This weekend, my dad said that ethanol is the way of the future. Today, CNN agreed. My dad's a smart guy.*
*Note that he not a scientist, engineer, corn farmer, sugar plantation owner, oil company executive, or anyone else related to the alternative fuel industry. He is an accountant who drives a Honda Civic that gets excellent gas mileage.
4 comments:
I read somewhere that Brazil totally converted to ethanol. And yet, it did nothing to help the Brazilian space program... Face it, we're doomed.
No offense to Dad, but I think he's wrong.
1) ethanol costs $4 a gallon now, so adding it to gas makes it more expensive.
2) we can't possibly lower the price of gas if we use an additive that's produced with massive farm subsidies and which has huge tarriffs to prevent cheaper foreign supplies from reaching us. (in other words one branch of the government has a mission to raise the price of corn as high as possible). It works in brazil because corn is much much cheaper there.
My dad's theory was based on two things: Oil prices are going up, and will continue to do so -- so eventually, it will be cheaper to grow corn and sugarcane to make ethanol. Second, ethanol is better for the environment, and is a renewable resource.
I agree and disagree. I agree that ethanol is better than gasoline, but the thing is, it takes alot of fossil fuels to produce ethanol. While we need an energy policy better than what we have, and ethanol should probably be part of that, the single best thing we could do is make cars and other products more energy efficient, so they require less fuel, whatever the source. After that, we should use wind and solar energy to the extent possible. Ethanol would come in somewhere after that on my energy policy, and I know this is extremely controversial, but I think nuclear energy's bad reputation is largely undeserved as well.
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