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June 9, 2008

Confused Americans for Truth - A Corny Excuse for a Green Fuel

by Ferdinand T Cat

Higher fuel prices mean higher food prices: after all, you need to transport the food from the places they grow it to places where they eat it. But there is another big component of the rising cost of food that is fuel-related-- the government push for more ethanol. This has become so obvious that even McCain and his fellow Senate Republicans are doing something about it.

But the biggest problem we face is that most voters don't know the truth about ethanol, and the truth is that it does nothing to help the environment.

To understand this, first you have to understand what happens when you burn hydrocarbons. Oxygen in the air is combined with the carbon atoms to produce carbon dioxide and with the hydrogen atoms to produce water vapor. If the burn is inefficient, some of the hydrocarbons are released unmodified, some of the oxygen turns to ozone, and some of the carbon atoms form carbon monoxide. These last are the components of smog.

It doesn't matter if the hydrocarbon is one of the dozens found in gasoline or the one that turns grape juice into wine. It's going to burn the same way, and it's going to spit carbon into the air.

Back in 2007, Obama supported ethanol because it reduced greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, he has called the fuel "transitional", and suggests that Brazilian sugar cane is a better solution. Ethanol from sugar cane is much cheaper than ethanol from corn. The conversion efficiency of corn ethanol is 30%, which means for each unit of energy we put into making corn ethanol, we get 1.3 on the other side. (I'm being generous here. Some people argue the return is 8% or less.) Brazil claims an 8:1 return on sugar cane, though it's being measured in a different way.

Regardless, ethanol is ethanol. If it takes more energy to produce ethanol than it takes to produce oil (which is not disputed by anyone), then we're going to increase the greenhouse gases, because if we burn coal, oil, natural gas, or ethanol itself in our quest to make more ethanol, we're burning hydrocarbons so we can burn more hydrocarbons.

This is a complete disaster, people. Even if you accept the tenets of the Global Warming hysteria-- which I do not-- the only Climate Change we'll get from using ethanol is to melt the icebergs a little faster. Yes, ethanol is renewable, and it's not foreign, but it's not clean, it's inefficient, and it's expensive. The United States government has been trying to promote ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuel for 38 years, and it's still not cost-effective.

So, in this year of Change, let's ask for a real, substantive change: pull the plug on ethanol. It's been almost four decades, and so far all we've got to show for it is more hot air.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


# At Mon 6:28 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags:

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Hey, thanks, I learned something here about ethanol. I always thought it was a fuel panacea; it clearly isn't.


Posted by: Full Metal Cynic at June 10, 2008 8:10 AM

My wish is that they develop a way to make gasoline from brussels sprouts--it would be win/win.


Posted by: KentuckyJim Author Profile Page at June 10, 2008 1:54 PM

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