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The Ethanol Delusion
By Mr Ethanol | August 11, 2008
American Enterprise Institute:
Ethanol–the chemical that gives your booze its kick–has been used by mankind for a very long time, 8,000 years or so. Even Stone Age people recognized the value of a good tipple. Of late, ethanol has been touted as the super-fuel that will reduce global warming, bring down gas prices, relieve our dependence on foreign oil, starve terrorists of funding, restore the family farm, create jobs and basically Save The Planet!
Contrary to popular belief, vastly expanding our use of ethanol fuel would do few, if any, of these things. But it almost certainly would increase food prices, greenhouse gas emissions and local air and water pollution while decreasing our supply of fresh water, consuming more of our land and destroying more of our ecosystems.
First, the lack of benefits. While nature spent millions of years concentrating solar energy in the forms of peat, coal, oil and natural gas, ethanol relies on the sunlight that strikes living plants in a single growing season. Because solar energy is diffuse, the scale of land consumption and the labor required to gather massive quantities of vegetation quickly leads to diminishing returns.
As Rockefeller University researcher Jesse Ausubel points out, it would take 1,000 square miles of prime Iowa farm land to produce as much electricity from biomass as from a single nuclear power plant.
The highly touted cellulosic ethanol, made from such plants as switch grass, is no solution, either. Professor John Deutch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently showed that we might conceivably produce enough ethanol from cellulose to displace 1 million to 2 million barrels of oil per day in the next couple of decades. But we currently use 20 million barrels a day and have a growing population, so it’s clear we’re not going to seriously influence world oil markets, become energy independent, impoverish oil-rich enemy regimes or de-fund terrorists by making ethanol.
Now, let’s address ethanol’s many drawbacks. Read full article.
Topics: Ethanol |
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