"Green" fuel killing the Gulf

Water = wet
Politician = liar

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Ethanol made from corn is an economic and ecological disaster. And the sad thing is that we did it to ourselves. Take a way the subsidies and you have lower food prices, greater efficiency, a smaller Gulf dead zone, and less land planted with corn.

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Solution meet problem

More ethanol equals less forest. Farmers cut down trees to make farms. More farms equal more gas/diesel burning equipment. More chemicals and ferilizers. More water used to irrigate instead of used for drinking.

Liberals = Unintended consequences

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Ethanol is the biggest lie ever perpetrated on the American public.

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I prefer mine in a quart mason jar, and it just taste better untaxed.

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There ought to be a law...






...for this government caused problem.

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People always bitch about ethanol but never acknowledge why it is used.

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Wait - why is it used? is there some advantage to it?

It is used to satisfy the econazis and line the pockets (buy the votes) of corn growers - as far as I can tell.

It is an inferior fuel with no advantages (known to me)

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People always bitch about ethanol but never acknowledge why it is used.

Wait - why is it used?

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Yeah, I'm all ears here.

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Wait - why is it used? is there some advantage to it?

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LINK

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One of the first gasoline additives used for this purpose was tetraethyl lead, which turned out to be an environmental disaster. Everywhere it went, the original octane enhancer left a nasty cloud of lead—which, as you might have heard, is really, really bad for our health and the environment. In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency began forcing refiners and importers to reduce the amount of lead in their gasoline; by 1996, the EPA had banned lead from automobile gasoline entirely. Over those two decades, the regulations reduced lead levels in America

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But while MTBE was great for urban air, it was bad for the water supply. When gasoline leaked from tanks, the MBTE mixed easily with water and soil and biodegraded much slower than gasoline's other ingredients. The EPA found that MTBE had contaminated five to 10 percent of drinking water samples where the chemical was being used heavily.

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The article goes on to explain that ethanol has its own laundry list of issues. However, the simple truth is that lead was added to gas to prevent engine knock. Lead was determined to be harmful, and was replaced by MTBE. It was also found to be harmful, and was replaced by ethanol.

While I recognize the issues that ethanol use presents, I get tired of the typical rhetoric on the mater that doesn't look at how we got to that point. The market capitalized on ethanol use, and it only further exacerbated the problem. Nevertheless it wasn't simply used because of econazis.

If you're going to have ethanol subsidies, which I think are dumb, but let's go along for a moment, they should be ethanol subsidies. Not corn subsidies. Sugarcane has seven times the energy balance of corn for ethanol. There are symbiotic bacteria (gluconacetobacter) that can fix nitrogen so you use less chemicals. Why is our ethanol coming from the Midwest instead of the South?

Oh.