In all honestly, I don't have a lot of time to type this up right now and will come back to comment later after I get the potatoes planted this evening. But I wanted to get this up in the diaries because it's important to both the "alternative energy" crowd and to rural folks.
Ethanol is a scam.
Not only that, it's a big business, big ag, Republican scam.
Bill Jones, the right-wing neo-con Republican who ran against Barbara Boxer in the 2004 Senate race, is Director and Chairman of Pacific Ethanol, Inc. He is
constructing ethanol plants like there's no tomorrow, and in the process will pollute the local air and water quality of these rural areas.
But even beyond the big business Republican connection, ethanol itself is not the "magic elixer" people want it to be.
A recent hour-long "documentary" that outlined an oil crisis (based on hurricanes and terrorist attacks but never once mentioning the words "peak oil") made sweet love to the idea that Brazil is using sugar cane to make enough ethanol for all its people, so why can't we?
One thing the documentary didn't tell you is that we are ALREADY producing roughly the same amount of ethanol that Brazil is. But how many people do you know that are using ethanol in their vehicles? It's literally a drop in the bucket of U.S. demand.
The solution seems simple: "grow more ethanol crops." But with the global food supply near the breaking point where there's more food being eaten than people grow, this seems unlikely. Where will this non-food-growing land come from?
A proposed ethanol plant near Montreal intends to produce 120 million litres of ethanol per year. That's a lot, right? Well... Canada uses 127 billion litres of oil per year, over 1,000 times the production of the plant. And the energy value of ethanol is lower than that of oil, so you need even more. To supply the U.S. with enough ethanol to replace oil consumption, an area the size of Texas would need to be farmed, or 70 per cent of all currently available farmland in the U.S. Without generous subsidies, which make ethanol a fast-growing money maker for the farm industry, there would not be any significant production.
Food? We don't need no stinking food... we'll all have Soylent Green and astronaut nutrition pills, apparently.
Additionally, the reason places like Brazil have so much land to farm their ethanol-producing sugar cane is that they have cut down massive amounts of rain forest to get it. Remember all the upset Starbuck's customers who refused to buy "sun coffee"? A grain of sand on the beach compared to how much is being destroyed for ethanol and biodiesel crops -- some southeast asian islands are pretty much being converted wholesale to palm oil plantations, and orangutans and other species are suffering to the point of extinction because of it. ANWR pales in comparison to the level of devastation.
But back to the ethanol scam... who will grow these crops? It ain't the family farmer, let me tell you that. That's right... big ag sees a lot of growth potential (for their investors) in the years to come if ethanol production gets a big government subsidy.
But you can at least save oil by using biodiesel to grow the crops, right?
Actually... no. And it makes the problem worse by putting even more demand on the very limited and energy-intensive biodiesel/ethanol industry. The more you grow, the more of it you require to grow the crops in the first place, making it even more expensive and requiring extra to be produced to produce the... uh... you get the idea.
Okay, I'm really out of time and it's going to get dark soon (plus the West Nile Virus-carrying mosquitoes will be out) so I need to wrap this up.
I hope this helps bring to light just how much cashola that corporations like Pacific Ethanol and ConAgra will make if the government decides to "solve" our oil dependancy by transplanting it into another substance and throwing subsidy money at it.
What should be obvious is that we need to be truly cured of our "addiction to oil", not simply given another (even more expensive and destructive) drug to fill up our thirsty gas tanks with.