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.
One of these dead end solutions is corn-derived Ethanol which is the favorite of politicians, corporations and media.
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 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. 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. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." 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! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: You need to burn more of it in order to get the same amount of fuel. It also has properties that make it impossible to use the existing pipeline infrastructure to transport the Ethanol 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 seen in an article in today's New York Times, residents of River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb lying near a biodiesel plant, observed a black yucky goo that was polluting the Black Warrior River. The junk was four hundred and fifty times more than permit levels allow and the stuff had traveled two miles downstream.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters super fast, leaving dead fish behind. And it is equally deadly to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't the only place dealing with this problem. In January a Missouri businessman was charged for a leakage that left 25,000 fish dead and commited genocide on the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only yesterday, a study from the University of British Columbia calculated that a boost in growing corn for fuel will widen 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" announced that Cargill, Inc., will pay a $100,000 penalty--the highest amount ever charged an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple violations surrounding illegal 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.
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 sharing information at a low price which people can use at home to put together a small gizmo which instills 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 uses as fuel. So the system is able to use much more of the fuel.
By doing this you can reasonably expect to improve your MPG by thirty to fifty percent or even more. Those particles "musta" been pretty darn huge in some engines before. But with WATER4GAS they are made usable so you can improve your MPG.
It also helps to lower emissions significantly.
This information has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND car owners 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, 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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