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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (353215)	10/2/2007 12:22:52 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577194

Ted, I think you're right but there is a transition period that I think we must go through to get to the other side. That's certainly true. It will be some 5 years before CO2 free capacity comes online and the replacement will be incremental, over following decades. The significant upfront costs slow things down. Investors will demand to see some successes before they rush with extraordinary amount of capital. And during that transition period which could take decades or at least a decade, we must pull something from every possibility including ethanol. And I believe that as we see more hybrid cars on the road.....again, another transition aspect....which uses less gas to realize a high EPA [by current standards], ethanol will prove to be reasonably cost effective for the short term. I agree with that, but I don't think we should shoot ourselves in the foot by granting excessive subsidies on short term ineffective measures at expense of long term effective measures (solar, nuclear). Ethanol is certainly better from CO2 perspective than burning fossil fuels, but the high labor (and other) costs make it a long term loser. And at the same time, growing plants for Ethanol production is just displacing other plants or vegetation that would be carbon sinks anyway. Also, growing population of the Earth needs to be fed, and hopefully with nutritious food as third world gets richer. The poor of the world will have hard time competing for food vs. rich world feeding their gas tanks - if ethanol and biomass were to be widely used. Joe