Thanks, Lowell. I couldn't agree more. As a sometimes farmer, I have been dismayed with the ethonol issue from the beginning. My farm journals say we would have to go from 80 million acres in corn to 200 million. This would be of course corporate farming. It would destroy forest land, particularly in Brazil and South America where it is being hyped. And if Americans stop using MIddle East oil, it does not help the environment. The oil will still be used, but by someone else - China, most likely, and will ease their way into negotiating for it. Thus ethonol will add to the damage to the environment by 200 million acres and the turning of Rain Forest into corn fields. This was an old Republican novelty idea from George Bush Sr. admin.

Why there are "progressives" out there who support something that would harm the environment while doing nothing to end our "oil addiction" (and the obscene profits earned by ExxonMobil and other Big Oil monstrosities) is beyond me.  I presume it's simply ignorance, although sometimes I wonder, given the over-the-top vehemence of the anti-corn-ethanol people.  My theory:  people are looking for an easy way out of our "problem," and simply don't understand that corn-based ethanol is actually a major step backwards.

Using food in a hungry world in order to produce fuel for cars and SUVs in rich nations is not just dumb, it's immoral.  Chopping down our forests - or the Amazon rainforest - to produce ethanol is also deeply immoral.  I would use the word "evil," but...hell, why not, it's evil.

I think the "escape" tendency is dominant. Anything that looks on the surface like a good idea  . . . the Repubs exploint this; I expect Rove and Boy George have noticed the irony of an "environmental" fix like ethanol taking out the Rain Forest. Also there is in the DLC generation an adiction to complexity - the more complex the idea the better - it is the opposite of zen. The very sensible Ed Koch, mayor of NY, came back to China 20 years ago with a vision of millions of people riding bycicles to work in NY City. Much simpler than a Prius. Also, in homes, clothes dryers are supopsted to be the biggest environmental culpret. But the idea of a clothes line is way to simple. I believe, at core, there are no complexity exits out of systems caused by complexity - only simple ones.

I know there are some fleets powered by natural gas, and Honda makes a Civic.  http://automobiles.h...  I know so little about this area.  It appears the US is a major producer of NG.  http://www.eia.doe.g...

Natural gas is scarce as it is, I can't imagine it being used for vehicles as well.  Also, most natural gas reserves in the world are located in Russia and...you guessed it, IRAN!  No thanks.

when you look at natural gas, the situation is even worse.

It's even scarcer and more expensive than oil, and has the same geopolitical problems or even worse.

You're absotootly rights.  Basically you can go down the list of countries and say -- "hey, there's a country that really hates us/we hate them" -- and they have big gas reserves.

Why can't we pick better friends?

It's no accident that oil has been called a "curse" and even the "devil's excrement."  Pretty much, it corrupts everything it touches.  See the movie Syriana sometime, by the way...it's a dramatic, blood-curdling depiction of this issue.

Both methane (the primary component of Natural Gas) and its product when combusted, carbon dioxide, are both greenhouse gases.  If you combust something carbon based (which includes ethanol), you end up with carbon dioxide as a product, though different fuels will yield different amounts of CO2.

If we are trying to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero or negative, we would have to transition away from carbon combustion sources of energy.  We could convert vehicles over to compressed natural gas (CNG) as a short-term solution to reducing our emissions.  But if we want to get to zero, this might divert valuable resources away from that ultimate goal.

The problem isn't greenhouse gases it's too much greenhouse gases.  We can not survive without greenhouse gases.  The problem is we are digging massive amounts of ancient greenhouse gases and adding it to our current balance.  Fossil fuels like natural gas, petroleum and coal add new greenhouse gases and are heating the planet. 

Burning plant material or biomass does not introduce additional greenhouse gases and displaces fossil fuels.  Using a combination of crop residues and energy crops like switch grass to make cellulosic ethanol/butanol and biodiesel, we can displace all the petroleum we use for fuel without impacting food crops.  Adding conservation and efficiency will make it much easier to reach the goal of 100% renewable and 100% clean.  The only problem being "reality" and human nature.

The world consumes 84 million barrels of oil a day.  How many acres of land would yield enough ethanol to displace that?  Second, would you not need tons of storage for the product or can you grow the inputs year round to feed into ethanol refineries?

Second, how is this not going to affect food?  Corn prices have risen due to the production of ethanol.  Sugar has also experienced a similar trend.  Even if you are only using crop residue, the fuel demand will still put pressure on the commodity price.  If we don't use arable land or food crops for ethanol production, how much land do you need for just switch grass and where can that grow?  And further what affect will that have on ecosystems where we choose to convert land use to fuel production?

On your first point, I think everyone is aware that greenhouse gases help sustain life on this planet.  The point I was making about eliminating or reversing some of humanity's contribution was focused on just that, not removing all carbon from the atmosphere.

This has a higher output of ethanol with lower investment in fuel than corn or sugarcane. Giving up on ethanol is unwise. It is not a perfect solution but it is much better than the largely undeveloped technologies of wind and solar.

I am sure that some constituency group somewhere would have a problem with those as well. The wind farms already up have been under fire from PETA and other silly ass animal rights groups from disrupting migration patterns for birds and killing the birds with the blades. Solar is at least 10 years away from being viable. The solar cells we have today are grossly expensive and inefficient. Right now it would take more than 20 years to recoup the individual investment in solar panels for a home through the savings of having no electric bill.

Ethanol is just a step towards all other alternative technologies. It is the only one that has large scale feasibility at this time.

There is a good point made in a post early about corporations owning much of the farmland. That is a more serious problem than the ethanol problems itself. We need more farmers to feed into the cellulosic ethanol production and the farmers need to own the production from growing it to refining it.

ethanol from switchgrass.  Just don't think that it's going to solve all our problems, or that the technology is ready right now.  And don't think it gets us away from the core solution, which is energy efficiency.

Lowell

There is at least one commercial plant under construction today that is capable of converting switchgrass to ethanol.  The technology has been available for a while, it just wasn't economically viable until the price of gasoline reached $2/gallon or so.

jumping on the chance to make $$$?

the key is to find the companies with the effective technology, not fall for the flim-flammers whod claim to have the technology but in reality do not.

My friends in this business with the new technology have not had any problem raising the huge amounds of $$ needed to build several new facilities "froms scratch".

of enhancing and improving ethanol we're allocating resources that would be better spent on R&D for much better long term solutions. 

Solar technology has been available to consumers for decades - it isn't just a flavor of the day solution.  And one of the primary reasons it isn't a financially viable solution today is because most of the R&D, marketing, and mass production efforts have been focused elsewhere (primarily oil).

So we should invest incredible amounts of time and money in ethanol efforts to save perhaps 10-15% in energy emissions?  Great.  Then in 10 years solar will still be "too expensive" and we'll have this massive ethanol infrastructure that can't be torn down because of the same reasons we can't tear down the gasoline infrastructure.

Ethanol, from switchgrass or other, may very well play an important role in our future.  I'm not suggesting we completely give up on ethanol, but instead put it where it belongs - a small R&D project among many.  And that we invest the big chunks of money in better looking long term solutions such as solar.

It may not be the most comfortable solution, but we've got to get out of this stop-gap approach and a begin serious investment into long term environmentally friendly solutions.  Short term it may cost more but long term it'll be worth it - in more ways than one.

We've got to put our money where we can get the most "bang for the buck," and stop nibbling around the edges.  We don't have time to waste on this, as Al Gore pointed out the other day.  We need to reduce our carbon emissions by 80% or 90%, or the planet's screwed.

There is a great deal of missing information and misinformation about ethanol and other biofuel developments in the above article.  For example the oil from soybeans is a by-product of processing (crushing) the bean for food and is considered a residue not in competition with the food product. 

If you also use the soybean plant residue to make cellulosic ethanol and the increased soybean production to displace petroleum plastics, you can create tremendous green house gas displacement with soybeans. 

Algae can produce over 200 times the yield of biodiesel as soybeans and the biomass residue from that can be used to displace coal or make ethanol/butanol.  Algae requires no crop land or fresh water and could displace all our petroleum usage using only .04% of US land mass.

on the algae possibility?  That one sounds promising if what you say about it is accurate.

The most advanced is a system from http://www.greenfuel... - essentially that uses flue gasses from a power plant to grow algae.  There are a number of others - some of which plan to use agricultural runoff to feed the algae.

One of the people who has worked on this wrote a paper some years ago which described using land in the Sonoran desert for growing algae in open ponds, but for a number of reasons the specifics in that paper aren't practical.  Closed systems in particular seem to be the focus of work these days - it is much easier to prevent contamination with other types of algae in a closed system.

There are some interesting talks in there about various aspects of the energy situation.  Oil, gas, tar sands, oil shale, natural gas, renewables and more.  The meeting took place Oct 2006, so it is still fairly current.

http://www.aspo-usa....

Isn't this model of the air car just precious?

Most Corn grown in this country actually is use for cattle feed.  Cows are a huge source of methane and other gasses that cause global warming.  Driving up the price of cattle feed will decrease the amount of beef being produced and have a positive effect on global warming.  The second big use for corn is high fructose corn syrup; which has been linked to the obesity problem.  Finally we need a large constiuancy to displace big oil.  The only group with the proven political power is the corn lobby.  Corn will encourage celluostic ethonol as corn growers look for a way to make money of the stalks and cobs (currently a waste byproduct they have to dispose of).