Posted on 11/13/2013 4:01:11 PM PST by raptor22
After fomenting fears of fracking and fossil fuels, the administration's campaign to put food in our gas tanks has wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies.
Ethanol was supposed to save the earth and pave the way to energy independence. It has done neither. We are getting closer to energy independence but it is thanks to the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has unleashed our vast reserves of oil and natural gas formerly trapped in shale formations underneath much of the U.S.
Fracking was supposed to be environmentally dangerous, a process that would pollute the groundwater throughout much of America.
Yet an analysis by the Associated Press shows that while there has not been a single documented case of fracking contamination of groundwater, ethanol production has scarred and ravaged the environment it was supposed to protect.
Back in June 2010, we warned that before the first drop of oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico, there existed an "8,500 square mile 'dead zone' below the Mississippi River Delta, roughly the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Way too much marginal farm land has been forced back into the production of corn grain for ethanol, which is just the kind of exploitation that was restricted by the policies of the Progressives over most of the past century.
If ethanol is such a good thing for motor fuel, a much cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to produce would be to take a fraction of natural gas, ethylene, chemical formula C2H4, and combine it with H2O in the presence of a catalyst, forming C2H5OH, ethanol, chemically indistinguishable from the grain alcohol produced from the fermentation of corn grain and distillation to separate it from the water in which it is mixed. No erosion, no waste heat pollution, and no vegetable waste from the fermented grain mash.
Your river is de Nile.
IBD EDITORIAL PING
I pretty much agree with article. I too _used_ to think ethonal car fuel was a good idea. Burning what should be food in cars is absolutely wrong. This is part of the reason for the Arab spring; they’re starving as food prices escalate and availability shrinks. Of course the other, big reason is Pieceful religion...
Wasn’t the renewable fuels standard signed into law by Bush in 2007?
yadda yadda yadda
Marginal land that farmers were being paid to leave unplanted, causing tsunamis of criticisms.
But antagonists don’t want that land planted, either.
Can’t have it both ways, except in FR postings.
Bad, but recall it was George W that accelerated the recklessness of increased ethanol.
W was the reason we got Obama.
No more RINOs.
I joined the Tea Party yesterday.
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