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POPSE.P.A. - Ethanol Promotion Agency About 320 million tons of biomass would need to be produced and transported in order to replace 10 percent of the U.S. yearly oil consumption with ethanol. That is enough material to fill 21.44 million semi-trailers. Stacked end-to-end these trailers would stretch from Florida's Cape Canaveral to the moon's Sea of Tranquility.
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POPSHas the World gone crazy? We deplete oil, we sacrifice our rainforests, denude and wreck our agricultural land, we see basic food prices disenfranchise the poor - we simply are failing miserably to see the folly of our ways.
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POPSThe Clean Energy Scam But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon. Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources-- it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences.
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POPSThe Myth Of Energy Independence Where did this notion of energy "independence" come from? Energy independence is not a new idea in American politics. Richard Nixon first started talking about it in 1974. The problem is it's no more feasible today than it was then. What about cellulosic ethanol, made from switch grass or corn stubble? I cite an analysis that was done by former CIA Director John Deutsch, who's now a professor at MIT. If his estimates are correct, producing enough cellulosic ethanol to displace just half of America's daily consumption of 20 million barrels of oil would require the U.S. to plant an area approximately equal to 1.5 times the size of Texas. That's a big area. If we could get the efficiency of the photovoltaic panels high enough, solar, ultimately, has more applicability. There are a whole lot of rooftops in this country you could put them on. Researchers are having better luck at converting larger parts of the light spectrum into energy.
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POPSThe Hidden Agenda Behind The Bush Administration's Bio-Fuel Plan
VERY DISTURBING REPORT Big oil is also driving the bio-fuels bandwagon. Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University and other scientists claim that net energy output from bio-ethanol fuel is less than the fossil fuel energy used to produce the ethanol. Measuring all energy inputs to produce ethanol from production of nitrogen fertilizer to energy needed to clean the considerable waste from bio-fuel refineries, Pimintel's research showed a net energy loss of 22% for bio-fuel—they use more energy than they produce. That translates into little threat to oil demand and huge profit for clever oil giants that re-profile themselves as "green energy" producers. So it's little wonder that ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are all into bio-fuels. This past May, BP announced the largest ever R&D grant to a university, $500 million to the University of California-Berkeley to fund BP-dictated R&D into alternative energy including bio-fuels. Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Program (read article)
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POPS The Biofuel Scam The timing is coincidental, but the report came out just as Senate and House leaders were weighing a plan which would leave renewable energy out of the next congressional energy bill. I'm sure there's some larger logic to explain that omission. But it might have a little something to do with the political muscle of the farm interests, a powerful lobby that knows its way around the corridors of power. All this is giving the cynics a field day. Each dollar spent on biofuel subsidies is a dollar not getting invested in other, possibly cleaner technologies. But the only people squawking seem to be the folks involved from those particular fields. I'm not advocating dumping ethanol research and production, but the selling of biofuels as the all-American favorite has been a marketing tour de force. That doesn't necessarily mean it's smart decision-making.
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POPS Ethanol Scam: Political Boondoggle But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year.
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