Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
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Yup. I cover the IRL for an auto racing publication, and I’m supposed to believe in Ethanol, but there are obvious problems with this solution.
The stuff works in a car — that’s not a problem. The problem is that the process of getting corn to fuel takes more energy than it yields. Conversely, petroleum (which is simply biofuel that nature processed for a few bazillion years) has lots of stored energy inside of it, and the process of getting it to your tank takes less energy than you get when you burn it.
Economics definitely kick in here. In Econ 101, the prof always uses grain as an example of perfect competition. If the demand for a grain goes up, it then lowers the supply of other grains in the short term. In the long term, the concept of “economic rent” kicks in, where we see that marginal farm land is pushed into production since the crops grown there are profitable enough to justify the effort.
So, yes, even if ethanol is suddenly viable, and even if we figure out a great way to refine biostuff into fuel, the result will be a massive expansion of food production and a probably rise in food prices.
My local big dairy farmer tells me that he loves the higher corn prices, but says that the price of dairy feed is now so high that he can’t turn a profit with his cows.
If he's really serious, why doesn't he install a wind turbine and a bunch of solar panels and be driven around in an electric car?
A few on the left, like Ms. Goodell, understand what is coming. However, control hungry socialists will shout down these voices of descent and give the west the type of environmental paradises we now have in Communist China and the former Soviet Union.
Cutting down forests, and replanting them, really ends up sequestering far more CO2, than allowing the old-growth forest to stand. Old trees only absorb enough CO2 to provide for their relatively miniscule addition to growth, and for the propagation of seeds. The spent parts of its growth, the core of the limbs and trunk, is dead, and is not involved in the further sequestering of CO2. Besides, this is all just fuel for some future forest burn.
New growth, on the other hand, gulps huge quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere, as all the plant structures are being constructed, literally, from thin air. There are a small number of micronutrients taken up, as well as phosphorus, potassium and various nitrogen compounds, but the nitrogen usually cycles back to the atmosphere rather quickly, as the amino acid of which it had been a part of, is decomposed by biological processes. The phosphorus and potassium remain in the structure of the stored carbohydrates of which the growing plant is composed and is released when the cellulose is burned, as part of the mineral ash that remains (pot ash, potassium, get it?)
Trees have this huge advantage, in that all the CO2 released kupon the combustion of wood was made up entirely of CO2 that had only relatively recently been sequestered, and effectively, does not alter the CO2 balance.
Far better than growing sugar cane (which in itself consumes huge quantities of CO2), the reduction of the wood waste from timbering into kerogen, a substance similar to light crude oil, by a process known as Thermal Depolymerization, produces a very useful chemical feedstock that does not tap into the remaining fossil fuels trapped beneath the earth’s surface.
The world shall NEVER run out of petroleum. It can be synthesized in industrial quantities, at a price competitive with current recovery costs for fossil petroleum. And while using existing technology.
Just an added benefit. MY plan for the rain forests was to turn them all into patio furniture. But you can only sell so many Adirondack chairs ...
Give me a break. If this is true, then Brazil should be a giant parking lot by 2020.
Wahh wahhh wahhh wahhh! What a bunch of BS. Show me where "rain forests" are being cut down to grow sugar cane and palm oil. And not the usual stock photos of the same log being cut down 20 years ago to build a road in Brazil. There has been unprecedented REGROWTH of forest, and farmland has been abandoned and taken back over by natural prairie plains grasses all over North America's mid west because of unprecedented farm failures brought on by ever increasing input costs while commodity markets prices have been at all time lows for the last decade. "Ms. Goodall is correct. In Indonesia, Africa and South America, growers are leveling rain forests to produce palm oil, sugar cane and other crops that yield ethanol and biodiesel."
All Goodall the monkey lover is concerned about is monkeys. The more land she can snatch away and label as eco sensitive Monkey habitat through the UN the better. She hopes that after decades of trying, she will find a monkey somewhere that will knock her up.
No they won't. They'll be burning bio diesel, All they will beltch is the smell of french fries, and make people hungry. This is a pathetic hit piece by the anti-human enviro freaks. There is no truth at all in this piece.
The use of grain for ethanol production only makes sense if you include hops or age it in barrels for at least 12 yeards
>> Connecticut sips ethanol Kool-Aid <<
Spiked punch??? (ethanol = drinking alcohol)
But supporting ethanol makes enviromentalists feel so good about themselves. Hey, what does one want? Self-esteem or better gas mileage? Sounds like self-esteem is winning out.