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.
Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
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.
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 love America but I sure as heck don’t love ethanol! As a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: You need to burn more of it in order to get the same amount of fuel. 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 majorly adds to the costs involved.
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, residents of River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb lying near a biodiesel plant, noticed a black yucky slime that was drifting in the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was 450 times more than permit levels allow and that it had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a cocktail of oil and glycerin, byproducts of biodiesel production. The gunk depletes oxygen in waters super fast, killing fish. And it is just as lethal to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't the only state facing this environmental hazard. 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, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
More recently, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that a boost in corn production for fuel will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life actually suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" announced that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 penalty--the largest ever charged an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple violations involving 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.
Ok folks, sorry if I depressed you. But I am just trying to wake you up to the truth. Further on along those lines I do have good news!
WATER4GAS is providing information at a low price which consumers can use at home to put together a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the gas/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
The process makes bite sized particles out of the ones that the system burns as fuel. Because of the smaller size the engine gets to use a lot more of it.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to lower your fuel consumption by 30-50% or significantly more. Those molecules must have been pretty darn big in some systems before. But with WATER4GAS they are made usable so you can lower your fuel consumption.
It also helps reduce emissions significantly.
This information has been purchased by over 9000 individuals already and the percentage of happy customers is about 99%! So how about you?

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

Activist, songwriter, consumer advocate and entrepreneur, GARKO, recommends a converted engine as the best solution for best fuel mileage solution and as an alternative in beating fuel prices For a list of current fuel prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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