Read this article.
Did you know that many cars being built in America today are "flex fuel" vehicles, meaning that they can run on both gasoline and much cheaper, more environmentally-friendly ethanol? If you own a Ford Taurus, Ford Explorer, Chevy Suburban, and many other models, you could be saving the environment (and lots of money) by putting ethanol in your tank today.
In Brazil, currently 70% of all cars sold are flex fuel vehicles, and ethanol there costs $1.19 per gallon. Not only are they avoiding buying oil from the Middle East, but they are creating thousands of jobs and reinvigorating their agricultural sector.
America could be foreign-oil independent today, if gas stations would simply add ethanol to their pumps, and the cost of fuel would be cut by more than 50%... and all of the bad shit that comes out of your tailpipe would be a thing of the past. (And wouldn't it just suck to put the entire Middle East out of business?)
Read the article, and see what the future holds.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hate to do nothing but argue with you, but you're off the mark on the ethanol thing. Since Iowa produces more ethanol than any other state in the union, it's available at every gas station in the state. The debate over ethanol is also in the local newspapers every day. The problems with ethanol are many, including: It takes a slightly more than a gallon of oil to produce one gallon of ethanol. The combines that pick the corn cannot burn ethanol, it's too low in octane for heavy machinery so the farm equipment must run on deisel, the trains that carry the corn to the refineries run on diesel or coal, the elevators that move the grain around the refinery run on electricity generated by oil or coal.
Ethanol is a hidden subsidy for the agriculture sector: Welfare for farmers. And if you read A Sand County Almanac you'll see that the government has known since the depression that the great experiment of the 1800s, turning the American midwest into one giant grain-producing machine to feed the hog, chicken, and beef-producing machines, is environmentally unsound and economically a failure. That's why the government destroys or gives away millions of gallons of milk, thousands of tons of cheese, and gazillions of tons of grain every year. If we didn't eat so much meat, but ate the corn and wheat we grew instead of feeding it to animals meant for slaughter, we could live quite well on a third of the farm land we use now. And since the 1970s there have been precious few "family" farms left to save. Of the 360 kids in Andy's school, I'll bet no more than 10 live on a working farm, though they can see miles of corn from the top of the jungle gym. But of course, without the agribusiness corporations tending all that farm land, it would blow and wash into the Mississippi, clog up the shipping lanes, and expose the Midwestern aquifers, causing massive drought. So we're sort of stuck with this huge white elephant of American agriculture, until science figures out how to bring back the prairies and the buffalo in a decade or two.
And why would burning more ethanol lessen the impact of auto exhaust? You're still taking carbon out of the ground and releasing it back into the air, you're just using fresh carbon rather than fossil carbon. The solution is to stop selling every schmoe with 300 bucks a car, and give the dope a bus pass.
Whew. I feel better now. Thanks for listening.
The article didn't hit too much on the costs of production here in America, but they did indicate that Brazil (although fairly socialist in comparison to the U.S.) has a private industry supplying ethanol at a profit.
They did mention that the refineries are right in the middle of the sugar cane crops. They did mention that sugar cane has a higher "kick" to it than corn when making ethanol. You probably could assume that the laborers in Brazil are cheaper, and the machinery less utilized in Brazil as well.
So, I'll assume that you are right... insofar as Iowa, and corn-based ethanol, but it certainly isn't entirely correct for Brazil, obviously. Perhaps in a decade or two, we'll be importing 140 billion gallons of ethanol from Brazil per year, instead of giving it to the wacko Wahabbists.
I'm all for that, though if that's the case then they'll have to start paying those sugar cane cutters a living wage, and give them some health benefits for their snakebite injuries. And really, shouldn't we just be giving away bicycles and bottles of rum to all the Americans who'll be unemployed in the next couple of decades? Doesn't that make more sense?
Whether it's ethanol, solar power, batteries, or hydrogen cow farts...
Whether it's a decade or a century from now...
Whether it is an overnight change based on government edict or market-driven and consumer-driven preferences or just plain old running out of oil in the ground...
Eventually a system-wide change will take place and Exxon-Mobil will either become the world's leader in flatulance capturing, or will be giving it's quarter-million-person workforce pink slips. I'm rooting for any and all processes that may give us an unlimited, pollution free fuel supply in the future.
Truth be told though... and I've hit on it already... my personal reason is I want to see the Middle East dry up literally. I want to make that place the most unimportant real estate on the planet, and completely cut off and impoverish the repressive governments and terrorist groups and extremists that thrive off of the oil money that the Middle East generates.
Hell: We're spending a billion dollars a week on un-fucking-up Iraq. If we stopped caring about their oil, we could probably take that money and use it to discover cold fusion before the end of the decade. (And yes... put millions of oil workers out of work. Sorry: But that's progress for you, as I'm sure all of the telegraph operators and carriage builders of yesteryear would tell you.)
Post a Comment