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By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

A remarkable number, but as far as I can find Pimentel claims no such thing about BARRELS per acre, but I can find that number in GALLONS per acre per year, e.g., see http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm. So 328 gallons of ethanol per acre = 7.8 barrels of ethanol per acre per year

Among his [Pimentel's] findings are:
An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel’s analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

Joule Unlimited's website does says "20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually" ( http://www.jouleunlimited.com/news/2009/joule-biotechnologies-introduces-revolutionary-process-producing-renewable-transportation- )

So one thought has occurred to me. If this technology involves growing green gunk in vertical clear walled tanks, then perhaps they have chosen to talk about the yield per tank in terms of tank horizontal footprint, i.e the amount of light input coming in the side of 1 square foot of tank horizontal footprint could be many times the amount hitting just the top... I can imagine a tank fourteen feet tall, 3 feet wide, but only 4 inches deep. So its footprint is only 1 square foot, but it catches 30 square feet of light if at Boston's 42 degrees latitude (or heck, 60 feet if one reflects light in on the back side.)

Interesting that travel dropped right about the time we really geared up the subsidized food burning.
 
Funny how historically high food prices and pitiful job and income growth can really dampen a decade. That's without mentioning gas prices. "Peak Travel" you say?? Whoever came up with this Peak Travel idea must live in vacuum.

1. Coal plants emitted 44.7 tons of mercury in 2008.
2. Coal causes 30,000 deaths every year
3. Coal shortens another 24,000 lives a year.
4. Coal pollution has increased 16% since 1992.
5. Coal emits 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Google, it is your friend. Logic, you can learn it. Math, it has power, doesn't follow politics and can free your mind. Quit being a tool and open your damn mind already.

the website of an Ethanol consortium says that?

Gee, I'm not surprised.

How about some honest research instead.

Also here.

And then there's the other effects...

...they have attempted to do like they do in surgery tent in Iraq and create a positive air flow?

I don't know, but it might not be a good idea. According to http://healthandenergy.com/suggested_indoor_air_pressure.htm,

Moisture condensation and damage can occur below the roofs and within outer walls of heated buildings if indoor air pressure is significantly greater than outdoor air pressure.

Of course, the next section of this page appears to contradict this....

http://www.trane.com/commercial/library/vol31_2/index.asp#control has more on this. Summary: It's complicated, man.

I asked about maintaining a positive pressure differential when we had an ERV installed (for reasons similar to those suggested by the PP); the technician indicated that while a nice theory, it could cause the ERV to ice up. They had been instructed to create a slightly negative pressure differential for this reason.

So my modern, plastic sealed house has slightly negative pressure relative to the outside. Several years and counting, and no negative side effects as far as I can tell.

Oh, and that's in Ottawa: Summer highs in the 40s, and very humid, winter lows in the -30s, and very dry. Nothing too extreme....

Even though this may be drifting a bit off topic...

Actually productivity per worker per hour is lower in communist countries then in capitalist countries. Closest data I could find real fast was GDP per capita per annum.http://anguilla.noggle.com/fields/2004.aspx

As for the Soviet Issue, I edited out some comments about that before I posted. Marx style communism hasn't really been tried, that is a confederacy of small agrarian republics. However it doesn't take into account that in effect it is really just a capitalist confederacy made up of individual control economies acting in their own best interest. Soviet style communism really only worked well in Yugoslavia. There are advantages to being able to control the rudder of the state so definitively, however when your productivity per worker is declining (given the average of the world) in the long term it spells doom.

I think that the Soviets ended up with a bad rap, it's not they could have administered better with the information provided, or that they were especially doomed from the basic economic conditions at the start of the communist revolution. Tsarist Russia was a powerhouse, even if it was run de-facto from Prussia for much of late 1800's. It's simply that running a government based on world-wide revolution is hard to finance with ever decreasing surpluses relative to the rest of the world.

What I'm suggesting is more of compensation from the top down, a voluntary re-distribution of income, from those that make the (RECORD HIGH) windfall profits on their natural resources to the communities that are exploited.

Let me add a bit of perspective. Take Kodak. Go to Rochester, NY and ask people about how they would feel if Kodak left the city. Now ask them if they know about Cancer Alley. http://www.healthandenergy.com/new_cancer_alley.ht m (Kodak is #2 on that list). Ask them about the increase cancer risks for living close to Kodak. The reason they want them to stay isn't just the jobs, though that is the first response. They want Kodak to stay because it's institutional to the community. It donates large sums to education and the arts.

In developing and poor areas, that institution would have to be different. However it breeds good will.

Actually, it is a GROSS understatement.
http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm
Pimentel, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the energetics, economics and environmental aspects of ethanol production several years ago, subsequently conducted a detailed analysis of the corn-to-car fuel process. ...
Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU.

"Put another way," Pimentel says, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU."

Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline.

The Ethanol industry, mainly those companies whose main business is the making and running the Ethanol plants (17 have or are being built in Nebraska alone) has a counter argument:
http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/pdfs/ShapouriEnergyBal ance2004.pdf
The net energy balance of corn ethanol adjusted for byproduct credits is 27,729 and 33,196 Btu per gallon for wet- and dry-milling,

Now, considering that gasoline supplies 125,000 Btu's per gallon, it will take between 3.5 to 4.5 gallons of Ethanol to replace each gallon of gasoline, (using PRO Ehtanol figures) IF Ethanol is to be self-sustaining. When you compute the total gallons of gasoline the US burns every year and multiply that by 4, then divide by the average US Corn yield, you'll learn that it will take 50% MORE land than the total arable land in the US. You can't grow Corn on rocks or mountian slopes, or in deserts. In fact, it is becoming difficult to grow corn here in the Platte Valley of Nebraska because the Ogalala aquifer is getting low and the Neb Nat Resource district is strictly controlling the pumping of water. You may see a LARGE drop in Corn production to do the extended drought in the Midwest. So much for Corn as a dependable fuel source.

Corn is NOT a renewable resource. It isn't even a fuel. It's a food source. Would you rather someone starve so you can drive your SUV?

• Nuclear. (France already supplies 80% of its energy needs using nuclear power...

In the USA, we get 20% of our energy from nuclear power plants. Also, the USA consumes more energy than all of Europe, combined. In 2003, the USA consumed almost ten times the energy that France did. We'd have to build another 515 nuclear power plants to get up to 100% of our non-transportation needs. That would result in an annual production of 432600Kg, or 476.85 tons, of highly radioactive waste. We're nowhere near that. That said, nuclear is probably our most practical option.

Ethanol

Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it provides. But let's say your company has discovered a way of converting solar energy to biodiesel that's more efficient than using photovoltaics or heat engines, and you can produce enough to provide enough for an average US car for a year on only 5 acres (half what it currently takes). That would mean dedicating 50% of the USA land area to growing sugar cane. Just for our cars. Yow.

• Solar
• Wind Power
• Geothermal
• Hydropower

Photovoltaics may be OK if you live in Texas, but it isn't very practical in Seattle.

Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass together currently provide 2% of the electricity America consumes. Add hydroelectric to that, and you get close to 9%. This is non-transportation energy, if you're willing to discount the tiny fraction of electric-driven transportation used in the USA. The vast majority -- 75% -- is generated by burning fossil fuels.

• Natural gas
• Coal

The world has about 147 trillion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas reserves. The US alone consumes a bit over 22 trillion cubic feet per year -- that's about 623 billion m^3 per year, about 20% of our total electricity consumption. If it were providing 100% of our electricity, then that's about 3 trillion m^3 per year. If we, somehow, were able to get our hands on all of the world's natural gas, that'd last us about 50 years. Assuming that, when we run out of oil, we don't start using natural gas for cars, and that our current electricity consumption doesn't change. More practically, if we assume everybody else starts using natural gas and the consumption percentages don't change (we consume about 23% of the world's electricity), then it'll last us about 12 years.

Coal is much more difficult to calculate. Coal comes in four different types, of differing energy yield and difficulty of extraction. Coal is comparatively energy expensive to harvest. But ignoring that: there is about 1 trillion tons of accessible coal, and the US uses about 1 billion tons per year, providing around 50% of our electricity needs. If we got our hands on all of the coal and it were providing 100% of our electricity, we'd have about 500 years worth of coal. If we got 23% of the coal, we'd have about 115 years.

So, adding it up, the world can provide about 130 years worth of coal and gas to the USA, at today's useage. We can stretch that by using renewable resources, but keep in mind that this useage is non-transportation. In 1990, 35% of the US's total energy use was in the transportation sector, and that's going to come almost entirely from fossil fuels.

Note that I'm not saying that we have 130 years until we run out of coal and natural gas; I'm saying that if that were all that we were using, that's how long we'd have after the oil runs out. Considering that about 75% of our current energy consumption comes from fossil fuels, that does

Ah. You've been brainwashed like many Americans.
"unsustainable subsidised food burning" - a great tagline.
http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html (why ADM sucks)

1 acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 55 bushels of beans. That same acre on a good year (like this year!) will yield about 250 bushels of corn.

Those figures sound like they're based on fertilizer use. Fertilizer production is highly dependent upon oil. That's where most of the energy use comes from in studies that include it. Pimental, for instance, says planting, growing and harvesting that much (1 acre) corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels . That figure is clearly not just based on tractor use alone.

And regardless, comparing number of bushels is completely misleading. Oil processing from soy is basically just extraction. Ethanol production from corn is much more complex, and more energy-intensive. Believe me, the net energy balance of corn ethanol is around 140%, much less than that of biodiesel.

Happy now? Time to stop the denial then.

Yes, turbo diesel cars get incredible mileage, but the particulate emissions -- despite dramatic improvements over the past decade -- still fall near the bottom of the heap.

So, if you want to improve your mileage to save a couple of hundred dollars a year and/or to reduce dependance on foreign oil, a diesel is definitely the car for you.

On the other hand, if you're concerned about that grey haze hanging low in the sky that you notice every morning driving to work and wonder about what it's doing to your lungs, the current batch of gasoline hybrids make a ton more sense.

bah! links didnt take

Link 1

Link 2

The ozone and global warming should be separated. Lightning will not patch the ozone hole, because surface ozone (lightning) is separate from the upper-level ozone protecting us from UV radiation. Surface ozone is actually a pollutant.

Increased vegetation is really thought to play a role in mitigating global warming. But the effect is not strong enough and not fast enough. Recent studies (summer 2004) also raise the possibility that increased CO2 will increase CO2 emissions from arctic beat bogs and from forests as well, due to the changes in microbe fauna in the soil.

More info on beat bogs and on carbon loss from forests. (More or less random links to the news articles that appeared everywhere.)

You should also be aware of some not so reliable information sources.

I'll pre-emptively reply to this one. Smart people should not worry about nuclear waste. Unlike the waste from burning coal, wood, oil, and natural gass, nuclear waste isn't spread out in the atmosphere, it's stored in nice safe little containers and it has a neet trick: nuclear waste dissapears by itself over time. People look at how long it takes to degrade and worry about keeping it contained for that long. Wake up! How long does it take for lead to degrade? How about mercury? How long do you have to wait before it's not dangerous? Are you sure you can keep it safely contained in your lungs until that happens! Your environment is being poisoned today. People are dying today! Birth defects and neurological disorders are happening today and they are't from nuclear power, the power generation methods we have used instead.

Nuclear power can kill, but if you look at it carefully, it doesn't. Nuclear waste is not nearly as hard to deal with as somehting like mecury spewed out into the air.

years until the surrounding areas become habitable
I have news for you, chemical pollution is just as bad if not worse. Chemicals are often stable. Meaning they'll stay dangerous forever, at least until they get diluted or are broken down through chemical means. Many poisons can remain deadly for thousands of years in a contained enviroment.

Air pollution from coal-fired power plants accounts for about 30,000 premature deaths in the USA each year
Times Beach became a superfund site, relocated 2,000 people, and 265 kilotons of soil incinerated
Don't forget oil spills!
Polluted Sand isn't going anywhere
200 homes rendered uninhabitable due to wood preservative

Pimental at Cornell has calculated that biofuels require more fossil fuels to grow and process into ethanol than the energy they deliver, while the promise of sustainable use of biofuels for the US would take 1/8 of all available surface area and still only account for about half of energy needs.

Among his calculations:
"An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel's analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol."

Yes, turbo diesel cars get incredible mileage, but the particulate emissions -- despite dramatic improvements over the past decade -- still fall near the bottom of the heap.

So, if you want to improve your mileage to save a couple of hundred dollars a year and/or to reduce dependance on foreign oil, a diesel is definitely the car for you.

On the other hand, if you're concerned about that grey haze hanging low in the sky that you notice every morning driving to work and wonder about what it's doing to your lungs, you might want to consider other technologies.

I'll be happy when we can finally flip off the OPEC nations and supply our own fuel. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that fossil fuels are still the most cost effective form or energy production.

Your comments are, in a word, ignorant.
I work AND live in Los Alamos and have not had any health problems to speak of. It's actually the safest work evironment I've ever had. (odd as that may seem at first thought) After all the flak they received about their "environmental legacy", they have instituted some of the most comprehensive health/safety/environmental policies ever.

Oh, and if you're wondering about "bringing home souvenirs", why don't you check YOUR annual dose.
You will be most suprised, I'm sure.