Rolling Stone magazine has been an arm of the "Gore for President" movement for ten years but even they couldn't swallow this: "Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles":
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.Viking Pundit in common cause with Jann Wenner? Cats and dogs living together!
3 comments:
Erik,
Using an energy intensive crop for ethanol feedstock makes no sense. I know there are a number of research facilities working on an inexpensive method of converting cellulose to ethanol. Should they succeed, then such a feedstock would end up being something like switchgrass (a prairie grass) that only needs to be cut and collected every so often. No watering. No fertilizer. No pesticides. Just a big lawnmower. It is estimated that such a process would return four to six times as much ethanol at corn per a given amount of energy input to harvest and process the feedstock.
Oh. wait. There are no subsidies for switchgrass, is there?
Never mind.....
We could just pump oil out of the ground in Alaska and off the coast of Florida and California - not like we can eat the stuff. Too easy I guess.
Amen! The only way to solve our crippling dependence on oil is to get more oil!
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