The whole ethanol craze is just such a completely absurd farce, and it doesn’t take anything more potent than sixth grade math to prove it. It’s snake-oil elixir sold from a covered wagon by hucksters. The more you look at the numbers on ethanol, the less believable it is that it’s even a matter of serious discussion. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about it.
I haven’t heard this nonsense before; but the argument that ethanol will reduce carbon dioxide emissions must be some kind of test to see if anyone is actually listening with their brains engaged. All hydrocarbons produce carbon dioxide (or monoxide, which is generally taken to convert to dioxide in the atmosphere) and water when they are burned, it’s just that simple.
Sigh.
When plants, like corn, grow they take carbon out of the atmosphere. When the plant or its products are burned (or decay) that carbon returns to the atmosphere. Closed loop, no increase in carbon in the atmosphere.
The carbon in oil (or coal or gas) was stored there millions of years ago when the fossil fuels were formed. Burn it and you have increased the total carbon in the atmosphere.
They don't explain it well, but the company is right and Tom is wrong. On this point.
There are lots of other excellent reasons why ethanol is a dumb idea, but this isn't one of them.
The chemistry doesn't work economically, the process requires vast subsidy for the fuel to be competitive with motor gasoline, the input we're using is entirely the wrong one, the mileage is crappy, the fact that we're using corn as the input is raising the prices of most other foods artificially and to no purpose, the chemical itself has enormous handling problems (can't be pipelined, for one thing, and requires diesel or gasoline just to be delivered), and, oh yes, ethanol inarguably produces more smog per unit volume than gasoline, when burned.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Sheesh. Well, it's only a matter of time before the sheeple figure all this out...but WHY do we have to wait, eh? Grrrr.