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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (146606)	5/20/2001 1:37:21 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Respond to of 769670

I'm afraid this guy is an Oxford professor. Amory Lovins, already the youngest faculty member in the history of Oxford and British representative of Friends of the Earth, Unfortunately, Lovins often overstated his case. In claiming that the entire U.S. transportation sector could run on gasohol, he used beer and wine production as a comparison: Each year the U.S. beer and wine industry microbiologically produces 5 percent as many gallons (not all alcohol, of course) as the U.S. oil industry produces gasoline. Gasoline has 1.5 to 2 times the fuel value of alcohol per gallon. Thus a conversion industry roughly ten to fourteen times the physical scale (in gallons of fluid output per year) of U.S. cellars and breweries...would produce roughly one-third of the present gasoline requirements of the United States. But notice Lovins doesn't bother to calculate the required flow of organic materials through the system. The hops crop and vineyards occupy about 40 million acres. Twelve times this amount would be 480 million acres -- half the farmland in the United States. But now we do have to factor in that beer and wine are only about 5 percent alcohol, which means multiplying again by 20. This leaves us with a requirement of 9.6 billion acres -- ten times the entire cropland in the United States -- to produce one-third of our transportation needs in 1977. In fairness to Lovins he favored deregulating prices at both the wholesale and retail levels -- the one peice of advice that California was never willing to take.