It was only a few years ago that the "overpopulation" nutbags were bitching that it took 10 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. The principle was if the flotsome insisted on being born, they could at least be vegetarians:
<<Children of the Corn
An energy source that isn?t.
By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
August 14, 2001 2:00 p.m.
In the neverending search for alternatives to fossil fuels, some politicians persist in believing the future lies in ethanol, a corn-based substitute for gas. Just last month South Dakota Democratic senator Tim Johnson promoted a bill to require two percent of all transportation fuel by 2008 to come from ethanol. The requirement would rise in later years.
Yet the evidence that this is a really bad idea keeps pouring in. A forthcoming study by Cornell University's David Pimentel says ethanol suffers from what people in his field call an "input-yield problem": "About 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol," says Pimentel.
Consider this: Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce versus about 95 cents for a gallon of gasoline. And that doesn't include other costs associated with ethanol production, including soil depletion, corporate subsidies, and price hikes at the grocery store resulting from increasing the amount of agricultural land devoted to energy production.
Here's another way to look at it, according to the Pimentel study: "If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States." And yet another way: "The average U.S. automobile, traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix) would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel. This would take 11 acres to grow, based on net ethanol production. This is the same amount of cropland required to feed seven Americans." (The summary of Pimentel's report may be read here.)
A recent National Academy of Sciences study suggests that ethanol may not even reduce pollution ? and it may even lead to more smog-creating pollutants.
Weirdly, the Bush administration is trying to jam ethanol into California gas tanks. On Friday, Gov. Gray Davis and the Golden State sued the Environmental Protection Agency for a requirement that cars and trucks there begin using a mix of ethanol and gasoline ? a concoction that will cost consumers some $450 million annually, says Davis. (This amounts to perhaps a nickel more per gallon at the pump.)
The only good thing that might be said for ethanol is that it doesn't smell as bad as gasoline (and that's discounting the NAS finding about smog). In just about every other way, ethanol stinks.>> |
