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There Is Nothing Green About Ethanol
By Mr Ethanol | April 27, 2007
JoeUser.com:
In the past year or so we’ve seen more and more people jump onto the Ethanol bandwagon. After learning more about it (and it doesn’t take very long to do some basic research) I’ve concluded that Ethanol advocates are idiots.
Let me be very clear: If you think Ethanol is a serious alternative fuel you either haven’t researched it at all or you are too dumb to be expressing opinions.
It’s actually difficult to find a “plus” to Ethanol. I guess, in theory, it would reduce dependence on foreign oil. Which seems ironic that anyone would tolerate the negatives to deal a minor blow to middle east oil producers even as they shop at Walmart (which imports vast amounts of its “stuff” from China) on their way to a “Get our troops out of there” protest rally.
So what’s wrong with Ethanol? Let’s count the ways…
1) It’s not carbon-neutral. Not by a long shot. Burning a bio fuel in itself is “carbon-neutral” but producing the bio fuel in the first place (whether it be corn or switch grass) and then harvesting it and then turning it into fuel is hardly carbon-neutral.
2) It takes more than 1 gallon of fresh water to produce 1 gallon of Ethanol. Think about that for a moment. Environmentalists talk a great deal about conserving water. But producing Ethanol is one of the worst things you can do in that area. When someone runs their shower for a long time, at least that water is (ahem) recycled if you’re living in a city. But the fresh water used for farming and producing ethanol is not coming back to the water table or the lake or stream it came from any time soon.
3) It pollutes the air. In our rush to worry about CO2 (better known as the stuff that plants breath) people seem to forget about good old fashioned real pollution.
But let’s put away the extra pollution in Ethanol itself, let’s consider the production of it which involves using massive amounts of nitrogen for fertizing it and the effect of that. Or how about all the other things involved in raising crops. I’m no farmer but one doesn’t need to look hard to find out that the “agribusiness” is a pretty environmentally intrusive thing. It’s one thing if it’s being done for food, but as an alternative to gasoline?
4) It wouldn’t even come close to solving our problems. Even if we turned nearly all the ariable farm in the United States to switch grass or corn production and we switched to using corn stalks or other more efficient methods of getting bio-fuels, we still wouldn’t have enough for even today’s gasoline needs.
5) Ethanol actually requires more energy to produce than it provides. Let me be clear on this because Ethanol advocates try to side-step this by saying that all energy sources are like this. But the difference is that Ethanol already uses more energy in the sense that it takes more gas, coal, ethanol, whatever fuels you want to use to produce ethanol than the produced ethanol will provide back.
It’s a fraud. Really wanting something to be true really badly doesn’t make it true. One study showed that a gallon of Ethanol has 76k BTUs but requires 116k BTUs to produce — before you even start transporting the stuff! In other words, it’s not a close call on that point.
It’s like the Simpsons episode where Homer goes into the Grease business and Bart says “That bacon you just used to produce that grease that made 50 cents cost $5.” and Homer says “That’s your mother’s money” and Bart says “But her money comes from you.” and Homer says “And my money comes from grease.”
THAT’s the kind of reasoning an Ethanol advocate has to use. Homer Simpson logic. Read more.
Topics: Negatives |
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