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 the past year, the Senate has plunged America down the toilet by demanding biofuels be the energy source of the future , 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. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to kick off. 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: 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 is tremendously inefficient.
Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar cane produces 8 units of energy compared to one unit of energy utilized for production which is an advantage over petroleum which is in a 5 to 1 ratio. But corn ethanol only outputs 1.3 units for every one unit consumed in the energy production process which makes it pretty much a wash and useless. "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 today's "New York Times" reports, some people living in River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama lying near a biodiesel plant, observed a black yucky slime that was polluting the Black Warrior River. The crud was four hundred and fifty times higher than permit levels allow and the stuff had drifted two miles downstream.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, waste from biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very quickly, killing fish. And the slime is equally deadly 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 indicted by a grand jury for a discharge that left 25,000 fish dead and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
More recently, a study from the University of British Columbia forecasted that a boost in corn production for ethanol will worsen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area with so little oxygen that sea life literally suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 environmental fine--the highest amount an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been penalized--for multiple environmental misdeeds involving harmful 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 providing information at a low price which folks can use in their garage or wherever to put together a small device which infuses hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
What this does is make smaller particles out of the particles that the engine burns as fuel. Therefore the engine is able to use a lot more of the fuel.
By doing this you can reasonably expect to reduce your gas consumption by thirty to fifty percent or significantly more. Those goblets must have been pretty darn huge in some engines before. But with WATER4GAS they are made consumable so you can reduce your gas consumption.
It also helps reduce emissions significantly.
This package of info has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND individuals already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?

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

Entrepreneur, consumer advocate, songwriter and activist, GARKO, is on a mission to save you from having to invent a car that runs on water and has good news that a water powered car is now reality and is one of the best tips on what you can do to save on gas consumption For a list of current gas prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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