Drive On The Road To Disaster Powered By Ethanol

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Drive On The Road To Disaster Powered By Ethanol

By: GARKO

The potential disaster facing us is not actually global warming but human stupidity and shortsightedness in implementing false and destructive solutions of which there are many.
One of these dead end solutions is corn-derived Ethanol which is the favorite of politicians, corporations and media.
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June 2007, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. It is a nice utopian fantasy with happy farmers, clean air, a cool clean planet and emancipation of the US from oil addiction. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. Interestingly enough, the primaries started in Iowa so all the candidates except one or two that have integrity suddenly became huge fans of Ethanol! .
The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. It takes some talent to be such a good spin master that you can put the American farmer growing corn as “the top of the spear on the war against terrorism as a former CIA director (James Woolsey) did but he did it! So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I will tell you, I love America but that doesn’t equate to loving Ethanol at all! As a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which is tremendously inefficient.
Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
But as seen in an article in today's New York Times, some people living in River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, saw a black yucky goo that was drifting in the Black Warrior River. The crud was four hundred and fifty times more than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and that it had drifted two miles from its source.
It was a cocktail of oil and glycerin, byproducts of biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very rapidly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as deadly to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't alone in this problem. In January a businessman in Missouri was charged for a discharge that killed 25,000 fish and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only yesterday, a study from the University of British Columbia forecasted that a boost in corn production for fuel will worsen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with so little oxygen that sea life literally can't breathe and dies. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., will pay a $100,000 penalty--the largest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been penalized--for multiple environmental misdeeds surrounding toxic discharges.
Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide.
In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Sorry, people, if I have upset or alarmed you. It is all about confronting the truth so that effective action can be taken. And I do have good news!
WATER4GAS is offering information for a nominal fee which consumers can use at home to put together a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
What this does is make bite sized particles out of the ones that the engine uses as fuel. So the engine is able to use a lot more of it.
With WATER4GAS you can reasonably expect to improve your fuel economy by thirty to fifty percent or even more. Those goblets must have been pretty "blankin'" big in some engines before. But with W4G they are made usable so you can improve your fuel economy.
It also helps make emissions substantially cleaner.
This package of info has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND individuals already and the percentage of happy customers is about 99%! So how about you?

Article Source: http://www.find-investment-advice.com

Entrepreneur, songwriter, activist and consumer advocate, GARKO, says that waiting for the automobile companies to manufacture the car that runs on water is like Linus waiting for the "Great Pumpkin" and that you only need to know the best way to save on gas and that is to convert your engine to a hydrogen powered system right now at home! For a list of current fuel prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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