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 real hazard confronting humanity as we move further into the new millennium is that we could convulsely grasp for solutions in our hysteria about global warming which will muck things up even worse than they are right now.
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. 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! 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 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 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 today's "New York Times" reports, residents of River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb lying near a biodiesel plant, saw a black yucky goo that was fouling the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was four hundred and fifty times more than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and that it had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, waste from biodiesel production. The stew depletes oxygen in waters with rapidity, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as deadly to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't the only state facing this environmental hazard. In January a Missouri businessman was charged for a discharge that killed 25,000 fish and commited genocide on the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only a day ago, a study from the University of British Columbia calculated that in increase in corn production for fuel will widen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life literally 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 biggest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been penalized--for multiple environmental misdeeds involving harmful 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.
Still, biofuels are, at best, a huge gamble. They may help cushion the fall when cheap oil vanishes, but if we rely on ethanol to save the day, we could soon find ourselves forced to make a choice between feeding our SUVs and feeding children in the Third World. And we all know how that decision will go.
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 sharing information for a nominal fee which people can use in their garage or wherever to put together a small gizmo which instills hydrogen into the gas/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
What this does is make bite sized particles out of the particles that the system burns as fuel. Because of the smaller size it gets to use considerably more of the gas.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to improve your MPG by thirty to fifty percent or significantly more. Those particles "musta" been pretty "blankin'" big in some systems before. But with WATER4GAS they are made usable so you can improve your MPG.
It also helps make emissions significantly cleaner.
This package of info has been purchased by over 9000 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, 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 gas prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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