[Question Liberal Authority]

What’s the difference between burning corn and burning wood? If someone was to propose setting aside millions of acres of farmland to grow trees so that they could be burned in a wood-burning electrical power plant, that person would be run out of town on a rail. Yet, that scheme would actually be more efficient than ethanol, because the entire tree could be burned. You wouldn’t have to extract oil and then refine it into fuel.

[nikos1121]

How about the Dept of Energy and the Dept of Education?
Why do we need them?

[Former Proud Canadian]

It’s actually worse. Corn is converted into foo, wood isn’t.

[dufekin]

The feds (EPA) in many areas already ban wood for home heating. With alternative fuels (oil, natural gas, coal, electric) increasingly unaffordable and more people falling from the rolls of the employed, this measure leaves many people with no access to heating during the winter.

Incidentally, wood-burning power plants do exist in those areas with an intense lumber industry, which yet persists only where big government hasn’t found an excuse yet to ban lumbering.

[SeeRushToldU_So]

What’s the difference between burning corn and burning wood? If someone was to propose setting aside millions of acres of farmland to grow trees so that they could be burned in a wood-burning electrical power plant, that person would be run out of town on a rail. Yet, that scheme would actually be more efficient than ethanol, because the entire tree could be burned. You wouldn’t have to extract oil and then refine it into fuel.

I actually work for a company that is trying to make ethanol from pine. We have made methanol and will make ethanol soon. It is experimental and I am not sure about its viability.