Why Ethanol Would Lead To Environmental Disaster – More Info

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Why Ethanol Would Lead To Environmental Disaster – More Info

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 has been around for quite some time and nearly six billion gallons were produced in the past year just for purposes of making gasoline additives. 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. If you listen to Ethanol people then this is part of a revolution to replace oil addiction (with Ethanol addiction I suppose) . 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. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who was staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.
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! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: 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 majorly adds to the costs involved.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. 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 today's "New York Times" reports, some people living in River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, cited a black yucky slime that was fouling the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was 450 times more than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and the stuff had drifted two miles from its source.
It was a mixture of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. The muck and mire depletes oxygen in waters very quickly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as lethal to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't the only place dealing with this problem. In January a Missouri businessman was indicted by a grand jury for a leakage that murdered 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 forecasted that a boost in growing corn for fuel will worsen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life actually can't breathe and dies. And today's "Des Moines Register" announced that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 environmental fine--the highest amount ever charged an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple violations involving toxic discharges.
Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.
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 consumers can use in their garage or wherever to build a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the gas/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
The process makes smaller particles out of the particles that the system burns as fuel. So it gets to use much more of the gasoline.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to increase your MPG by thirty to fifty percent or even more. Those particles must have been pretty "blankin'" big in some systems before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can increase your MPG.
It also helps to lower emissions significantly.
This information 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, 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 one that runs on water right now at home! For a list of current gasoline prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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