question was as to where the millions of barrels of vegetable oil per day, just for the USA, could be produced? Ethanol at present is too costly to produce and is just a pipe dream for reducing oil consumption. Maybe algae produced oil could be economically produced in large multi-layer structures to capture more sunlight. However I do not think that US reduction of use of Middle East oil will put a dent in the trouble with those countries. I doubt that oil is the main cause of trouble with the Middle East.

No, I am arguing that were there future glaciation there would, even with reduced population, be mass starvation. But, of course, as with any global warming and sea rise , humans are not completely stupid. Over decades, they will choose to not build where they will have to drown like the climate change true believers seem to think they will voluntarily do as the seas rise.

Good grief, I am quite aware of where batteries get their energy. Carnot efficiency issues are the same regardless of cycle. Only combined cycle plants are doing 50%. Coal and nuclear are much worse in the twenties. The average in the US is much lower than 50%. More that 50%, not almost 50%, of the heat energy is wasted in power generation. Something like 75% is wasted in transportation.

There is no real problem with ethanol disrupting food prices, although it is technically unsound as a fuel source. This is not so with vegetable oil-based diesel.

Don't understand your second point, but the Middle East would be as relevant as Uganda if we didn't need their oil. No idea how problems in the Middle East go away now, without taking away their funding.

I feel you are still missing the point I made, which is the hypocritical lack of support among greenies for vegetable oil-based diesel as the best solar energy approach. Regardless of the food argument (I disagree, but irrelevant), we spend $400M on Solydra, with a cell efficiency of ~3%; billions on unaffordable wind, gobs of ethanol subsidies, but nothing on an approach far superior to them all and essentially carbon neutral. This is hypocrisy!

Trump could have crushed Hillary with this argument just tonight. Crushed her!

You are arguing that if the human population was significantly reduced there would be glaciation?

Just remember that batteries for electric motors require electric energy produced by power plants which waste nearly 1/2 of the energy of the fuel as heat in generating the electric current,which is one reason that heating by electricity is several times more expensive than by natural gas.
For the oil, you get into the same problem as with ethanol disrupting the prices and supply of some commodity. I do not see a dependency on foreign oil as the cause of defense problems but rather government intervention in the energy industries and the support by citizens and government for religious intervention in society as a right making it near impossible to argue against it.

Just remember that that right is to act to gain and keep property and not to have it given to you by society or to steal it by right. Branden once related an old Spanish saying of 'take what you want and pay for it' and added that the hard part was in really knowing what you want.

The Earth and available energy are vary large compared by a quarter of a cubic mile of humans. Getting government out of the economics and science businesses along with increasing production of CO2 would go a long way toward supplying that small mass of individuals. The bad part would be a future return to glaciation with possible mass starvation, though that would be true with a fraction of today's population.

Very uncomfortable, and not so tiny when considering the requisite support needed to sustain the mass.
This lumped picture does doesn't get to the portion of the mass that is non-contributing, or the involuntary servitude issues.

I think people who argue the environmental terror of AWG without also advocating nuclear power are disgusting hypocrites. Nuclear is the only near term solution to power generation.

My point about vegetable oil is similar though. If again you also support the environmental terrorism arguments, building solar arrays, wind turbines power buoys and investing goobs of money to all around, feel-good inefficient junk is not even reasonable.
Vegetable oil run through an diesel engine (not that state-endorsed lie of ethanol) is ~10x superior on a kW-h/acre basis to any other solar technology, it is ready today, and the infrastructure is already in place (unlike hydrogen or battery exchange).

So go nuclear, and until batteries get better, run your cars and portable stuff on vegetable oil. The infrastructure is here right now. It is only ~$3/gallon, not far off the price of oil-derived fuel.
Why don't we do this? Because it doesn't support the disruption of the status-quo adequately for the environmental fascists and the majority of the enviro-lemmings are technically ignorant.

I study this because I am partly in the energy field, and my other big toe is in defense. Eliminating dependency on foreign oil is overwhelmingly the most efficient way to defend against islamic terrorists! Unlike AWG, this I do endorse.

The number of people is really tiny when viewed as a single mass.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technolo...

Then, if that was just patter about vegetable oil, why do you think that by harming US citizens by getting rid of fossil fuels without advocating going nuclear? But then you have the problem of decreasing CO2 and killing people with food shortages in the future.

That's not really the right question is it?

How many barrels of vegetable oil per day do you believe could be produced for that little carbon neutral project of yours?

Well said Herb!

The earth is an almost unimaginable confluence of coincidence and the improbable. Not impossible, because of the fact that it exists. Yes, it is fragile in the sense that it maintains a habitat for life. But the thing that the eco-freaks refuse to take into account is time. The time scale of the universe, which includes the Earth, is, as its very size, of unimaginable length. Changes are measured not in hundreds, or thousands, but in millions and billions. The fools who babble about climate change cannot accurately predict the weather for next month let alone the next fifty thousand years. It is a device to, once again, provide the "ideal" solution of giving more power to the state in order to regulate productivity.

The number of people in poverty will be reduced if the subsidies for poverty are reduced. I think most here would take this as an axiom.
How many people are really contributing, really creating wealth? The days of even thinking in those terms are long gone, but we need a "Contributors Renaissance". Every time I hear of the need for government subsidy for basic research or the arts, my mind simply goes to the inadequacy of those asking to describe their value in a manner they hold companies accountable to. Where is Sarbanes-Oxley for the arts?

Separately, I still think there are just too many people, and there are too many because the price to have one is almost zero and the drive to practice having one is so high.

Climatism is a sect of anti-humanism. Just like there are those for whom pain is pleasure, there appear to be a loud, obnoxious minority that fervently worship self destruction of the human species. This is but a grotesque variant of Utopianism, that belief in a fantasy form of perfect existence that is usually the product of brutal, extreme efforts. The climatists usually postulate some radical reduction in the Earth's human population (usually to 100 million or even fewer) is the only true sustainable civilization.

The number of people can be an issue. But perhaps the central issue is not the number of people, but rather the number of people in poverty. Of course, people might experience poverty for a variety of different reasons, and we might never eliminate some of those reasons (e.g. natural disasters), but we certainly can remove some of the causes our politicians are glad to propel. One example I have in mind is to uphold the right to property, or -- in other words -- abolishing income taxation and also subsidies for non-productive behaviors.

Worshiping lemmings are everywhere, so ready to be zealots in the name of something, giving power to Jill Stein, Jimmy Swaggart and the ayatollah.

The issue is trivially solved. Using vegetable oil in a Diesel or Brayton cycle is almost carbon neutral, available and the most effective means of solar power by orders of magnitude. The issue is that it is inadequately disruptive to the status quo, and the politicians have not finished wringing power from the people using AGW as a tool yet; therefore, a solution is not allowed.

My interest in this is that is renders the Middle East and its terrorist religulous clowns irrelevant. Eliminating the value of oil and their financial source is the absolute best defense against these people, hands down. Doing so significantly reduces the need for significant investment in weapons, defense and people.

That's the entire notion behind the climate alarmist theology - and I call it a theology intentionally. But what is so insidious is that they encourage nature worship only as a facade for their own elevation of power.

Right, beginning with the wholesale disruption of the status quo to move power to the elites.

This issue is the physics of climatism, not how to address it.
If the purveyors of this fiction are correct, then the outcome described will happen regardless of our action. It will happen voluntarily as the author describes, or involuntarily when the resources are gone. If the purveyors are wrong, an active remedy is just a waste.

My personal opinion is there are too many people, period. We have way to many non-contributors and wanton consumers wasting everything. We have no natural predators, and no checks on our population, which is out of control. Separate from an argument for climate change, I claim this is an example of Milton Freidman's "Involuntary Servitude". Our existence is diminished by crowds, pollution, crime, costs via socialism, water bans, etc etc. As such, there should be a price assigned to population increase.
I do not believe that a sustainable system is impossible without reverting to caveman existence. That is nonsense, particularly if it begins with controlling the population in accordance with what the individuals can afford. If we wanted to stop using oil, we could grow canola, and use the oil in a diesel cycle or Brayton cycle (gas turbine) tomorrow. This is the overwhelmingly most efficient solar power source. It is carbon neutral, and we could do it tomorrow. The problem is the greenies are idiots, and shun such simple concepts since they don't disrupt the status quo adequately.