Ethanol = Unsustainable, subsidized, food burning, mileage ruining, non-pipelinable, corrosive, caustic, economically backward FRAUD!!!
Before you all beat me up, I agree with every point youve made
All you said plus tell the enviros to go pound sand and start using the hundreds of years of oil that lie under California and off it's coast.
Ethanol is a joke unless we start making it out of food.
Promoted by the RATS and the MSM in order to justify our insane energy policy of no new refineries, no ANWR drilling, and no nuke power.
There. I feel better, now.
Remember that with ethanol, unlike oil, the feedstock is not fixed. The plant scientists have quadrupled average corn yields per acre since the Second World War. Give them 10-20 years to optimize feedstocks for fuel production and we might find that our current projections are quite low. Also remember that corn may very well be supplanted as the feedstock of choice. Cellulosic ethanol opens the door to using a very wide range of materials, and we have scarcely begun to survey the possibilities. There is, for example, discussion of algae and microbial production. The point is, no one really knows what the feedstock potential is. Projections of current feedstocks and technologies get us out to about 60 billion gallons a year (vs. about 140 billion gallons of gasoline that we currently burn). That may be a lower boundary.
Yes, we will have to build a new infrastructure to handle all this. That can be done if the scale of production warrants it. The key question is where the price of oil will be 20 years down the road. If $20 a barrel oil magically reappears, the whole range of emerging alternative fuels probably gets priced back off the market. If oil stays above $50, it's a new ballgame. If oil bumps up to an even higher plateau, you will be harvesting your backyard to sell the clippings.
What we are doing now is jumpstarting a high-potential new industry as a means of hedging against political and economic risk in the oil patch. Right now, our thirst for gasoline is financing most of the world's really bad people. I think it makes sense to aggressively explore a way of getting off that path.
"Ethanol = Unsustainable, subsidized, food burning, mileage ruining, non-pipelinable, corrosive, caustic, economically backward FRAUD!!!"
As American farmers sell their corn and other ethanol producing crops for ethanol production to be sold at a high premium cost over regular old dirty oil, several situations will happen:
1. The 2nd and 3 rd world countries that depend on our corn and other cereal crops will become Sudans and hot beds of social unrest. America will be blamed for this green arrogance.
2. Corn syrup and other cereal by products will start a wave of inflation as the added costs of these by products impact so many food products.
3. Inflation in the fuel market will happen as the ethanol becomes more expensive each day due to market shortages of the corn and other products.
Don't forget soil-depleting, topsoil-erroding and chemical-fertilizer-polluting.