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Dead Zone in Gulf Linked to Ethanol Production
WASHINGTON - While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.
The Gulf of Mexico dead zone threatens valuable commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries that generate about $2.8 billion annually. (Credit: NOAA) Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn, about a third of which is
made into ethanol, leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi
River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae
blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays,
consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life.
Known as hypoxia, the oxygen depletion kills shrimp, crabs, worms and anything else that cannot escape. The dead zone has doubled since the 1980s and is expected this year to grow as large as 8,500 square miles and hug the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas.
As to which is worse, the oil spill or the hypoxia, "it's a really tough call," said Nathaniel Ostrom, a zoologist at Michigan State University. "There's no real answer to that question."
Some scientists fear the oil spill will worsen the dead zone, because when oil decomposes, it also consumes oxygen. New government estimates on Thursday indicated that the BP oil spill had gushed as much as 141 million gallons since an oil-rig explosion and well blowout on April 20 that killed 11 workers.
Corn is biggest culprit
The gulf dead zone is the second-largest in the world, after one in the Baltic Sea. Scientists say the biggest culprit is industrial-scale corn production. Corn growers are heavy users of both nitrogen and pesticides. Vast monocultures of corn and soybeans, both subsidized by the federal government, have displaced diversified farms and grasslands throughout the Mississippi Basin.
"The subsidies are driving farmers toward more corn," said Gene Turner, a zoologist at Louisiana State University. "More nitrate comes off corn fields than it does off of any other crop by far. And nitrogen is driving the formation of the dead zone."
The dead zone, he said, is "a symptom of the homogenization of the landscape. We just have a few crops on what used to have all kinds of different vegetation."
In 2007, Congress passed a renewable fuels standard that requires ethanol production to triple in the next 12 years. The Department of Agriculture has just rolled out a plan to meet that goal, including building ethanol refineries in every state. The Environmental Protection Agency will decide soon whether to increase the amount of ethanol in gasoline blends from 10 percent to 15 percent.
A 2008 National Research Council report warned of a "considerable" increase in damage to the gulf if ethanol production is increased.
Pet cause of Congress
One of the authors of that report, agricultural economist Otto Doering at Purdue University, said that a 50 percent boost in the ethanol blend in gasoline will significantly raise corn prices, driving farmers to pull land out of conservation and pastureland and into corn production. They are also likely to add more nitrogen fertilizers to boost yields.
Corn ethanol has been heavily subsidized since the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. Viewed by the corn industry as a lucrative market, ethanol is a perennial favorite in Congress.
Ethanol consumes two-thirds of all federal subsidies for renewable fuels, said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, leaving solar, wind and the rest to fight over the remaining third. Corn ethanol cost taxpayers $17 billion from 2005 to 2009, his group estimates.
"This is another industry that's entirely a creature of the government, even more so than corn growing per se," Cook said. "The production of ethanol wouldn't happen at all without government subsidies and protection."
The National Corn Growers Association ran a media blitz in Washington last week to press for the renewal of the 51-cents-a-gallon tax credit for ethanol. With pictures of the BP oil spill looming in the background, the Corn Growers' video announces, "Ethanol: Now is the time."
Conservation plan hurt
The ethanol boom over the past decade has lured farmers to withdraw millions of acres from the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farms not to plant fragile land. Much of this land has been returned to native prairie grasses, at taxpayer expense. Millions more acres are up for renewal over the next few years.
"There's been a very large-scale conversion of these CRP lands to biofuel production," Ostrom said. Those soils have accumulated carbon from the atmosphere and stored it, becoming "a pretty significant sink for atmospheric CO2," he said. "If we suddenly start farming those soils, we basically release all of the carbon that's been sequestered for decades, and that may more than offset any carbon benefit of switching to biofuels."
To meet its goal of tripling ethanol production, Congress called for more cellulosic ethanol, which is made from wood, crop waste, perennial grasses such as switchgrass, and even native prairie grasses. Perennial grasses are considered far less damaging to the environment than corn because they require less fertilizer and their roots remain in the ground, helping to stabilize the soil and reduce runoff.
But commercial production of cellulosic ethanol remains a pipe dream. It would require large subsidies to dislodge corn ethanol.
There is no experience with commercial production of switchgrass. Purdue's Doering said it will require fertilizer and is likely to be planted on conservation lands and pasture instead of displacing corn.
Joan Nassauer, a professor at the University of Michigan who has studied how alternative agricultural policies could alleviate the dead zone, said cellulosic ethanol could work.
"It might be one of those win-wins, but it's not in production yet," she said. "What we've got now all over the Corn Belt is corn, and that's definitely not a win-win."
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Show AllLike I keep saying we need to do something about the exploding populations around the planet. That is our big problem. Too many people want too many things. There is no such thing as sustainability except in the minds of dodo's.
Six billion miracles are more than enough! This planet could sustain all of us, if we did things right. We have to stop burning things for energy. We have to develop or revisit an economic structure that is based on real wealth units, not bogus con games. Otherwise, our future is "baked into the cake" ! The hemmorhage in the GOM is in all our waking moments, it is the fastest moving extinction event in human history. Somewhere out there ,I pray there are ET's on their way to save us! That being a long shot, it is past time for a revolution or ,at least, the dissolution of these here United Snakes of America, a division of Armageddon Inc.Move all the banks and corpserations to the Gulf Coast, and declare that the new country of Greedia. Fence off any gated communities elsewhere and utilize them for reeducation camps for rich folks. I offer a sliver of hope...
Theres no way to stop people from reproducing
Its a basic biological function.
But what always happens is some innovative minds figure out some new tech to supply more food with less land, faster, ect.
Imagine a GM super crop that can grow in the snow, matures in 6 months and provides a good amount of the key nutrition a population needs to live. Now make it grow without much water too, desperate times call for desperate measures .
Or the alternative is you can go around advocating some crazy one-child policy( people will keep having kids, they just end up being abandoned...or worse.)
"People today have forgotten they are really just part of nature.
Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend.
They do not know it, but they are losing nature.
They don't see that they are going to perish."
And consumption?
vaialdiavolo, I don't know if you were around when there used to be this debate about population vs. consumption - as to which is the biggest problem. I was one of those who always argued for the immediate need for reducing consumption (and that's where you'll see immediate results), and that there was no immediate way to reduce population that is agreeable to me. Natural reduction in human population (which I agree is completely necessary), even adopting a one-child policy, is going to take a few generations - so, sharing equitably in the meantime is what is needed.
Take a look at this, for example:
Six Reasons Why Earth Won't Cope for Long
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-0
This has come up before, and I'm sure it will come up again - as it seems that both the "camps" seem intent on holding on to their positions.
There is no way we are going to get Big Oil out of our Soil.
We are screwed, we slept through three decades of decadence
and only woke up during the Bush years...way to late !!!!
Did I just come up with a new meaningless bumper sticker
GET BIG OIL OUT OF OUR SOIL
Typically, stories like this never name the real culprits, the agribusiness corporations that have rammed corn ethanol down our throats, via a thoroughly complicit Congress and executive, for 30 years now. That would be Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Monsanto, chiefly. The same bunch that have enforced the use of high fructose corn syrup in nealy all mass produced food over the same time period, addicting millions to this obesity-creating and nutritionally null corn/chemical melange.
And who has been a HUGE supporter of corn ethanol? None other than Obama, whose home state of Illinois is one the largest producers of corn for ethanol, and who has been funded throughout his political career by these very agribusinesses that have promoted corn as the miracle biofuel that would deliver us from the clutches of foreign oil. And now it turns out that overproduction of corn (drive thru the Midwest sometime for overwhelming evidence) is even more destructive of marine life in the Gulf than BP's insanely arrogant, greed-driven irresponsibility.
See how long it takes before Obama, or either wing of the Big Business party, budges from their 100% support for corn ethanol. Like "clean coal" or "safe nuclear", it will continue being promoted as one of the key steps on our Stairway to Energy Heaven. All lies, just like those flowing from BP's PR Dept. and the MMS over the past decade. We're all fed a diet of LIES daily by our criminal leaders and their corporate owners, and we're supposed to believe this is a democracy?
Mass marketing is how "things get done" nowadays. In these era of new-speak words like re-sizing (instead of downsizing or more accurately, layoffs), clean coal, safe nuclear, "Beyond Petroleum", "going green" etc. are sanitized terms of corporate re-branding to enhance the consumption masses in identifying with product and keep on buying. In the energy markets the newfangled catchy phrase now used is "energy independence" with the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico giving us a grim example of how it plays out as long as the usual suspects continue to dominate the game. Yet the consumption masses are SO identified with product they're almost willing to believe whatever it is they are told so long as they get to go on buying.
We must all become Ninja Turtles and learn to live in the sewer called Earth. The corporate god requires this of us. We must all ingest toxins in large amounts so that we either die or develop immunities. Those that develop immunities will prosper in the sewer culture until such time that the sewer reaches it's ecological limits and mankind is transformed once again into some monster sub-sewer species yet unknown to us. Be a survivor and reach ever lower.
I've done that all my life, I Grewup in the baig city, San Francisco covered in Smoke from busses. Drinking Flouride, and letting the CIA release the odd safe virus on me. Well now what can I say I eat what I'm told from the grocery, and I still drink TAP Water! And I'm FINE!
"The Earth is fine we're the ones going away." George Carlin
>^^<
The article leads off with a doozy
"While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history…"
Oh I see, just recent US history. Like, the oil spill is happening now, and recently at the same time!!!!
And it is the worst oil spill in history, but that history is happening like now, wait...seconds passed, RECENTLY!!!
I mean, that oil spill is bad, but not THAT bad!
Look over there!
No, Look over there, there!!
I appreciate the article on the environmental impact of the production of bio-fuels, but why the author has to diminish the ongoing catastrophic blown out well, is bizarre.
The article states fertilizer is the problem -- fertilizer used on ALL corn crops, not just those devoted ethanol production.
The headline reeks like fertilizer.
Ray Berthiaume
As a sidebar, let us not forget the devastation of the Mexican economy due to "cheap" U.S. corn and the vast migration to the U.S. for jobs previously had in Mexican agricultre.
It seems a pity that our society seems unable to come up with true costs of various products. The disasters occurring with the Gulf oil spill and with the destruction of aquifers by natural gas 'fracting' are not a part of the price equation, but they should be. Nitrogen fertilizer should have a tax applied to reflect the damage that is done to the Gulf. If, for instance, this meant a doubling of the price of nitrogen, then less would be used and more nitrogen stabilizing products would be applied to keep the fertilizer where it's needed. Whenever a product is 'too cheap' then waste is a certainty. Oh, and by the way, having taxpayers endlessly subsidize ethanol is beyond stupid. And for those of you who do not know, I am a corn grower.
Corn has been used as a powerful too by the agribusiness companies for 50 years and the damage isn't limited to just the gulf. The damage is nationwide and nobody in Congress wants to fix that. There are alternative ethanol solutions that could environmentally friendly such as alcohol, wood, hemp, switchgrass, sugar canes, and algae that could substitute for corn ethanol and it is being tried out in other nations but not in this nation thanks to capitalism and general disputes, scientific and political. It is hypocritical of Congress to oversubsidize corn ethanol projects while giving no funding for research and development of alternative sources of fuel.
When I first read this article my BS meter went off. Hearst Communications Inc. is a big player in US corporate media. The article presents the argument that BP did not act alone in destroying the Gulf of Mexico. It is argument to be used in the 20 years of court proceedings that will follow this spill. The article tries to establish that BP is not solely responsible for the damage to the Gulf and leaves open for argument just what percentage of the damage is attributable to BP? The amount will always be in question. The argument will be used to minimize BP's monetary damages. Exxon argued for 20 years the dollar amount of damages of the Valdez and cut their final payout down considerably.
Expect more stories in the corporate media about poor BP. I'll bet the NYT, WP and WSJ will be crying a river tears over the poor widows and orphans who won't get their BP dividend checks this year. Let's hope they have enough money this winter to buy coal.
Hearst Communications was founded by nazi supporter Randolph Hearst who successfully led the fight to prohibit marijuana in the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. If it weren't for that tax act, Big Oil wouldn't be so powerful today. Unfortunately, some ding bats don't get it but neither do most Americans of this lost soul of a nation. We could have had hemp ethanol instead of corn ethanol by now. It's still not too late but some people won't get it. They'll insist that hemp causes global warming as much as fossil fuels if not more despite evidence to the contrary and even those who insist that only solar and wind technologies will do fail to mention that unless we're making plastics out of hemp instead of crude oil, manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines will continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels for manufacturing. Just ask Ron Paul who knows everything about industrial hemp and goes beyond recreational use. Better yet, ask Ralph Nader and Harvey Wasserman.
I'd expect with the oil that goes into Big Pharma, They'd have a say. Of course if we replaced all the anti-depressants with pot,, Globalwarming just might happen, unless we could chew it. :)
>^^<
While the timing of the article is a little suspect (as pointed out by SJRyan) and possibly even the source (as maxpayne suggests), I find little to argue with the SUBSTANCE of the article itself. In fact, except for the timing, there is really nothing new about what's said.
I have always felt that farmers in the settler countries - especially those owning 100 acres and more - have almost nothing in common with farmers in other countries. Settler countries include those in North & South America, the whole of Australia, New Zealand, and earlier on - South Africa, Zimbabwe, etc. Apart from the ridiculously cheap (like zero, in many cases) rates these farms were acquired for in the first place, many of them have been supported by huge subsidies. The "surplus" production has been used for all kinds of purposes - from killing the livelihoods of farmers in Haiti and elsewhere to insane levels of production of meat (for domestic consumption as well as exports - here ranchers come into the picture) to the recent insanity of biofuel from corn. And all the while, big farmers and ranchers acting as if they are the victims of the "system" and the agri-business. Sure, big agribusiness is a whole 'nother beast that is destroying the planet, but the fact remains that large farms and ranches came into being as a result of conquest - including the Homestead Act - an unbelievable bonanza for those who crossed the ocean. Especially compared to the lives of their immediate ancestors "back home".
Why do I bring up the conquest and colonization? It's because I am convinced that farming in the conquered countries by settlers took on a completely different direction compared to farming in other parts of the world. And this, without even including the use of slaves. Petroleum is nothing but an "energy slave" that has replaced the human slaves. So, farming was NEVER sustainable in the settler countries - EVER. There was never any good-old-days from the point of view of sustainability. There was no organic growth of farm practices as in other parts of the world - everything happened so fast and in such large scales.
Combine the conquest of territory, slavery, discovery of oil, and the modern beast of capitalism - what is happening today is completely INEVITABLE. We had it coming. Unless this harsh truth is realized, and steps taken to consciously move towards sustainability, we'll be facing one problem after another, sometimes in combination.
I don't recall farmers in India and China going high on corn unlike the US but I know they have their own issues. Land grabbing followed by farmer suicides is all too common but the media does a pretty good job of hiding it and distracting audiences with celebrity trash and cheap talk commercials. I hate those Complan and "Milk bikis" commercials a lot. Those commercials have a nerve to blame good food for not providing good strength but then they say nothing about the junk foods depriving people of the much needed nutrients and strengths. I guess those junk food elites don't want to "offend" their junk food elite brothers and sisters.
maxpayne, good to see someone who's familiar with the absurdities in India. In fact, the situation in India has moved so far away from sustainability, that it's no more mere "absurdities" limited to some urban yuppies. Practically the whole of the agricultural sector now exists only to support the urban consumption.
Actually, corn production is on the increase - including Monsanto's crops. I think much of it goes into making cattle-feed, since corn is not consumed in large-scale otherwise. In the beginning, farmers see it as a way to get some extra money. My impression is that many of them still have this implicit faith in new breeds - and not all of them suspect there's anything wrong with the "green revolution". Knowing this, companies like Monsanto do their marketing through "agricultural extension" workers. Companies like Monsanto, Cargill, (and possibly ADM) have great influence over the Indian government policies, and they are also part of the so-called "Knowledge Initiative" at a very high level. It's supposed to be some kind of a "collaboration", but look closely, it's a big sell-off by the Indian elite.
Meat and dairy production (and consumption, of course) is on the increase in India. It is completely unsustainable - simply because of the limited availability of farmland and irrigation water. Not to mention the huge population. And the continued diversion of farmland and water for industrial purposes, including the scandalous "Special Economic Zones". But the urban yuppie crowd seems to think they've finally arrived - just because they can go to air-conditioned malls and eat pizza. You are very right about the mindless TV programs - including the monstrous new venture called the Indian Premier League cricket. I understand that the money involved there is mind-boggling. All of these only act to drown out any voices raising concerns over sustainability. And when the evening news reports the Indian security forces fighting the Maoist rebels (called "Naxalites"), I can imagine the typical urban yuppie rooting for the State fighting the "terrorists", with no clue whatsoever about the connection between their own consumption and the deprivation felt by those in the rural areas.
Alcyon, I'm married to an American woman whose parents came from Northern India. If you were to see her, she looks mainly American being fair skinned but up close you would notice her residual looks of a typical North Indian woman. Still, it was through her that I got around to taking interest in a lot of Asian cultures out there. After my trips to the some of the countries in the Far East, I noticed one thing that they all had in common aside from the fact that they're going yuppie on petro-manufactured products. They all have this sense of looking at the west, getting starstruck, and thinking "Oh man, I think I should have some of this too. It'll make me feel good !". Trouble is once they start jumping into it, they're hooked and it gets harder to pull them out of it. Trying to ask the yuppies to stop and think turned out to be barely useful let alone convincing them to be their true cultural selves. By the way, I don't know if you had heard of this but the Indian government was working on passing a law that would outlaw anyone who spoke against GMO as if farmers committing suicide wasn't bad enough. If it passes there, you can bet all the money in the world that Monsanto and the rest of the GMO buzzards will be ready to lobby Washington to do the same and who knows how many other countries out there.
>>>maxpayne wrote: the Indian government was working on passing a law that would outlaw anyone who spoke against GMO...
maxpayne, my first thought was, Can they really do that? I think the general principle that any law must still meet with their constitutional requirements should hold in India as well. I hadn't heard about it until you mentioned it here - so I did a Google search, and guess what, it seems like there indeed is a proposal by the Ministry of Science and Technology, and it's called "the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill, 2009 prepared by the Department of Biotechnology, which is a wing of the ministry of science and technology headed by Prithviraj Chavan."
And it has this clause:
'Misleading public about organism and products' is one of the crimes for which punishment has been prescribed in Section 63, Chapter 13 of the Bill which deals with various "offences and penalties".
"Govt moots jail for GM food critics"
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/84730/India/Govt+moots+jail+for+GM+food+critics.html
That's friggin unbelievable, and a clear sign that big corporations have a MUCH greater control over the Indian state than I've imagined, and been saying so far. I've mentioned the "Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill" before - that seeks to limit the legal and financial liability of the operators of nuclear power plants. There was even an article on CD that talked about this:
"Domestic operators' liabilities are to be capped at about $110 million, after which the Indian government would be responsible. If damages exceed $460 million, the victims would be on their own."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/28-5
I think this is dangerous, and I hope the Indian people wake the hell up before they find themselves as slaves working for corporate masters.
I sure hope that this breaks out into a MASSIVE backlash from the activists there. Because the news story in "India Today" also had this to say:
>>>"This is a gag order, absolutely draconian and violative of Article (19) (1) (a) of the Indian constitution which guarantees the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression," said Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan.
>>>"It is definitely meant to scare people so that they don't say anything against GM technology. Even journalists writing critical articles can be punished." The Bill has been criticised by several civil society activists. " If this law was in force today, environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who has questioned the safety of GM crops, would have been behind bars because he would have violated it," said Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.
Governments can always choose to break away from their corporate masters at anytime. If people systematically vote for politicians who are against corporate tyranny, then government will not play puppet to the corporations. The Indian elites come to power by bribing voters not with samosas, pots, and pans this time but with flat screen TVs if they get elected. Imagine fulfilling their promise once elected and delivering all those voters their big TVs so that Monsanto could magnify their tv ads and bait the viewers into jumping on their bandwagon. I believe that the people who support GMO in India are going by theoretical research that it could deliver healthier foods and keep the costs low. I find that too good and cheap to be true but not most people who aren't making enough money to buy something healthy. The Indian marketers are also getting to be as smart and smarter than American marketers.
Corn based ethanol is truly bizarre. Big Oil really doesn't want it, except maybe as a less toxic (than MTBE) oxygenated fuel additive. Maybe Big Oil realizes that more fuel and petroleum based products are consumed than yielded??? If the huge subsidies and fuel content regulations go away, ethanol gets turned off the next day.
The auto industry really doesn't want it. If anything it reduces mileage, it attracts water, causes corrosion and material compatibility problems.
Obama has been a long time corn ethanol supporter. If we truly do have a "green cabinet - environmental dream team", then they will be letting him know ethanol is a 3 time loser regarding in its negative energy balance, environmental destruction and effect on food prices. Will he listen? Will he risk a political firestorm for the truth?
ethanol = moon shine
We should fuel our bodies with it instead of our vehicles, we would get many more miles to the gallon!
BTW, last time I checked with an illegal ethanol producer, the price was $22/gallon!
Guns don't kill. Biofuels don't kill. There has never been a tool that killed. Rather people kill, inflamed by the greed agenda.
The San Francisco liberals writing this article want to hide the fact that elites are abusing biofuels and thereby destroying marine life to further their oppression of the people.
The San Francisco liberals want to protect the value of their real estate investments. So they need to frame events in terms that obscure the cause and effect, leaving the people ignorant, which is exactly how the elites want them. The authors could have shown that biofuels produced sustainably at the local level are essential to the people's emancipation from slavery to elites.
But that is not the status quo under which San Francisco grew into prosperity, so that idea must be suppressed, and the authors must blame the tool for the elite's crime. Offloading responsibility from elites, the authors help fuel elite class war aggression against the people which helps sustain real estate value in gentrified areas like San Francisco and helps ensure the classist status quo in general.
The killing of the biosphere goes on, by the conservative faction of elites, in competition with the liberal faction for dominance over the society.
Ethenol has a dark side and it has nothing to do with property values in San Francisco. The Dead Zone is attributable to farming practices in the mid-west, along with aquifier depletion and other environmental degradation.
Some people would find fault in using Hydrogen............ :(
>^^<
So this is what "progress" looks like.
Another third of the corn crop is used to fatten up cattle in feedlots to give us tasty burgers and heart attacks, but you won't see an article entitled "Dead Zone in Gulf Linked to Tasty Burgers".
Another large part of the corn crop is used to make high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten our non-diet soft drinks and also to give us heart attacks and obesity, but you won't see an article entitled "Dead Zone in Gulf Linked to Colas"
Another article title you're unlikely to see: "Lethal Combination of Corexit and Toxic Petroleum Compounds Circle the Globe Killing all Oxygen-producing Plankton and Sealing Earth's Fate"
This article is a propagandist turd floating in the swimming pool of the fourth estate.
Ford cars were originally designed to run on alcohol (ethanol). Farmers made it from multiple sources. Early drivers bought their fuel from these farmers. Rockefeller introduced gasoline, made from the toxic byproducts of petroleum refining, as an alternative fuel. Ford preferred alcohol fuel, but made flex-fuel cars whose engines could be easily adjusted to run on either gasoline or alcohol. Prohibition put an end to alcohol production. Ford continued to make flex-fuel cars for another decade and then switched to gasoline only. Prohibition ended the following year. Corn is not as good a feedstock for ethanol as many other crops, including ones that can be grown on marginal land. A by-product of ethanol production is distiller's grain, which is a healthier animal feed that corn.
For information on how ethanol can and should be made:
http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/book_menu/360
Thank you "am" for making the distinction on each biofuel out there. Unfortunately, even some of the "environmentalists" will claim that all biofuels are bad and cause global warming. They'll use the "burning any plant releases CO2 into the air" bullshit excuse to frame all biofuels as bad. They'd almost sound like Rush Limbaugh using corn to badmouth all biofuels. Then there's the "Peak Oil" enthusiasts who won't no discussion of the alternatives. Tell them that alternatives exist or even try to tell them about the history of how the engine designs were fudged to run on petroleum and they won't listen. The masses, even some who are usually progressive, have been far too brainwashed by the Rockefellars and Big Oil to learn.
I always love these downer articles about how were gonna destroy the planet. How pollution and Global Warming will melt the hills, and kill everything. Well I must say this is a most narrow and uneducated view point.
Yes we have a choice, and yes we may kill ourselves but destroy the Planet, no way. The planet has been here a long time it's seen giant metor collisions, the poles flip over more than once, and the extintion of more species than you can count in a week of Sundays.
Yet the earth is still here, yes we may kill off most of the current biological infection, (US) but if we do that's ok. Something else will take over, it always does. If we kill ourselves the galixy won't miss or mourn us, just another failed eviloutionary expirament gone bad.
So don't get too worked up over saving the Planet, see it as it is, Saving your oun Ass! If you don't have any interest in that, then go light up and stand aside for someone else doing the work.
>^^<
A lot of interesting comments have raised the issue of corn ethanol and the history of what could have been done about it.
P.S.:
Max Payne, I believe that most of us here on CD love what you are saying about the need for hemp but I have to agree with some of the others that you are getting a little too obsessive about hemp at times. Hemp may be a big solution and possibly substitute for oil but we are not ready to agree on one solution. I know you mean well but if you don't mind, please don't be angry about our constructive criticism. There are plenty of great alternatives to oil but as Ephraim and others have discussed before, unless the alternative idea can be proven to be more profitable than drilling for oil all over the planet, the idea is moot. Hemp may be a great idea but how many of us working in different professions are prepared to be farmers overnight since it will take more people to grow the crop to produce the oil just to match up to the same demand for oil? It may create jobs and probably be somewhat sustainable but unless it can be made automatic and profitable, hemp for fuel just won't cut it.
Stanley1979, in order to evaluate the feasibility of hemp, the least that should be done is to legalize it. It makes no sense to be selective about what is legal and what is not. Especially in a society that will go to any extent to maintain the right to gun ownership. A society that permits harmful chemicals and radiation, GM crops and all kinds of medicines, hormones and vaccines should be able to live with an additional plant being cultivated.
Thanks and well put Alcyon but I'm afraid Stanley might be right. Maybe I did go too far in mentioning the need to give hemp a chance. It is sad that even the Left won't get out of bed let alone fight against the War on Drugs. That isn't to say that all Republicans are against legalizing hemp. Take a look at the cosponsors of Hemp Farming Act 2009 and prepare to be surprised. I learned so much about the 26,000 industrial uses of that plant. I became more outraged the more petro-based daily products I found could be replaced with hemp especially on plastics over the years. Ok, maybe I'll stop mentioning hemp unless someone asks for what solutions I think are available. It appears to be "sexy" to talk about "Peak Oil" during oil disasters or rising crude oil price times than it is to open the doors to new solutions. I guess it isn't "progressive" or "liberal" to talk about Mother Nature's greatest gift, cannabis, and how its prohibition has everything to do with our resource wars for oil, oil price fluctuations, and oil production disasters because doing so might "offend" the Peak Oil enthusiasts, faux "environmentalists", and the oilies on the right. Even on the issues of guns, abortion, nuclear energy, healthcare, and GMO half of the left is ready to side with the rightwing without thinking. When I go through a historical record on what the Left lost on the issues, it all seems to start with the 1930s itself although it wasn't until the 1980s that the real hemorrhage of the Left on the issues began.
Alcyon, I don't dispute that. My apologies for the ambiguity of my post. I was trying to help Max out on how he advocates solutions as he has run into opposition here on this forum. They don't oppose the need to legalize it per se and neither do I but it might be the way he expressed his enthusiasm for the plant that didn't resonate well. I don't know much about hemp myself except its food and medicine benefits.