Posted on 02/08/2007 7:35:28 PM PST by Kitten Festival
Energy: Could lowly switch grass mow down the petropower tyranny of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez? A U.S.-Brazil ethanol pact signed this week may supply the fuel to do just that.
Chavez's hostile anti-American dictatorship grows worse as his oil earnings pile up. With the U.S. as his best customer, buying about a quarter, or 1.1 million barrels, of Venezuelan crude oil each day, the bitter coda is that every barrel we buy fuels his anti-U.S. actions.
These range from crazed speeches to colonial acquisitions like Bolivia to rogue-state alliances with Iran and Zimbabwe to menacing moves against neighbors like Dominica, Guyana and Colombia with $4 billion in weapons purchases.
High oil prices, low supply and his own expropriations of foreign oil partners in Venezuela only increase Chavez's oil cash and clout. The U.S. has been largely helpless, because it has few alternatives to buying Venezuelan crude.
But a new deal announced with Brazil to pool ethanol technology and produce greater quantities of ethanol in both countries could help. ...
The ultimate aim of the ethanol deal is to create a commodity market. This could give every country in the region alternatives for energy buying. In turn, it will undercut Chavez's monopoly and abusive influence.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who flew to Brazil to iron out the deal, made no secret of that. "Energy has tended to distort the power of some of the states we find to be negative in the world — Venezuela, Iran," said Burns, quoted in the Washington Post. "And so the more we can diversify our energy sources and depend less on oil, the better off we will be."
...this signals an impressive new U.S. diplomatic offensive
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
R O T F !!
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.
The cost of corn has skyrocketed.
What does that mean?
U.S. dairy & cattle farmers are going bankrupt in record numbers.
Regards, Ivan
I agree. Butonal can be fermented from the same corn, sugar beets, sorghum, cassava, sugarcane, corn stalks, and other biomass as does ethanol. There's also promising research with manufacturing it from food manufacturing waste products (e.g dairy whey).
I believe we are not hearing about the promise of butanol as a fuel alternative because it doesn't have a political lobby (as does ethanol).
I have been to Brazil and that is not true. The whole country is just about oil independant when it comes to automobiles, and there are plenty of them. I am not saying our economy should be ethanol based, but dependance on oil abroad is what we have to curtail, as it feeds the jihad operating in the ME.
"...especially on FR - too many people can see you for what you really are."
I am sorry, my previous post was in contention to the statement that people in Brazil cannot afford cars.
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.
Burn corn, half the 3rd world will starve.
bad, bad choice.
Let em eat the oil.
well maybe not as blunty but Me-262 has a point here.
3rd world starvation is to do with goverment control or lack thereof in those regions more then food. if you reemeber the ethopian famine, the governemnt at the time was exporting food if i remember correctly. if people are so concerned with 3rd world starvation, may i kindly suggest you email the chinese and ask them to stop funding african dictators with free loans just after the us/europe paid off the loans given to their last dictators as an attempt to buy our way out of starvation. as me-262 said they took western money and bought USSR weapons. also starvation in the world is dropping fast. the percentages of people starving is now down to 18% and is expected to hit 12% of the world population by 2010. it was 33% in 1970. the numbers are huge but the reality is 3rd world starvation is directly linked to democracy and free markets...not subsidatisation.
as for ethonal, corn, etc...I DONT CARE!!! i want something, anything that will allow us to stop feeding the hand that is slapping us. you want to stop saudi extremists...stop filling your car with their oil. i want something, anything that allows me to do that. if its corn in the short term, lets kick on, then plant your spuds, grass, whatever the hell you need. BUT WE NEED TO START. the last thing i want is some government comission for 10 years wondering about fuel output.let the market decide. if corn cant cut us the markts will tell..BUT for the LOVE OF CHRIST LETS ROLL!!!!
* sorry went into rant mode there at the end...
oh and one other thing, no i dont think biofuels will do it alone, we should dril, we should buy from canada..we should use this to supplement...
ethanol is a tool, it is a weapon and we should weild it as such...
But it's THEIR choice, or the choice of their governments, NOT OURS!
We need to become independent of sleezbag dictators and Mohametan death-cult purveyors.
Let them ALL go back to their respective primitive centuries.
Maybe if their people get hungry enough for food, they'll become equally hungry for FREEDOM.
.
It's what I get for not putting /sarc after what should have been obvious.
Sorry.
My sarcasm detector has been compromised by so many other freepers saying such things and MEANING THEM.
.
"Burn corn, half the 3rd world will starve. bad, bad choice."
Come again? How will things be any different?
I agree ethanol's as big a waste of our time as hydrogen, but I don't see how this would make poverty in the third world somehow worse. After all, we would immediately be desperate for ethanol production--something that most countries can MAKE, as opposed to oil, which is either there or ain't--and we do tend to PAY for commodities.
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