Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: ColtonGang who wrote (149698)	5/30/2001 5:29:04 PM
From: SecularBull	Respond to of 769670

They already have the government fronting for them in the sugar market in favor of corn syrup, now you want to produce ethanol with an excess, expensive, highly subsidized corn crop? ~SB~

To: ColtonGang who wrote (149698)	5/30/2001 5:33:44 PM
From: willcousa	Respond to of 769670

Of course they want their surplus corn made into ethanol. They could give one damn about whether it makes any sense or not. This is less preferable that they be subsidized than some guy in West Texas with a gas well IMO.

To: ColtonGang who wrote (149698)	5/30/2001 8:39:23 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Respond to of 769670

Ethanol Another report I came across put it at 10 acres of corn to fuel one auto for a year. 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. Lovins's vision, often compared to Mao Tse-Tung's dream of backyard steel furnaces, had a toy-train quality to it. Everything was precious and simple yet somehow unreal. "If the electrical grid fails, there is nowhere else to go and not much you can do about it," he wrote. "If your solar system fails...you can put on a sweater and go next door." spectator.org