Slashdot Mirror
The Great Ethanol Scam
theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."
I just like to drink boooze!
Instead of using corn (worse than sugar cane), soy beans and bio diesel would be beter. I always thought that diesel engines get better mileage.
It's next to impossible to find a gas station that does not have Ethanol in it's fuel. It doesn't help that two huge ADM plants are with in 90 minutes of where I live. Regardless, there is a single Shell station in the area that has 93 octane V-power that is without ethanol. The cost different of $0.30/gal is offset by the noticeable decrease in fuel consumption, increased power, and smoothing the idle. Yes, my car is tuned to require at least 91 octane.
"There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on Earth." -Anonymous
"Does the average citizen understand what this means?" No. Does the average /.er?
..if this NY Times editorial is a sign of the times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24sun2.htm .
Basically, it says that the ethanol lobbyists are fighting back against the EPA attempting to do its job by actually measuring the effects of ethanol as fuel.
More than anything, this cartoon puts me off the whole ethanol idea. It still creeps me out seeing it again now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
E85 is garbage. Why do you think the government has to subsidize it by about 40 cents per gallon? If it was that good of a fuel, it could stand on its own. Corn / Farm lobby + enviro wackos = total failure.
Stop the subsidies, tax carbon to account for externalities, and then let the market decide. The negative effects of biofuels have been on display ever since the Dutch dropped palm oil. Instead of the government pushing this obviously failed product, they should make sure that consumers bear the entire cost of their decisions and let companies develop a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And less biofuels means the price of my beer goes down, dammit! Won't someone think of my beer?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
it's not ethanol itself, it's just the way US produce it... none of those arguments would apply to sugar cane. about the engines, brazil is using pure ethanol for quite sometime and it just doesn't destroy the engines the way tfa implies. if it's happening on US, maybe you should take another look at the auto industries.
Everything I've been reading suggests that ethanol has no advantages, other than for the subsidized corn producers. It takes more energy to grow the corn to be converted to ethanol than what you get out. You get lower mileage from running on a gasoline-ethanol mix than on pure gasoline. You produce less quantity of pollutants per amount of fuel burned, but this is pretty close to offset by the larger amount of fuel that you have to burn to go the same distance.
Maybe I'm wrong. I drive a diesel car that I run on biodiesel made from used restaurant oil, so I'm definitely not against biofuels in principle, but everything I've ever heard or read makes it seem like ethanol does not actually do anybody any good. Its only purpose is to make it SEEM like somebody is doing something, to make us feel good. But it raises the price of corn, and now, it appears, it destroys your car's engine as well.
The only thing wrong with ethanol is that big corporate farms are subsidized to make corn ethanol. If the U.S. just allowed the importation of sugar cane ethanol from countries like Brazil, then it would be a great thing.
If you've spent any time in Brazil, you will see that ethanol is just fine for internal combustion engines. They've almost exclusively used ethanol for the last ten years. Now maybe there's an argument about "flex fuel" but that is just a transitional fuel type. Once we can import environmentally and economically friendly sugar cane ethanol it won't be a problem any more.
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It doesn't have to be a linear curve, dude. It could be 30% at 15%, and 50% at 90%.
Not saying anything about the veracity of the article, just sayin'.
According to TFA, in many cases fuel lines or fuel pumps have been destroyed by fuel with increased ethanol content.
This seems credible because similar problems are known with biodiesel (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Material_compatibility). But there are materials that can handle the ethanol, they just need to be used in new cars and eventually most cars in existence will have them.
The real question is how large the net energy gain from using ethanol actually is. If TFA's assertion that it is a net energy loser are correct, that would be a far bigger problem.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It doesn't matter that bio-ethanol always was so utterly bone-headed from a thermo-dynamic and food-price point of view (and now this as well) - utterly wrong, right from the start, with back of the envelope calculations.
Some people can make vast amounts of money out of it under cover of doing the "right thing" morally (much like the war on drugs), and hence it gets government support.
Azural - instrumentals
The part I loved most about the steaming biased crock of crap that is the article is the comment that E85 (15% Ethanol) means a 30% drop in mileage.
So E0 (100% ethanol) would be a drop of 200% in mileage? Does that mean you fuel with Ethanol and your car goes backwards?
Hate to burst your bubble, but E85 is 85% ethanol. And it's quite apparent that you know nothing of math or energy density. The energy density of ethanol is about 26 MJ/kg whereas the energy density of gasoline is almost twice that at about 45 MJ/kg. So to answer your last quesion, you'd most likely get less than half the mileage out of your car if you used E100 (100% ethanol). BTW E0 is 0% ethanol, ie pure gasoline.
Oh, so using a fuel different from the fuel specified by the manufacturer can destroy your engine. I don't think that's news. Ethanol is corrosive to plastic and rubber. If the pumps are spitting out higher than 10% ethanol, the chain of responsibility is pretty damn clear. Sue the gas seller.
Anyone who has done ethanol conversions for internal combustion engines (ICEs) can tell you that the conversion requires replacement of plastic and rubber hoses in the fuel system with stainless braided hose. Obviously if the system isn't originally designed for more than 10% ethanol there will be problems.
But the problem isn't with ethanol per se. While it doesn't contain as much energy per liter as straight gasoline, that never stopped gasoline from taking off in favor of diesel's increased energy per liter. Ethanol makes fuel octane ratings go through the roof, which means you can tune the engine to run leaner under acceleration. Even running under boost you can often run leaner than 12 AFR with E85.
I don't agree with the subsidies from the corn lobby, but attacking ethanol because "it destroys engines which weren't designed to run on ethanol" is frankly a stupid tack.
That does seem a bit outlandish but ethanol will kill your efficiency. Pure ethanol only gets about half the mileage of pure gasoline. It's also a disaster for food prices. It's just not a feasible alternative.
Time makes more converts than reason
Now who sounds biased?
Hint: Not everything is linear.
Let's pretend that ethanol works exactly like gasoline. No extra corrosion, etc. It still seems like nothing but a money grab by corn / sugar farmers to me. No data I've ever seen makes it seem more useful than gasoline. It's a waste of food.
Now if we can produce cellulosic ethanol, that could be really useful.
But we can't right now (at least anywhere near cheaply). Corn ethanol isn't useful. Give it up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. Not the other way around. Thus, 100% ethanol would probably lead to a 35% drop in mileage or something like that.
Actually, the increased effective octane of E85 means that it is much more detonation resistant than pure pump gas. That means you can run a lot more turbo boost than you'd normally be able to get away with on a "street" fuel.
You have to increase injector size quite a bit to offset the lower energy per volume, but with all the extra air crammed into the motor at high boost values, the net result is a metric assload of power from a freely available fuel.
Making 500 HP out of a turbo 2 litre street motor is entirely doable running this fuel. I had to run 118 octane C16 race fuel (at $10 US / gal) to get similar performance.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You can't buy gas without ethanol in California due to the CARB requirement that all gas meet oxygenation requirements. Ethanol was chosen as a substitute for MTBE due to the less-than healthy effect of ground water contamination from MTBE runoff.
There are numerous problems with ethanol as an additive, and it starts with the alcohol being corrosive to many plastic and rubber hoses and connectors. Aside from that, boat fuel tanks are comprised almost universally of FRP, and E10 will dissolve the tank and then the engine ingests the dissolved plastics. Not only does it corrupt the engine, but the exhaust products are pumped into the water behind the boat, leading to another environmental pollutant.
Of course there is the issue of stored energy as well. E10 contains about 15% less energy than E0. So, more trips to fill up, and more CO2 from distribution.
The big problem is, there are no other choices for oxygenate additives in California, and by extension MA, NY, NJ, OH, NH, VT, etc.
It takes more water, soil fertility, and work (energy, human labor) to produce the stuff than you ever get back out of it as useful work. It's a scam in the same sense that batteries and electric vehicles are a scam.
Ok, what is the thing about first posts anyway?
You mean other than you failing it?
While I agree with your general sense of the article, your math needs work.
Although the writer appears to be a respected journalist (see the brief bio at the end), the article is little more than disconnected anecdote. IF the big manufacturers are on the hook for multi thousand mile warranties and IF increasing ethanol concentrations from 15% to 18% routinely trashed engines within the warranty period then I would suspect that the manufactures would be complaining about this. Big Time. Yes, I read about ethanol induced damage not being a warranty repair, but having thousands of annoyed customers even more pissed off because of the fine print makes little long term economic sense.
And this is aside from the point that it can't really be that hard to devise plastics that are ethanol resistant. The stuff isn't hydroflouric acid. And fiberglass gas tanks? WTF. Never heard of them.
Sounds a bit hyperbolic to me (and thus perfect for a discussion here....).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I want some corn! Where is it? I need to have corn! Don't turn it into fuel, it's food motherfuckers!
Here in Brazil we have been using alcohol as a fuel source for years. When you go to a gas station, it is guaranteed that you will find both a gasoline pump and an alcohol pump. Most cars developed here since 2003 accept both fuels, using an engine technology called FLEX. The only difference is that the alcohol we use is called "Anidro", and it is 99.3% pure, while Ethanol is 96% pure (the rest being mostly water).
Based on this, to subsidize the price of the gasoline here, the government sets an alcohol mandate of 22%. So even if you have a gasoline-only car, you are really using 3/4 gasoline and 1/4 alcohol when you fill the tank. Since the alcohol does attack all parts of the engine that are in contact with it, engines produced for the brazilian market have a special protection layer. And indeed, owners of imported cars here usually fill their tanks with a special "premium" gasoline, that is basically pure and high-octane, to avoid damage. (Guess I don't have to say that gas stations rip you off for that)
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
From what I understand ethanol from corn, which is the big lobby group in the States, is not an efficient process. Ethanol from sugar cane is suppose to be a more efficient, process.
Not of ethanol, I'm really skeptical of it. It takes so much energy to make, I'm not sure what the point is.
I'm more skeptical of the other things listed. An E85 vehicle typically will run on E100 with no damage. The only real issue is that if you let the engine cool down, it won't start since ethanol won't vaporize properly in a room temperature engine. But it won't cause any damage, and merely putting 100% gas in the tank (assuming there is room, pumping out ethanol if necessary) until the percentage gets high enough to start the engine is all that is needed.
Also, ethanol doesn't reduce "gas mileage" (the words used in the article) 40-60%, it reduces FUEL mileage 40-60% by volume. This is because ethanol contains less energy per gallon. So consumption goes up, but what you really want to measure is energy efficiency, and burning ethanol isn't significantly less energy efficient (note, I'm not speaking of the energy required to make the ethanol, merely the combustion in the engine). So as long as the fuel is priced correctly and you have the space for the ethanol needed, it isn't an efficiency issue.
I do have problems with E10 ("standard gas") more than E85. With E85 at least you know what you're getting into. With E10, we are made to pay regular rates (or even more!) per gallon for the fuel even though it contains 4% less energy than straight gas.
For the record, I'm against a move to E15. We'll end up paying the same amount again (per gallon), while getting another 2% worse economy (per gallon). And it doesn't seem to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, since the corn used to make it is generally grown using nitrogen fertilizers made from petroleum.
I still like the idea of flex-fuel, but we need to find better wats to make alternative fuels before they represent a real viable alternative.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Does that mean you fuel with Ethanol and your car goes backwards?
No biggie
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
weird... we use ethanol over here in Brazil for a long time already, and aside from one crisis on availability of fuel in the past, we never had any problems with our cars. And we blend 25% ethanol into our gas.
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
Oh, sweet Jesus that's a moronic post.
Let's spell this out:
1. Ethanol damages fuel systems.
2. Our current methods for producing ethanol are not efficiency winners.
3. Ethanol has lower energy density than gasoline.
4. The pro ethanol lobby is unnaturally strong.
5. You are posting at below-average quality ***for slashdot***.
i am lucky in where i live in a town of 13,000, 15 miles from B.F.E. we still have two gas stations that still sell gas with no ethanol(and proudly say so). from personal experience i lose about 4 mpg with ethanol added. Then there is my brother and friends who drag race 1/8 mile tracks they lose up to a second running fuel with ethanol added.
those two things alone where enough to make me swear off the stuff
I live in Brazil and my car, like most of the new (3-4 years old) ones, runs on both Ethanol and Gas. I only run it on ethanol because I want to be greener. A few facts from my point of view:
1 - Yes. Unless your car is prepared to use ethanol it will destroy it because it have water and that water will oxidate the tanks, engine, etc... But here cars not prepared for ethanol run on gas with 25% of ethanol.
2 - No. It's not an scam. We've had it for 30 years now.
3 - The carbon cycle of the ethanol takes carbon from the atmosphere and sends it back there. The petrol cycle gets carbon from hundreds (or thousands) of meters bellow the surface and it sends it to the atmosphere.
4 - Stop using corn ethanol, think sugar cane ethanol. Corn ethanol looks to me like it has been created to fail: it is not energy efficient as sugar cane's and it uses much more space than sugar cane's.
I think we are already late in replacing gas. But the few people that make a ***lot*** of money with it will do anything for us not to replace it. With ethanol there is no central organization controlling us and anyone can produce it, you just need land.
5 - Yes, I also think the food prices will rise. This is really a down side here. Sad.
DVHC
Crock, eh?
Mechanics have been WELL aware of the problems caused by ethanol (particularly in boat, small engine, and commercial engine applications) for many years, but mechanics don't make public policy.
The 30-percent mileage drop appears to be worst-case, but the mechanical and corrosion problems are very real. I don't own a boat, and I can refit my older rides with ethanol-compatible carb (Holley for the trucks and S&S for for the Harleys) kits , but the MILLIONS of people who own engines too complex to easily refit with pumps, lines, seals and injectors will be screwed if the ethanol content goes up.
I'll make enough dough wrenching on the side off this to update my late model vehicles.:P
Example problems:
http://boatingsailing.suite101.com/article.cfm/ethanol_fuel_problems_for_boaters
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yeah, sure.
Always remember: taxes can and will be used against you eventually.
but having thousands of annoyed customers even more pissed off because of the fine print makes little long term economic sense.
Long term economic sense, something that every U.S. automaker has since when now?
That is not exactly true. The power output of an internal combustion depends not only on the energy content of the fuel but on on other factors as well, such as, *VERY IMPORTANT* compression ratio. The higher the better and ethanol allows the use of considerably higher compression ratios without detonation. It doesn't compensate the lower calorific power of the ethanol (25% less mileage) but for the same engine, ethanol usually has a little higher rated power (it can operate on higher RPMs).
How hot does the engine run with that much extra compression? I'd imagine it'd be pretty rough on the cylinder walls if you did it for anything longer than 1/4mi dragging.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of engineering or anything -- maybe we need to look back into ceramic composite cylinders, which I think was a focus of research back in the 70s or 80s -- but I'd be surprised if you could take an engine designed for 87 octane gasoline and increase the compression to what's optimal for E85, without increasing the wear pretty substantially.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Since gas is measured and sold by volume, it only makes sense to talk about energy density in those terms. Ethanol is 23.5 MJ/L while 87 octane gas is 34.8. Fuel use of E100 seems to be growing. The most widely documented cases of damage due to use as an additive is when it is added to the driver.
I just got 10% ethanol gas at Sunoco. I've been suffering from low/bad idle ever since. Just ran fuel system cleaner in an attempt to fix it. -_-
I think our society needs to begin to understand that all of the dense, useful energy they are pulling out of the ground took hundreds of millions of years to create. Wasting such a valuable finite resource is useful if and only if it is used to transition to an energy system that uses that day's sun energy to do that day's tasks.
The energy problem is quite simple. Stop zoning cities for cars. As soon as the economy is back in swing, slowly raise the gas tax and funnel all of that money directly into solar and battery technology research. Raise electric consumption taxes for all fossil fuel burning power plants to fund the construction of solar and wind. Build some trains that run off of solar energy sources on main highways. Connect those to neighborhoods with short range electric buses, bikes, and small sugar cane burning scooters.
The big problem with the conversion in Brazil is the massive clearing of rainforests and the offsetting the natural intake of CO2. Unfortunately, taking on only one side of the problem creates more problems.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
troll penis
Hate to burst your bubble, but E85 is 85% ethanol. And it's quite apparent that you know nothing of math or energy density. The energy density of ethanol is about 26 MJ/kg whereas the energy density of gasoline is almost twice that at about 45 MJ/kg. So to answer your last quesion, you'd most likely get less than half the mileage out of your car if you used E100 (100% ethanol). BTW E0 is 0% ethanol, ie pure gasoline.
there are more important factors than energy density here, for instance pure ethanol has an octane rating of ~116 allowing much higher combustion chamber pressures prior to detonation netting a power gain over what can be achieved with gasoline. granted the car needs to be designed for this, through higher compression piston, higher boost levels, and/or modified ignition timing.
theres a reason that ethanol is used in some drag leagues, and its not because of lower power output :)
In June 2005, J. Craig Venter co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce clean fuels and biochemicals.
Ok, it's been 4 years, do you have any progress to show us or what? I mean, if ya gunna pick such a topical issue to found a company on, you've gotta at least give us a time line.
Looking at the web site it's pretty clear that this is still the hype that they're pushing... so where is it? 10 years away? 20? Is this the new fusion?
How we know is more important than what we know.
One page article: http://www.businessweek.com/print/lifestyle/content/may2009/bw20090514_058678.htm
If your idea of efficiency is mpg (which is stupid when comparing different fuels), then yes it's much less efficient. If you want power from high compression, it's better than gasoline (much higher knock and detonation temperature thresholds). The real measure is mile per dollar, which is much lower with ethanol from corn vs gasoline, even before you take into account the rent-seeking scum bags who use corrupt politicians to steal tax money (subsidies).
People in California were driving electric cars every day ten years ago. They were fast, quiet, clean, and reliable. They were also accessible to the everyman, unlike the Tesla roadster.
I don't give a fuck about corn or other combustibles. We could all be driving electric cars today if not for big oil colluding with government regulators.
Give me my electric car!
Cant you chain ethanol together to produce gas? even if its not energy efficient (which i think it will be under the right conditions as dH=Tds +Vdp (i think dp & ds will be negative )), you can burn ethanol to heat the reaction (as its apparently useless for cars), or better yet use energy from nuclear plants!
Sure it wont be great gas but you can then treat it and use branching/anti-branching catalysts etc, at the end of the day a car doesn't give a shit where the gas came from as long as its mostly ~c8h18.
Cheap clean electricity is what is needed (just go fucking nuclear already), once you get that, ethanol (or even methane) can be chained to produce whatever plastics/ gas you need! (hell you can grow the shit in hydroponics plants, if the electricity is cheap enough)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I'm waiting for the all-electric stuff.
No oil change, no pollution from the car, no hassle.
Yea, and I'm pro-nuclear too. :)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
From your own energy density numbers 45/26 = 1.73. So you'd need 73% more ethanol fuel to get the same mileage as from a unit of gasoline. However, while ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, it has a higher octane rating which means that there is less waste heat and that the engine can run more efficiently. The article is right, a 20-30% drop in mileage is likely.
Football Odds
Every energy system that is used as fuel ultimately loses energy as a transport. It's just a question of how much. When sunlight is converted to coal and oil, over millions of years, energy is lost. When biodiesel is created, energy is lost. This is simple physics.
The reality is, whether or not ethanol is a "net energy" gainer is a red herring frankly cooked up by people who are pro-drilling. The only reason ethanol is taking a beating now is because gas prices are low again, but if they go back up to $4 a gallon, and they will at some point, then, ethanol will be roaring back into demand.
Whether or not engines are destroyed from it, only means that we need better engine designs.
This is my sig.
Other types of biofuel may be better than corn, but they have their problems too. According to a shocking report by "Time Magazine", "if the world gets even 10% of its energy from these new kinds of crops, most tropical forests will probably disappear."
Not surprisingly, lobbyists for American agribusiness are angry as hell about the conclusions of the EPA study.
Really, the best way to partially fix this nonsense is to make Iowa (and its corn farmers) the last state to participate in both the Republican primary and the Democratic primary. Due to the importance of Iowa as the first state in the presidential primaries (including caucuses), Iowan agribusiness has a stranglehold on American politics, and its politicians do stupid things (like supporting corn-based ethanol) in order to cater to Iowa.
Also, has anyone noticed that no one has mentioned the #1 reason for the growing energy problem and its associated pollution problem? The #1 reason is overpopulation. If we reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 3% over 10 years but increased the population by 3% over the same period across all nations, then we effectively accomplished nothing.
Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
MPG is very important. How would you like to reduce your mileage per tank from 300 to 150 miles? That isn't going to be acceptable to most people even if ethanol was slightly cheaper, which it will never be without subsidies.
Time makes more converts than reason
Instead of using corn, soy beans and bio diesel would be beter.
Instead of growing crop for ethanol, fermenting byproduct and other garbage coming from the agriculture would be better. Instead of losing arable to fuel production and cutting down food production. (That's how it's actually done here in Switzerland).
That is until the "aglae growing in a vat" that we regularly read about on /. works.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's quite annoying to the rest of us !!
But it's not Fuel vs. Food. The corn companies are not taking Corn that can be used for food, and the price of corn is not going up because of the production of Ethanol
For now. Wait a couple more years, and the whole ethanol-producing crop-growing will be outsourced to where it is the cheapest : in 3rd-world countries.
And you'll end up with two problems :
- developed world's farmer having again an excess of product that they don't know what to do with because its too much expensive.
- 3rd world countries which replaced part of their food crops with fuel crops because there's more money to be made out of it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
E100 fuel isn't being chosen by racing because it's a "better fuel". In fact, they don't really care; what matters to them is that everybody is using the same fuel. It's being chosen in an attempt to make a decidedly non-green sport look greener. No other reason.
I can't speak for IndyCar, but I know that one of the other race series is switching to ethanol, and in conjunction with that, the maximum permitted fuel tank size is rising, because it doesn't get the same mileage and they'd have to pit a lot more often, changing the balance of the race. I consider this less than a ringing endorsement.
... when it is added by the driver.
Makes sense.
... when it is drunk by the driver.
Makes even more sense.
This signature intentionally left unblank.
Ethanol isn't subsidised in Brazil. It doesn't need to be subsidised because it uses the parts of the sugar cane that can't otherwise be used and it contains more energy than the process used to create and transport it.
Yup, in Brazil. They are organized well enough to re-use locally produced byproduct which otherwise would be thrown away.
But you can count on big corporation located in ultra-liberal economies (such as the USA) that they'll outsource their fuel crop growing to the cheapest place - in 3rd-world countries, which in turn will sacrifice more of their food production for the more lucrative fuel productions.
As a parallel, see how forest are destroyed to make place for more palm oil production.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ethanol is definitely not the way to go but the corn they use to make it is definitely not food. It comes from the great food desert that is the midwest. Try eating some corn #2 it aint tasty. But i guess it does up the cost of all that stuff they claim is food but i have my doubts. the people claiming that food prices are directly related to ethanol production should start asking for the corn growers to umm grow food instead of something that has to be processed endlessly.
Here in Brazil we have ethanol cars for 20+ years and I hear nobody blaming it for engine destruction.
Why this referenced site wrote this scam? I can't understand!
The price also is 50% cheaper thas gas.
...Mt Dew now has "Throwback" to make use of the now-cheaper cane sugar....
if Coke would just get rid of that crappy high fructose corn syrup trash. It's been ages since you could make a good rum and Coke. Sometimes "real sugar" Coke is available at the local Kosher supermarket but it would be nice to just get rid of that high fructose corn syrup. BTW, has anyone else noticed how the obesity issue in the US has tracked so closely with the introduction of that HFCS poison (just Google "high fructose corn syrup obesity")?
The Prez wants to fix health care? Start by "encouraging" the demise of HFCS in people food and ethanol in automobiles.
Ethanol attracts moisture. A stabo additive is required.
It attacks fuel lines. This spring I had to change out the fuel lines in all my lawn equipment. The line trimmer had (was cheaper) to be replaced.
It's a nightmare for the marine industry. Not only attacking the fuel lines, but the internal fuel tanks also.
Needless to say, I've learned my lesson. I go out of my way to purchase fuels that don't have ethanol mixed in.
Maybe in the future everything will be ethanol tolerant. But that day isn't today.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Let's see how this works:
- Lawmakers receive campaign contributions from ethanol and auto industries.
- Law gets passed mandating Ethanol in gasoline. Public loves it, since they can think they're "helping" the environment without doing something "stupid" like moving into a denser area, driving higher-mileage vehicles, or not driving at all.
- Vehicles' gas mileage drops across the board. The American public don't care how much gas they're consuming; only about the per-gallon price. Gas tax revenues increase without the extremely politically unpopular move of raising gas taxes.
- Vehicle fuel pumps start failing. Facing a repair up to $1000, many people will choose to replace the vehicle outright. Auto industry benefits, and the American public are intoxicated with "new car smell", since they were looking for an excuse to replace that fully-paid-off car anyway.
- Profit!
Farmers in europe have run there equipment off home grown ethanol for decades no problem.
Energy density has nothing to do with efficiency. Its not really relevant that gas has more energy in it, Its how much you can get out of it.
Oh and by the way it is possible to make ethanol from things other then corn.
You mean other than you failing it by a country mile?
I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Australia they've done fuel economy tests comparing E10, regular and high octane gas. It turns out that using high octane, what with better fuel consumption will probably cost you only a couple of hundred dollars more more than low octane in a year of running, and you'll make that back easily with less wear on your engine, less carbon buildup in the engine, and less repairs, and less trips to the gas station. E10 is even worse, and will probably actually cost you more at the pump AND stuff your engine up. Everybody should just use high octane fuel.
You are all in denial. Ethanol is great and much better than gasoline. I have an VW Golf for 12 years, never had problems related to ethanol. There are millions of vehicles running on ethanol around. This kind of thinking lead to the bankrupcy of virtually all american car makers.
.. So you'd need 73% more ethanol fuel to get the same mileage as from a unit of gasoline. ..
Okay, you seem confused. Ethanol has 73% of the energy content per mass that gasoline has.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
It's great to see this on /. I hope something finally gets fixed.
My cars (1963 NSU, 1967 Corvair) and bikes (1965 Ducati 250, 1966 Montgomery Wards) don't like ethanol much. Ethanol and the changes in oil have been all over the car/bike email lists for years. This is a huge problem for people who own vintage iron.
Old cars and bikes don't like the new oils. It's designed for catalytic converters and doesn't do the lubrication job correctly anymore.
Ethanol is corrosive, chews up fuel lines and rubber gaskets, and doesn't burn "right". Engines aren't designed for it.
Valves burn up. Motorcycle clutches don't work correctly. Engines seize through lack of proper lubrication.
Things like lead additives, Marvel Mystery Oil and other related hocus-pocus stuff helps, but not enough.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Is it this? Discovery Channel's "Modern Marvels: Secrets of Oil".
I wonder if someone at Slashdot is taking money to post links to junk articles with hidden agendas. Alcohol is fine for cars. See, for example, Brazil's alcohol cars hit 2 million mark. Cars that use alcohol for fuel are completely reliable. Their exhaust is much better-smelling, too, because the unburnt hydrocarbons are sweet-smelling alcohol.
The article linked by Slashdot discusses problems with the bad design of fuel systems, not problems with engines.
I understand that the main problem with alcohol in the U.S. is that it is made from corn. In Brazil it is made from sugar cane, a more efficient method, and one that fits Brazil's climate.
We Brazilians use ethanol since some 30 years. Our engines are doing well, thanks. /.ers should know better and /. should not carry such misinformation.
Google "history brazil ethanol" and "ethanol octane".
Ethanol is better. End of story.
Unless you're involved with oil trade, then it's bad for you.
Idea:
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that has E10 clearly marked on the pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 10%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Another idea:
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that doesn't have E10 marked on their pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 0%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Gas station owners keep water out of their fuel because water will cost them money when they have to pay to repair people's cars. The benefit to adding more ethanol is that the damage isn't instant. You won't be able to sue a gas station for repairs when your fuel injector dies, because you won't know which one was responsible. The lawyers will eat that one up in court.
Can't go wrong for suing for false advertising, though, and it carries some pretty stiff penalties. Especially when the false advertising can lead to property damage or injury, as in the case of high ethanol content.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Has anyone given any thought to that biggest of energy wasters, our own very Sun?!?!? That thing has been burning uncontrollably like a runaway Texas gusher for millions of years! All that wasted hydrogen. Here's what I propose. We fly Red Adair out there, have him cap that sucker, and now we have a big freaking reserve for our hydrogen cars. Now is time the time to think green, boondoggles like 24 hour Solar Systemic lighting need to go!
Sorry to respond to myself, but I forgot to mention what ethanol does to fiberglass fuel tanks. It eats through the glue and they start to leak.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
You are, of course, completely forgetting that unless you drive a race car to work, the compression ratio is set to work with gasoline, not alcohol. And it makes no economic sense for any car company to make a vehicle that runs only on ethanol because of the scarcity of ethanol infrastructure.
Now if you're a tuner, drive a turbocharged car, and don't mind fiddling with programming a waste gate, you can raise your effective compression basically by letting the turbo spin a bit more before opening the waste gate. But I'd posit that there are very few gas-power turbo cars out there right now (most are diesel), and an even smaller number of those care to fool around with tuning for ethanol.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
from TFA:
Really? According to whom? The EPA says that using ethanol in place of gasoline reduces GHG emissions by 21.8% when compared on an energy-equivalent basis.
Actually, there are some performance benefits to E85, provided the engine is tuned to take advantage of it. Because ethanol boosts the octane rating of the fuel (something like 105 octane or so) you can bump compression up considerably (12:1 or more, versus the 10:1 that most gasoline engines use), advance ignition timing, and run higher levels of boost in a turbo- or supercharged engine. Ethanol also cools the intake air when it's injected into the intake manifold, which further increases power output. In the Koenigsegg CCXR, running on E85 boosts power output from a mere 806hp to a much more respectable 1018hp (!!!)
Of course, all of these things mean that your engine is going to be slurpling *more* fuel, and gas mileage is going to decline even further, but just about the only good thing I can say about ethanol as a fuel additive is that it's basically cheap-as-dirt race gas you can get at the corner station.
If the goal is to stop importing energy then we need to start drilling for more oil here in the USA. The article points out how ethanol can destroy an engine not designed for it, which is a good reason to not put ethanol in an engine not designed for it but a bad reason to stop putting so much ethanol in our gas tanks.
A good reason to not use ethanol as a fuel is because it has a very poor return on energy invested. The fact that people are debating whether or not one actually gets a net energy gain is a good enough sign for me. Even poor performers like solar power has a energy return on investment (EROI) of 5 to 1. Most energy sources in common use have an EROI somewhere around 10 to 1, such as coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal. Petro-fuels like gasoline and natural gas have an EROI that is even higher on average, it varies from well to well and will go down over time as the good wells are used up but still remains well above 10 to 1.
Fuels like diesel fuel, gasoline, and kerosene are very useful because they remain liquid over a wide range of temperatures at atmospheric pressure, have a relatively high energy density, are able to lubricate the pumps and engines they run through, and most of all it is cheap and plentiful.
The USA can be energy independent. If the yahoos in California would allow drilling off of its coast and the yahoos in DC would allow drilling in Alaska we would have a good start. Then those yahoos in DC need to stop holding up the building of more nuclear power plants. We need coal, uranium, natural gas and oil. We have it we just need the politicians to stop changing the rules and get out of the way so capitalism and commerce can meet the supply and demand naturally.
The meat of all this is that this is a problem of politics. We can't drill for oil because some tree hugger would rather think of the fish than people freezing to death. This is also ignoring the fact that the oil is seeping out of the ground and washing up onto California beaches. If we drill for that oil the it won't end up killing the fish. The majority of oil spills have been from oil shipped over the sea. There has been very little lost when pumped through pipes and shipped over land. If the tree huggers want to see fewer oil spills then we need to stop shipping it from other nations.
Some of those tree huggers might just rather we not use any oil at all. That's fine while your riding your bike through southern California but those of us in the Midwest need diesel fuel to harvest the corn and wheat those tree huggers like to eat. Those bike tires had to come from somewhere you know, like perhaps crude oil shipped on diesel trains and trucks.
There may come a time when the EROI of drilled oil might not make it worthwhile to use for fuel any more. We will still need oil for chain oil and bicycle tires. At that point it may make sense to synthesize hydrocarbons. The energy to synthesize those hydrocarbons has to come from somewhere. At that time, likely many decades from now, we will have to use things like nuclear power to create the hydrocarbons we need. Given the many desirable properties of hydrocarbons as a fuel we may still use hydrocarbons as a means to store and transport energy.
Ethanol is a scam. We have better alternatives. We need to stop subsidizing ethanol and put our efforts into something sustainable for our energy needs. In fact the federal government should stop subsidizing all energy and let the market figure things out. If you think the government is the solution then you do not recognize the problem.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Within a year of moving to a state that used an ethanol blend my head gasket went. Coolant got into the cylinders and produced a wonderful smoke screen. Not sure how many gallons of ethanol I'd have to buy to offset the $1000+ repair.
The article mentions a handful of cases where the tanks of some failed cars had more than 10% ethanol. One of the cases was cited as a station screw up, but how many were the owners fault for pumping E85 into a non-flex-fuel vehicle? It happens far more than people admit.
I was going to mod you up, until you started going on about the scarcity of gas-power turbo cars (I happen to own one) and the small number of people who fool around tuning them - it depends on your perspective. There are probably low tens of thousands of turbo owner/tuners out there in the US. From the technical POV, it's one of the easier things to do to make significantly more power in a mostly normal car. Yes, that's a small number - but nowhere near zero.
Me, personally, not interested in tuning my car at the moment, been there, done that, got other things to mess with right now, I might get back to it in a decade or two. The tuners aren't all that hyped up about getting the most out of ethanol since you can get more out of pump gas. And... "boost" is not compression ratio, the actual ratio between maximum compression and where the exhaust/intake valves open/shut is pretty hard to change on the fly - you can get a little with variable valve timing, but VVT is usually used in other ways (such as to promote "better breathing" for low end torque and max power at high RPM.)
A variable compression ratio engine would be more expensive and prone to defects than the common fixed compression ratio engines - add to this the fact that using corn for auto fuel only makes sense to the corn farmers and I'm hoping that ethanol goes the way of the Edsel really soon...
The one type of biofuel that has a realistic potential of having a large impact on climate change is made from salt water algae. The idea would be to farm these algae on land based farms using sea water. The precise nature of the mechanics of the farms is still up for debate. One possibility would be to grow them in transparent pipes or bags. The algae would undergo photosynthesis, fixing CO2 and producing oxygen and sugars. The algae, along with their sugars could be easily refined to make diesel.
Researchers have actually discovered a type of algae that refines into diesel with very little processing. The refined fuel even comes with its own natural octanes!!! The advantages of this system would be that it would not use up arable land, and that it wouldn't consume fresh water. The biomass per acre for algae would be at least an order of magnitude more than the best current biofuels.
The problems with this method are primarily ones of technique. Algae farms would have to act to prevent foreign species from entering the system, and the conditions for growth would have to be maintained. But I do not see any insurmountable obstacles. I strongly believe that if we devote our technological expertise to this problem, we will be able to make it work. This technology has the potential to supply a very large portion of our energy needs.
(I first heard of this from a NASA scientist on the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks)
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
There are many cars with engine programming for E85. Mostly domestic models.
Take ethanol from corn. This makes large conglomerates lots of money in terms of short term profits. It does not help the small farmer or the small processor as the good times do not last long enough to pay for the capital costs.
Such talk also helps solidify the corn culture of the United States, a culture that has cost the tax payer maybe 5 billion a year in doll payments to the conglomerates and farmers. This means that even though corn may not be the choice that a free market economy would make, it is the choice that the command driven economy is forced to make. Therefore alternatives like sugar cane, which the US used to grow, and maybe even switch grass is priced out of the command economy.
So what is next. Getting oil from shale, something that business would like to invest in, if only there was some stability and possibility of profit. So what does the business press do, publish stories about how the ethanol is a scam and we need to go back to oil, which we have plenty of if only the government would stop regulating the corporations so they will be able to innovate. We are told that it is cost effective to extract the oil at current prices, but we just need a push. Maybe move dole payments from corn to shale? Not likely. Probably ask for new dole payments for shale
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd vote for a gay seal-clubber - if only because he's probably comfortable enough with himself to go his own ways.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The subject of ethanol is covered at length. The author describes it as a complete scam on the American people.
http://www.amazon.com/Gusher-Lies-Dangerous-Delusions-Independence/dp/1586483218
It's not clear to me that sugar cane is a sustainable crop.
Still, the wikipedia article about Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane is enlightening, although we might not be able to replicate this in the US.
And, in any case, the Brazilian experience does show that the "ethanol ruins engines" canard is not to believed- 95% ethanol apparently doesn't ruin engines in Brazil.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
While there are many reason's why the US approach to ethanol as a fuel is misguided, I'm hesitant to jump on this bandwagon yet. I'd like to see some independent research on the issue. Ethanol collects water which can cause all kinds of problems in a vehicle where the fuels just sits (read isn't used often). But I wonder how Brazil has managed to use Ethanol for so long without all of the fuel pumps dieing if this problem hasn't been solved somewhere.
Think Deeply.
I encourage everyone to question the "fuel economy" of cycling: It takes about 3000kcal to cycle 100km at 20km/h (60 miles at 12mph). The cost of food which delivers that amount in a healthy form is almost the same as the cost of fuel for driving the same distance in a 6l/100km (40mpg) car. Passengers tilt the equation in favor of the car. The key difference is that most people have calories they would like to spend.
Is this guy adding in the few trillion (whatever, some hugemongous number of dollars) over the past few decades to keep a huge military presence in the mideast, all tax payer dollars? Or is he yet another one of those people who maintain our presence there has nothing to do with oil supply, it is just a coincidence?
I'd call that military expense an oil industry stealth subsidy and it dwarfs any ethanol subsidy or mandated cost. Dwarfs it, stomps it into the ground, not even in the same league. People who bitch about the small change ethanol subsidy always seem to conveniently leave out we run the US military in a major way as Chevron's and Exxon's bitch. That's a lot of scratch, jack.
And how about the economic impact of exporting those dollars for crude? Once a dollar leaves the nation for your crude, if it doesn't come back almost immediately, especially in diverse fashion, not just buying up government debt paper or enriching the same handful of military weapons systems companies it always has, the endless wars for endless blood profits boys, it has massive and negative compounding effect on lost productivity and wealth domestically for everyone else. Your imported crude costs several times more than what you pay for it directly at the pump in other words, because you have just screwed your economy over bad, except for a select few "golden" connected fatcat industries, plus because a lot (not all, but a lot historically) of that cash winds up in inimical and dictatorial regimes, so it is a direct threat to US security on several different levels. Put a cost on that, in dollars and blood on this Memorial Day.
If you can actually parse the article, the problem is using chintzy plastic that just doesn't work well with alcohol in some aspects of engine construction leading to major failure, because of too high a blend ratio, and that is the only single thing I agree with in his complaint list.
This is the car companies fault, directly, it is NOT a secret at all that US gasoline has had 5 or 10% ethanol in it for years now, or could have, so it should have been assumed consumers would be sticking it in the tank, and the effects of alcohols are chemically understood. They just chose to ignore it and should be forced to recall and fix those engines that fail because of their ignoring something that just about everyone knows, it is written on the pumps themselves! How could these huge companies miss that? Oh wait, I forgot, they are all run by Limo riding doofuses who don't even pump their own gas, their chauffeurs do that as they run them to and from their private jets.....
Personally, I am in favor of no more than 5% blends, or pure 100% ethanol, one or the other, with the consumer left with the choice at the dealers and at the pumps. With a 100% ethanol, they can design engines that will run quite well on it.. flex fuel engines or higher concentration blends in normal gasoline engines make no engineering sense at all. I remember this SAME EXACT ISSUE way way back when they did a big ethanol push for a few years, dang such a long time ago now,,maybe late 70s or so. Peoples fuel lines would rot out fast because of the ethanol. Now then, it wasn't their fault, they had no idea that alkyhaul would be stuck in the gasoline, but now? No way, 100% car companies fault, and oil companies as well if they cheat or screw up and make too strong a concentration blend. They made a huge point back then on insisting that 10% blends were pushing the envelope there, so stay below that. This isn't new news at all and those car companies should be stuck up against the wall over this and be forced to pay for their cheapness.
There are more hidden costs than farm subsidies once you start talking about energy sources, and let's treat these car companies as responsible adults and make them fess up to just screwing up bad and eat some of their capitalist dogfood (of course that has fallen out of favor lately, keep throwing the most tax money at the largest and most
The biggest problem with Ethanol in/as a fuel is the fact that it produces and increased amount of H2O in the exhaust that causes damage to the pistons, cylinders, and exhaust system. The only way to avoid that damage is to have the insides of everything ceramic coated which is an expensive process for most engines.
E10 costs the same per gallon as straight gasoline, sometimes more - yet I get at least a 10% drop in fuel economy.
The station closest to my house switched from Mobil to Sunoco a couple months ago. My "winter mileage" never recovered (always get worse mileage in the winter; in April, it comes back up about 20%). Then I quit that station and started filling up at Hess. Immediately gained 2 MPG, because I didn't get E10.
We always hear stories about all gas stations getting "the same gas" but the gas at this station most definitely changed when it went from Mobil to Sunoco - my gas mileage this spring at that station was definitely lower than at the same station last spring.
Sunoco in my area always sells E10. Mobil & Hess don't.
E100 fuel isn't being chosen by racing because it's a "better fuel". In fact, they don't really care; what matters to them is that everybody is using the same fuel. It's being chosen in an attempt to make a decidedly non-green sport look greener. No other reason.
Actually, Indy cars have been alcohol fueled since the mid-60s, and in fact it is for a good technical reason; it burns cooler. The switch they're currently making is from methanol to ethanol, not from gasoline to ethanol-- they haven't used gasoline for years.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I have a relatively new vehicle and it specifically states in the fuel requirements section of the owner manual that 10% (or 15% MTBE although that is largely banned now) is the maximum amount of ethanol which may be used in the fuel. It also states that using non-compliant fuels (i.e. leaded gasoline, too much alcohol, store bought additives, etc) may result in engine damage which will NOT be covered by the vehicle warranty. I suspect that this is the case for many vehicles currently being driven on American roads today. The government would not be able to mandate 15% ethanol fuels without pissing off millions of Americans who will be faced with the prospects of reduced engine and service life expectations on their current vehicles OR possibly expensive engine upgrades / modifications which almost certainly will not be covered under warranty. If they do increase the gasohol requirements then they will have to implement a long phase in period to make it politically palatable and how much difference will 5% extra ethanol make anyway? Probably not enough to justify the expense (or even the environmental benefits) of replacement (new vehicles means more new pollution to produce them) or major upgrades / overhauls of millions of existing vehicles.
After reading all the articles linked to, I noticed not one mentioned one part of the scam. Business Week and Chicago Tribune said the ethanol was corn based. However the same amount of land would produce more ethanol if sugarcane was used instead. With the world's largest biofuels program Brazil uses sugarcane. And switchgrass produces even more. Another benefit of using switchgrass to make ethanol is that it will grow on marginal land other crops aren't grown on.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A couple years ago here in Indiana there were all sorts of commercials about ethanol but I haven't heard one in a while. I thought they had given up on trying to push it through once the price of gas dropped.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Presumably you could also change the effective compression ratio by altering the intake valve timing. With solenoid-driven valves, this could even be computer-controlled to adjust efficiency according to the fuel blend, reducing compression if it detects preignition, etc.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
the third world countries can use the awesome money they now make from fuel crop to buy the expensive corn from USA farmers! win-win.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Just because the government makes mistakes does not mean the free market doesn't, there's plenty of mistakes both of them make and I wish the anti-government types would realize just how many free market failurs there out out there.
When the freemarket, which we do not have, or businesses make mistakes they should be held accountable. But who holds government accountable?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Some good points, but most of the cited evidence of damage relates to either:
- concentrations of ethanol greater than they were supposed to be
- putting ethanol-blended fuel into something that wasn't designed for it
That's not a good argument against all use of ethanol blends, but does go against mandating all octane-ish fuel be blended.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
if Microsoft were left alone with no government interference they would have solidified their monopoly
It was because of government that Microsoft got it's monopoly. So if the government had not interfered MS would not have been a monopoly.
If there was no government interference there apparently would be no corn farmers in the US anymore.
How so?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
IMO this breakdown is not a government issue, it is a getting to the truth breakdown. IE false advertising and bad science is leading people to believe in Ethanol, a free market is just as weak to that as a government. People pay extra, do extra to try and address those indirect society costs that lead to increased pollution, recycling, etc. Free market does require enforcement, and that needs to come from government. IE we do need truth in advertising enforcement, and we need some FDA involvement to make sure the failures don't kill too many people first. Also to make sure were not getting addictive chemicals added in. But mostly we have to make sure the indirect society costs are also factored in (pollution, road wear, noise, etc.)
"Doesn't have to be?" Dude! Go out on a limb! It certainly isn't a linear curve.
Ethanol doesn't preclude the use of the corn as food. After the corn is fermented, it is then sold as either wet or dry "distiller's grains" as cattle feed.
The majority of dent corn in the US is already used for animal feed (as is the majority of soybeans in the US). If you can substitute DG's for crushed or rolled corn in feedlots (and you can) there need be no loss of food use of the corn. The sugars are merely removed from the corn before being fed. In fact, DG's make for better cattle feed than raw corn does - cattle need to be slowly put onto raw corn feed to prevent acidosis, and this isn't a problem with DG's.
As for corn (and other commodity) prices: no one here appears worried about the issue that is responsible for more of the price swings in corn than any other: inflation and currency exchange rates. If you look back to the last "high" price of corn, which was in August 1973, and adjust that forward to today for inflation (as measured by the CPI-U from the BLS), you'd see that corn has gone down in price, adjusted for inflation. August 1973's corn price would be $13+/bushel today, and we're looking at about $4.30/bu today on the near contract (July 09).
So much for the "oh, whatever will the poor do?" The poor, and everyone else, are getting a screaming deal in US ag commodities. None of the US ag commodities have kept up with inflation since the 70's, which is one of the reasons why farmers and crop processors sought out new markets with added value for their crops. If you want to have all the output of farmers for use as food, you'd better get used to paying a lot more for food, because farmers would like to at least keep pace with inflation - and there's plenty of catch-up that needs to happen.
As for global food stocks: The #1 solution to this problem is for other countries to move forward out of the stone age of ag. The US can feed its population (and plenty more besides) with only 1 farmer feeding over 100 people; in many third world nations, they're still back at a point where 30 to 50% of the population is involved in food production because they have not adopted new technology of methods of farming. Part of this is due to government policies in the third world that hinder successful adoption of technology, part of it is luddite nonsense and propaganda from environmentalists over GMO's, part of it is due to land usage patterns that make very little sense.
The US is more than pulling its weight in terms of feeding people. If the rest of the world wants to eat well, they might want to start pulling their own weight.
I really have to start taking more chances in my life...
The free market does a piss-poor job of dealing with external costs (those not paid by the consumer), and the government is the appropriate mechanism for connecting the costs back to the people who create them.
True enough but it's government who's given businesses the power they enjoy. For instance the city of New London, Connecticut used their power of eminent domain to take away people's homes so a business could redevelop the land.
A better approach would simply be to impose a GHG tax -- taxes on the various gasses, for the various industries that produce them.
If you haven't heard of it perhaps you'd be interested in a proposed net zero gas tax. The idea is to raise fuel tax but cut income tax. Then the better your mileage or the less you drive the more in your pocket. If you get a Prius and only drive 100 miles a week, you'll pay less tax. And those who drive their SUVs 200 miles a week will pay more. I was surprised to read this proposal by Charles Krauthammer in the conservative "Weekly Standard"
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My state's laws require that all gas stations provide no less than 10% ethanol if they can get it cheaper than pure gas. I've run my stock 1997 Thunderbird LX (3.8L V6) on it for a year and a half now, with no ill effects at all. That car is rated for 24 miles per US gallon on the highway (when using pure gas), and it gets that even using E10 (a surprise, to be sure!).
The one time I put a tankful of E85 in it, eight months ago, the engine ran well and it showed a noticable, if small, boost in power. As with most cars not adapted for it, it caused the computer to throw bogus "fuel/air mixture too lean" (and similar) codes and the car got lower highway economy than it does on E10 (about 25% lower, in my case), but the E85 was just over *half* the price of pure gas in that area, so the loss of economy was definitely not an issue.
The real problem was that the E85 pissed off the fuel pump after about nine gallons had been used. It didn't damage it significantly, it just helped a bad bearing in the pump make itself known, so it has not been replaced yet. The engine still runs about the same as it did when I bought the car five years ago.
Market regulations are necessary to direct the free market away from catastrophic orientations. The market indeed HAS a self-correcting property that many mistake for magic or some kind of "invisible hand". In reality the market is simply using cold logic to determine what business is affordable and may live on and which is not. Here lays it weakness, because this reaction is never planned, but simply instantaneous. This is basics that are very important to understand if you want to build an economy that is both prosperous AND sustainable. This economy must be a mixture of planned regulations AND free trade. The ratio of these mixtures must be determined by expert economists. Any complete favor of either one or the other is always a naive mistake.
Now, to connect this with this article, a catastrophic orientation would be to continue to only build cars that run on normal gas if there would be a sudden halt in the production or import of oil, which many experts believe will happen. The free market would be unable to plan for this, because this is not what the free market does. The free market would indeed react, but far too late, and the economy would crash, due to being far to oil dependant. It's the government's job to regulate the market to keep this from happening by promoting alternatives that may not be optimal right now, but would have a positive effect on the echonomy in a longer perspective. And in this case, even if all bad rumors about Ethanol was true, introducing it would still result in a loosened up car market, where that an alternatives IS possible. It can make car manufacturers spend more on research and development of new technology because both they and the consumers get more aware that cars can run on many other things than gas. And it could pay off too.
Electric cars is a good example, the battery technology today is enough to power more than half of the American people. Electricity is cheap too; the mileage cost would be the same in worst case. So what prevents electric cars from reaching the market? First of all consumer and industry attitude, which government regulations can help to loosen up as mention earlier. Another thing that prevents new technology is patents. Are patents really worth all the trouble that they create in practice, like companies that uses patents to block concurrent, and companies that only earn money from selling and buying licenses?
Ethanol has its flaws, and has been accused of many things. One thing it was attacked for was the rise in crop prices and even the cause of world starvation. This proved to be wrong when the crop prices started to go down again, but it gives a hint that some people seem to be looking for arguments, with torches and flashlights, against ethanol. Now it is accused for destroying all of our precious car engines. Isn't this expected as only special engines can run on ethanol, but it will likely happen that some people try anyway? Another argument against ethanol is the fact that it can never replace gas. Taking all the crops in the world to produce ethanol would only power about 5% of all cars. True, but this have never been an argument, and where, contrary to popular belief, not the main reason why we should introduce it.
My 5 cent.
This guy just got destroyed.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
I'm a Canadian, and while our government has loads of problems, they are of the "the free market doesn't always work perfectly" kind, not the "everything the government touches turns to shit" kind.
Is the freemarket the reason Canadians have the come to the US for surgeries? Yea, in the US if you can pay you can have the surgery without waiting a long tyme whereas if you depend on National Health Care in Canada you do wait. A Liberal MP, Belinda Stronach went to California for surgery for her breast cancer, not because of the cost or waiting period but because "the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required."
And it's not just those who can afford it in the US who get good care, those who can't afford it can get good care too. I am an excellent example. As a college student without health insurance I was riding my bike one day after classes when I was hit by a moving van. At the accident scene I was picked up by a helicopter and flown to the best hospital for my type of injury in the area. I spent about a month in the hospital then lived in a rehabilitation house where I lived another 1 1/2 months. After leaving there I was in therapy about 3 months. My medical bills, which because I did not have insurance I could not afford, came to more than $120,000. I couldn't even afford to pay $1,200 never mind that much but I still got medical treatment.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There is a massive amount of oil still left.
True. One billion billion barrels gone, one billion billion to go. According to the man who predicted, to the year, the day the United States peaked it's production. Since 1970, no matter how many resources you throw at it, you guess less oil out each year in the United States.
The trouble is that the market is unpredictable. No one knows the year when people realize oil really is going to run out. Once that happens, the oil shock last year is going to look like a tea party. $150 a barrel cost the average american $2500 extra per year. Imagine $300 a barrel. Now keep in mind that other modern industrial economies use seven times less. Would you rather prepare our economy for this eventuality or let the market that gave us suburbs provide the solution?
Whenever we start to get close to running out of oil we will find alternative energy sources. To date, there is no energy source that is cheaper, more efficient and profitable other than oil.
So there's no energy source more efficient, but we don't need to worry about running out? At least you got the profitable part right.
And by the way, energy conversion from oil to gasoline to moving your car is about 30%. We're just lucky it's so dense.
Government funding only go so far, and most of the time it ends up wasting tax dollars for an undefined goal and leads to many dead ends. Let the free market do it and you will have a solution. Let the government do it and you will end up with even more wasted tax dollars and a broken "solution".
How has the free market solution to health care been working out? How has the free market solution to financial instruments been working out?
Let's think about the free market solution to very complicated problems, like cancer. Firstly, remember that the free market doesn't give a shit about cancer. As long as they make more money treating it, there's no real incentive to cure it. Last year, the US Government invested 5 billion dollars into cancer research. Pharmaceutical companies spent 4.4 billion in advertising for their products, mostly things like Viagra, which had a $122 million dollar marketing campaign.
I wasn't able to find any figures on private cancer funding, but the options look like non-profit organizations. Why is this? Why doesn't Pfizer want to cure cancer? The answer is they have no economic incentive to do so. The costs of the research outweigh the possible reward. How do you expect a society to progress in this sort of state?
Government projects only work with a defined goal. Just think of our space program, there was a definite goal of putting a man on the moon within a few years. It was quickly accomplished. On the other hand projects with little to no goals such as the war in Iraq end up wasting money, time and lives.
So, just make the goal "Let's make a battery this efficient and this recyclable" or "let's design a light rail system that can run on daily solar power."
Iraq has been a success. American companies have access to Iraqi oil, and America has more permanent military bases in the middle east, so they can control what's left of it.
Public transport also raises a lot of other questions. Not only the general pain of having to deal with the hobo who is sitting in his own pee
Here's where I like your post, because it illustrates something. Namely, your hatred of the disadvantaged. There's a 1 in 4 chance that hobo is a vet, but I doubt it matters much to you.
but also disease transmission. If swine flu had been a real lethal pandemic and we had mostly public transportation it would spread and wipe out a lot of the population much more quickly than most people being confined to cars for day-to-day travel.
To arrive in buildings to work together? Does any scientist support your theory, or are you just talk
Canada has the most stable banking system in the world today. Because it is the most regulated banking system in the world.
If America reduced it's oil consumption and developed new technologies to do so, not only would it be more efficient and competitive in the future, when rising oil prices are inevitable, it can also sell the technologies to other developing countries.
You're basically arguing that we shouldn't work on computer technology, because if we do we'll have less money for beer. I imagine those who invest in technology instead of getting shitfaced will do better in the future.
you'd most likely get less than half the mileage out of your car if you used E100 (100% ethanol).
Only if you insist on using it in a distressing inefficient manner. Ethanol has one major advantage over gasoline, and that is the octane rating, which is about 116 for pure ethanol, compared to 91 for premium gasoline. That means you can run it at much higher compression ratios (read : high boost forced induction) without worrying about knocking, and more compression translates into a more efficient burn, which in addition to boosting mileage (at appropriate settings, the mileage is the same as it is on gas), boosts power and torque considerably. Take a look at the Saab 9-5.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
> The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail.
Ok, when's Microsoft going to die?
There is no freemarket. If there were Microsoft would either be out of business or would produce better products. Having said that MS is improving, not as fast as some would like but they are getting better.
How about American Airlines?
When do I get to celebrate the passing of GM?
In a freemarket American Airlines would not have been rescued by the government. Neither would Detroit.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What we have now, however, is not this thing, and I'm glad of it. The primary sellers are huge corporations that pursue every legal avenue available to maximize profits, including patents, licenses and copyrights. When the laws do not favor them, they lobby to get the laws changed. To them it has nothing to do with fairness; it is entirely a cost-effectiveness equation.
Ah, as you say, we have no freemarket.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If nothing else our fearful leaders will be able to sell more government made cars. We can fuel them with government subsidized food converted to fuel and all be skinny cause we just can't eat.
It will never happen in our lifetimes, but "taking money out of politics" is the right answer.
And, by "taking money out" I don't mean on the campaign contribution side -- it is on the tax raising side.
If the taxes were only raised in a behavior neutral way, there would be far less reason to bribe your favorite politician.
(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen. Anything else is unfair, but necessary simply because not everyone can afford their fair share. All the shenanigans of modern tax code boils down to the politics of extracting unfair amounts of money from whomever can pay and the resultant politics of helping friends and punishing enemies.
So, in the US, with a $2.1 Trillion budget and 306 million citizens, if your family is not paying over $6,800 a head in federal taxes you are not paying your fair share. If you are not paying that much, you should thank some rich guy for helping you out. If that seems like too much, or you don't like being beholden to "some rich guy", maybe the government should spend less.
Of course, arguing the expenses is another story... if the government only did was it was constitutionally allowed to do, it would need a lot less money.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Here in Sweden the petrol/gasoline has been made up of 15% alcohol for several years and there has been no reported increase in enginge damages, in fact many newer engines seems to run more smoothly on this than the old petrol.
We also have the E85 gas which is 85% alcohol, the rest ordinary petrol that certain cars can run on and most modern engines be retrofitted to handle but here is a bit of a problem in extremely cold weather so in the winter time the E85 is not 85% alchol, they lower the content to around 70% to avoid problem with starting cars in cold weather.
European nations are much more culturally and racially homogeneous than the US
Actually Russia is about as ethnically diverse as the US. Like the US Russia has many ethnic groups.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Statistics can be spun. Example, It says that adding 15% Ethanol drops fuel efficiency 30% to 40%. Bullshit. In order to do that it would have to reduce the efficiency of the gasoline burning which it doesn't. What the spin is Ethanol produces 30% less power it doesn't drop E85 by 30% to 40% as the article would have you believe. If you do the numbers the mileage drop is 5% to maybe 10%. Not great but a far cry from 30% to 40% that fossil fuel crowd would like you to believe. As to Ethanol killing cars, only the ones not designed to run on it. The problem is the seals on normal cars are eaten by Ethanol. Flex-fuel cars don't have this problem. If it was such a dire problem then Brazil when be a car disaster zone. The fossil crowd would have you believe that burning coal in cars is the safest cleanest solution. Don't pay attention to articles that are largely opinion pieces check the facts.
Sounds like the same old fear mongering we've been hearing from the right wing for the past 30 years. I agree with the majority of comments, this is nothing but BS designed to protect current markets.
If "Ethanol destroys engines" as a general rule, why have I gotten most of the way to the moon in my 14 year old car when, so long as it was practicable I consistently put 10% Ethanol in the tank?
Let's give up on the FUD, folks. One important point is: is your engine engineered for Eth? Nowadays most car engines are designed for up to 15% Eth. The other point is can we produce the Eth in ways that don't deprive others of food AND don't use up more energy than that in the Ethanol they produce.
So let's make sure of its effects: cleaner burn in the engine? cleaner exhaust? and if it passes, find all the otherwise-non-food and net-green sources of Eth we can and run our engines on this annually renewable resource.
Science over FUD please. We can't afford stupid decisions so well as we once thought we could.
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Cap and spend is just another scheme to fleece the taxpayer.
Not if it's coupled with a plan like the net zero gas tax. In this plan fuel taxes would be raised but income taxes would be cut Going with cap and trade the income from selling emission credits can be be used to offset cuts in income tax. If you pay $20 more for energy you get $20 cut from your income tax.
And notice how the net zero gas tax is proposed not by so called liberals or socialists but by a writer for the conservative magazine "Weekly Standard".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The business week article bothers me, especially when I get to the end and read the piece about how the author earned some kind of journalism award. I think it must have been the kind that comes hidden in a box of cracker-jacks.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that we should, seriously, consider the repercussions from moving to 15% ethanol but much of the rest of his article seems to be nothing more than histrionics. The examples of cars dying from ethanol seem to come from gas stations that get the wrong mix of gas (at least 20% ethanol) and car companies that didn't design their cars right. US gas has had the option of having up to 10% ethanol for many many years, why aren't car companies designing their fuel systems to handle it? He even gives an example of a flex fuel car that, accidentally, received 100% ethanol fuel (which it isn't designed for). He even admits that this was a mistake at the refinery, so what is the point of it being in the article at all (other than to produce inflammatory garbage journalism)? Those kinds of mistakes say nothing about whether ethanol is good technology, one way or the other.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
I have a 2006 VW GLI. It has a 2.0L turbo-charged, direct injected engine in it. While driving across the country a few years ago (before the federal mandate hit), I averaged 34 mpg while driving in non-ethanol states. Once I hit states that had already started adding ethanol to the gasoline, my fuel economy dropped to 27 mpg.
I was shocked! Changing the fuel to 10% ethanol resulted in a drop in fuel economy by 21%. I couldn't reconcile the drop, as it didn't make sense that ethanol would drive my economy worse by an amount greater than the percentage of ethanol added.
I don't drive like a maniac, and discovering this caused me to reform my driving habits to get better fuel economy. The best I have been able to manage since the mandate is 29 mpg. Again, I was getting 34 mpg on straight non-ethanol gasoline, while driving more aggressively.
I did some further research, and found that Volkswagen's stance on ethanol is to absolutely not use it, ever. My engine uses a new technology (gasoline direct injection) that is emerging in just about every high-efficiency gasoline engine that is on the current or near horizon. All of them will have the same detrimental performance with ethanol blend fuels.
This will set up a situation where the non-government controlled auto industry, attempting to meet the new aggressive CAFE standards will be fighting against the government castrated companies and the ethanol lobby. I hate to admit that we will all be losers in the end, as the former winning will increase fuel economy, but probably cause fuel taxes to rise to make up for lost revenue from increased mileage. The latter's win will also increase the cost of fuel, while further decreasing mileage on new direct-injection engines.
-- Len
How some friends here write.
Brazil use alcohol since 1970 in cars. And become a government program when the OIL crisis near 75/80 years.
Someone here speak about GOVERNMENT give subside to alcohol in Brazil. LAST 20y this is BS. Diesel, GAS and other kind of OIL still have and STRONG. EXAMPLE. In Brazil still not possible to use DIESEL in cars. Because LAw.
Today The alcohol producer LIKE ANY KIND OF BIG INDUSTRY and sensible for a nation have some special ways of do things. BUT not put TAX money to subside the production.
hoo, they burn sugar cane. Huuu.. did you know how they get oil or use the coal? and this things of BURN is almost from past. The HIGHT techs producers today are almost 100% automated and the ACT of burn, turn the production low. SO THEY almost stop do it. Ambient laws do it more hard to be done.
Ho, they use poor labours to do it. Well, yes still used in some places. But how different from the COAL miners IN US, that work under some hard conditions?
When we speak ALCOHOL is A CLEAN FUEL. Of course its not CLEAN. Everything in earth works inside SCIENCE rules. Any kind of energy production have a BAD. SAME CLEAN FUSION like star trek movies have the bad things.
Doing a comparison of COAL, OIL, ALCOHOL. Just someone receiving MUCH money from someone can say its not MORE CLEAN and efficient.
Have BAD things to. ITs not perfect. If world use this, in future we will need to work with some problems to. But we cant compare with OIL pollution.
Oil pollution is a kind of energy that still closed and we open this. the sub products all concentrated now become open in atmosphere. Alcohol and biofuls use what already is open in atmosphere and convert this. So the unbalance of BIOMASSES become LESS problematic. So THIS IS THE GOAL.
For cars, have a relation PRICE/CONSUME. Same way DIESEL do GASOLINE.
In Brazil today if alcohol price become under 70% of the gasoline price. Below this, same alcohol have a more consume than gasoline cars. The final cost still better.
and the engines last 2 to 3 years. WE ALREADY can start to speak about alcohol do the same mileage that GASOLINE.
Indy cars are using alcohol if iam not wrong, and they run well.
today in Brazil we have a 25 millions of CARS ( not trucks and other things, just cars) and already 50% are alcohol and 2010 to 2015 will be 70%.
Engines blow by alcohol. Of course. if you have a engine converted from GAS to alcohol something will happens and will not be good.
Not just the H2O cumulative and corrosion of metal/plastic pieces. But the alcohol pressure to combustion is more hight and the temperature levels are far more hight than GASOLINE.
But Engines build to work with alcohol. Are in some ways far better and more durable than GASOLINE. Today with FLEX engine used in BRAZIL, Europe and Asia. This engines are the TOP. Here in Brazil we already have FLex engines to work Alcohol, GASOLINE and NAFTA gas. ( NAFTA GAS ARE THE MOST CHIP COMBUSTIBLE HERE, BUT we loose a lot of power in engines).
When we speak NORTH Americans are using the wrong WAY to produce alcohol and because this FOOD become more EXPENSIVE.
Humm, we neeed to analyse this. Food start to become more expensive just before the SHIT in ECONOMY HAPPENS. They already to put some guilty of the economy mess in food and alcohol. but after the CRASH was not possible to LIE at this level. So, we need to understand well, where go our money or our food.
But its true when we speak, CORN or SOJA are not good for this production. The relation of SOIL/EXPENSE/AMOUNT of this PRODUCTION ALREADY CONVERTED TO ALCOHOL and the protein that become expendable like garbage are hight. The time the north Americans farmers discover produce cana de aÃucar is more cheap and easy, they all will change the talk. And food never will be in FAULT. ITS ALL ECONOMY. if have much FOOD, become cheap, if EXPENSIVE a lot of peoples start to produce food to take advantage of this. ( besides all, there in NORTH AMERICA, government have a HEAVILY SUBSIDED FOOD, not just becaus
You mean like AIG, Wall Street, all these stupid banks involved in subprime mortgage scams, GM and Chrysler... Oh wait they didnt fail they got a bail out.
The fact they were bailed out shows there wasn't a freemarket. Under a free market the government would have let all of them fail and declare bankrupty. Many of those who support a free market opposed them. Here's some articles from the freemarket think-tank CATO. Here's more articles from the Libertarian Party, with more from the magazine "Reason". All of them support freemarkets.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
When was this?
Crack open a history book and read about why government started regulating things.
Crack open history books and read about how government gave corporations power. About 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson warned about them, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
"Free markets must convince you to voluntarily consume their products instead of a competitor's."
When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack.
True but they don't get business from me or others either. There are still some of us who know how to hunt and fish if we want meat. And for those who don't even large grocery store chains are starting to sell free range meat and organic food. No body's forcing people to pay more for them yet a lot of people do. Whole Foods seems to be doing better than many thought. Personally I'd rather hunt for my meat, when I have it, otherwise I prefer growing my food. I don't have much space but I'm growing Thai basil, blueberries, carrots, lettuce, mustard, onions, 3 different peppers, radishes, rhubarb, strawberries, and 3 different tomatoes. I'd grow more if I spent more tyme and had more space.
Government (who's sole motive isn't greed for money, but rather fear of being elected out of office)
BS! While most people say congress is bad, when asked many say their own reps and senators are okay.
Free-market economics have had failures throughout history.
Name one tyme a free market failed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
and Russia excepting
No I didn't miss it, you said "and Russia excepting, are much smaller in geographic size." To me that looks like you're comparing the size of Russia, other European nations, and the US not the ethnic makeup of them.
Otherwise I agree with your post I replied to, because the US is more diverse it makes a comparison in health care with Europe hard.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things?"
After recent events, keeping claiming that government intervention is always worst is frankly ludicrous.
Private companies have probed themselves as unreliable incompetent and devious as many Central Politburos in former Soviet area countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you want to be a united country the federal government will prevail.
It can't be otherwise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You only have to go to a third-world company where oil is extracted to see how these companies act with the lack of government regulations to control them (or a government that can stand up to the companies).
Hell, you don't have to find a third world oil company for an example of this. Unocal, Union Oil Company of California, has been accused of using the military to force Burmese to relocate and work in Burma. In Nigeria Shell Oil "supplied the Nigerian military government with weapons. These weapons were used to put down, with deadly force, opposition to Shell drilling on Ogoni land." Ken Saro-Wiwa, who opposed Shell drilling, was hanged by the military because of his opposition. Some groups in other nations have used the Alien Tort Claim Act of 1789, ATCA, to sue US businesses in US courts for their support of such things. And as president Bush tried to gut the ATCA.
The free market, with the companies always seeking lowest costs and better numbers this quarter, actually encourages these behaviors.
That is not a free market. A free market is one in which there is a voluntary exchange.
And like it or not, Somalia is exactly what we get with the "libertarian paradise". They might claim that they don't actually mean lack of government, but what good is a government that doesn't enforce laws and regulations?
If you're poisoned by some company you can sue them, you don't need byzantine regulations. Actually do you know who the biggest polluter in the US is? The United States Government. It's the biggest polluter and it gets away with it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Are you saying that Latinos (which are not culturally homogeneous), and African-Americans (which are not homogeneous neither) actually enjoy being sick and destitute?
You USians enjoy pigeon-holing people in order to find easy explanations for everything.
The fact is that Latinos, apart from the Spanish language, very often have not much else in common culturally, the other unifying factor being that they are poor.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What's interesting here is not just the characteristics of ethanol, it's the nature of lobbies and how law is bought.
We've known that corn ethanol was a stupid idea for many years. When the ethanol industry was first challenged to run their industry on the fuel they make, and they could not do it, it was a big hint. So we learn more, and realize it is not good for the environment, not good for reducing fuel imports, bad for food prices and is wrecking cars. And what are we doing? Working on how to increase the amount used in gasoline. All the major news outlets have done articles on how corn ethanol is a big error put in place -- they've been running for years.
It should shock us that something so boneheaded can hold on, and even keep growing, for so long. We are incapable of saying, "Oh, looks like that was a mistake" and fixing it quickly. We'll probably be burning it for another 5 years. And those involved will not be punished. They just did what they thought was good for their state.
Sigh.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Spoken like a man who's never been seriously ill. Or poor.
I come from a low income family and yes I've been both seriously ill and poor. I am poor now, currently the only income I have is disability. See as a college student, I worked part tyme, had no insurance, and didn't get financial assistance. I was hit after classes one day while riding my bike. According to the docs it's a miracle I lived. So now I am disabled and will soon be getting help buying food and paying rent. If it weren't for the fact that my sister owns the apartment building I live in I would have been evicted months ago.
And yes, she grew up poor too but now has her Masters, runs her own business, and owns rental property.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Oh golly.
We have different languages every few hundred of kilometres and people from North, South, and East European descent, who have arrived at different times from different places.
Just Spain recognizes several autonomous entities, with a seizable heritage (800 years) of Arabic culture and, naturally, DNA interchange, the UK is divided in 4 distinctive countries (with 2 recognized languages) and we know the disaster of the former Yugoslavia (where Muslims and Christians could not live together).
What about Sweden, Norway and Finland? Where several groups with different languages mix in each country? (for Linux nuts: Torvalds is not a Finnish last name).
As for Italy, tell a North Italian that they are pretty much like their compatriots in the South and he may reply to you, in German, that he politely chooses to disagree.
I could go on, but I think my point has been made.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To rub it on the day GM is being dismantled, at the tax payers expense, worldwide due to their sheer incompetence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And Brazil is chopping down virgin forests to grow more biofuel in the name of saving the environment. Just wonderful.
Compared to, say, NY State?
401 per km^2
France 117 per km^2
Even California has 217.
France would be ranked 22nd by population density. The UK (at 246) would rank 11th.
Out of 50 states (and the UK being one of the more populous ones in the EU), that's pretty low.
USA economy is probably closer, technically, to a fascist economic system.
I'm pretty sure that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
fascism:
"noun: a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)"
While still free, relative to the rest of the world, the US economy is partially controlled by the government with the higher you go the more government controls the economy.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
We've had 15% ethanol in our regular gas for years, and it appears it works well enough. We certainly doesn't see more motor failures than people in the USA do.
Actually it was correct.
While the same capacity engine tuned for ethanol will have a higher maximum power output, this has no bearing on the fuel consumption.
If anything, a tuned engine will be capable of using even more fuel, because you have raised the fuel burning capacity of the engine (maximum hp).
You forgot the end of that sentence. It only damages fuel systems that aren't designed for it.
Consider this:
Governments are funding oil exploration and new oil wells, at the same time as they are increasing the tax on car fuels, adding congestion taxes and whatnot.
In other words, they are pumping more and more oil from the ground, and making sure that the sheep that voted for them are paying the maximum possible for each drop!
Why don't they help the environment for real by closing oil wells, or making it cost-prohibitive to extract it? Oil that isn't extracted can't be burnt!
Every drop of oil in the ground will be burnt, the politicians are not trying to stop it, they are just arguing about the price.
Likewise, ethanol exists as an alternative fuel only because there is money and votes to be made from it.
Using ethanol as a car fuel the way it is done today is WORSE for the environment than burning oil. But claiming otherwise sure sells a lot of new "green" cars, and you get a fine-looking reason to put extra taxes on anyone who can't afford one!
The politicians and corporations have suckered millions of people into "upgrading" their cars to monstrosities with abysmal mileage compared to other alternatives, and it has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to improve nature. I am glad that this scam is finally starting to fail.
I cannot believe how many comments I've read here on how ethanol works fine in Brazil's sugar cane based ethanol production and in engines designed for it but not in the USA's corn based ethanol production and not in engines not designed for it.
With that kind of mentality, you Americans will still be paying for Arabian oil in 50 years, when there's almost none left. I don't want to appear anti-American but really, that's the same mentality that left you Americans in shit street with your SUVs (and the same, lazy ass defeatist arguments) when the oil prices skyrocketed and the recession hit.
Come on, folks, there are other crops besides corn, and you have huge areas of hot desert that would be fine for some other crops (like sugar cane) with irrigation (and before you moan about the energy needed to pump water, remember that solar and wind power could do it if need be).
If Brazil, with less resources (but obviously more will and less car indutry/corn growers/dumbass lobbying) can do it, so can the US.
You know where the real problem is in the USA? It's all the vested interests, such as the auto industry, corn farmers industry, pharmaceuticals industry, banking industry etc all trying their level best to make sure they don't actually have to adapt to changing circumstances. The not-invented-here syndrome in the US, whereby anything that wasn't an American invention is somehow suspect is not exactly helping you either.
Keep that shit up and in 40 years China will be giving the USA development aid.
Oh come on, There isn't a sugar cane farm within 1000km radius of the amazon rain forest. That is another issue entirely.
Fearmongering and anecdotes.
I have run my old converted car on E85 for three years without a hiccup. This is as much evidence pro as the OP is con.
"We estimate that the coal and oil industries spent an astounding $427.2 million over the first six months of 2008 to influence public opinion and public policy."
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/19/coal-and-oil-unite/
It just needs to spread like wildfire, and then get stronger due to anti flu drugs and mutate into a plague like killer cutting the earth population by 20%.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And BTW: Rush Limbaugh has been noticing this same thing with ethanol. It's messing up the corn market and Mt Dew now has "Throwback" to make use of the now-cheaper cane sugar as an alternative.
Wait, since when was Rush Limbaugh an authoritative expert on fuels, or anything but a drug-addled simpleton appealing to the prejudices of the masses?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Since the thirties. Haven't updated since then and finally ran out. Make 'em cheap nasty and BIG. Worked well for nearly 80 years. Good long term economic sense.
First, pointing out the flaws in a system is an integral part of refining that system (and a favorite past time of most /.ers).
Second, none of the critisizm you are railing against are unrealistic. The majority of the US fleet is not compatible with Ethanol and cannot be made compatible with ethanol without being replaced outright. Buring E85 fuel in engines not designed for it is a slower equivalent to draining all of the oil out of the engine block and then driving cross country, it's guaranteed to kill the engine. The US not only lacks the appropriate climate for sugar cane, it also lacks the requisit infrastructure for the large scale production necessary to replace corn-based ethanol production.
Third, most of the posts I've read above are of the opinion that corn-based ethanol is the problem, not ethanol itself. We can gradually shift the US fleet to 100% E85 compatibility solve the fleet problem. We can find alternative substrates to corn (sugar beets, celullosic biomass, etc.). Hell in the near-term we can improve the efficiency of corn-based ethanol production by fractionating corn prior to fermentation, which has been claimed to increase yeild per batch by 30% (less non-fermentable substrate taking up space inside the fermentation apparatus).
As to the planting of sugar cae in the dessert with the massive irrigation that would require, that's not really an option. We are already having to deal with the fallout of excessive aquafer depletion in the western US where the desert is located. There are already fairly high profile disputes between California and the states East of there over who exactly has the right to use the water from the rivers that flow into California.
Vested interests may or may not be a problem for the burgening ethanol industry in the US, but that doesn't make any of the critisizm I've seen above invalid or inappropriate. In the absence of debate we are left with despotism.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
but having thousands of annoyed customers even more pissed off because of the fine print makes little long term economic sense.
Long term economic sense, something that every U.S. automaker has since when now?
Long term economic sense, something that every U.S. automaker^w^w^w the US has since when now?
I'm sick of seeing the signs on the gas pump "MAY contain UP TO 10% ethanol". Well does it or does it not and how much ethanol? 5%, 1%, 10%, 0%? Who the hell knows? If they told us exactly what was in the gas we can avoid the ethanol containing gas if our car doesn't like it. At least there are still some gas stations that don't have any sign so I assume they must be 0% ethanol.
Considerations
a) Engine lifespan - some additive may help extend engine life - perhaps lead?
b) Prohibit items grown for fuel from lowering food supplies - Don't use land that could grow food
c) Well to Wheel Mileage is what matters - Cost to "get the fuel" matters. Using 2 gal of fuel to grow 1 gal of ethanol is stupid.
I'm just a simple engineer. CNG, seems like the best answer for the next 20 years or so, but decoupling the power train from the fuel seems like the smartest route. That means, all electric vehicles with gas, CNG, fuel-cell, and/or whatever chargers built in. The Honda natural gas to hydrogen house converters http://world.honda.com/FuelCell/FCX/station/ are very interesting even with the lack of extremely high efficiency in the conversion process.
If the fuel you buy costs you $100, and taxes are some fixed percentage of that. Then should the taxes really be on 96% of the $100 = $96, so in effect the govt is charging you taxes for that 4% of pure h20. Is this an utter scam, farce, that worthy of class action lawsuits?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Like a hammer: Both are tools amiright.
Name one tyme a free market failed.
Define failure. Since most people define the failure of an economic model in terms of the "goals" of that model rather than real world performance, it's important to lay out exactly what you're looking for. For instance, people starving to death is generally considered a failure of communism because communism was supposed to provide for everyone, while it's "ok" that some people are unable to afford food in a capitalist system.
I define the failure of capitalism as the destruction of capital becoming profitable. It's bad enough when you're choosing to destroy your own property to ensure that nobody else can buy it from you (eg liquidation) and benefit from it, next up is burning down the neighbors' houses to improve your own house's value (or to set the stage for John Galt to run and hide in the mountains).
In addition to posting here, also let the EPA know how you feel. They are taking public comments here:
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&d=EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0211-0713
the structures of which favor less populated agricultural states.
Once we realized the environmental disaster MTBE was, we started replacing it with ethanol, and suddenly farmers and agribusiness saw that they could be in the energy business. It was like striking oil in the cornfield. That's driving ethanol, not the local mechanic or even Detroit.
I'm not anti-biofuels. That doesn't make any sense; I'm against a biofuels program that is driven by profits in the next couple of years for one group of businesses. Unless biofuels are formulated (like biodiesel) to be an exact replacement for some fossil fuel, they're not a quick fix.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You are correct, but I was typing that on an iPod Touch (hate that on-screen keyboard). I considered the point after I'd typed up the post, but I was just too frustrated with the interface to go back.
But, yes, drag racers, indy racers, and Koenigsegg CCX owners could make a fuss with that point. One could argue that the acidification of ethanol is more generally corrosive, but, if you put the right materials in a bucket, dissolving them with gasoline, ethanol, or diesel is a piece of cake.
I give up on Slashdot folks. Out of 385 posts on this topic 289 of them cannot understand the difference between Ethenol and what is used to make Ethenol.
Listen, people, I know public education has gone down the tubes in the last 30 years but you need to remember that when you make an argument for or against something you have to stick with RELEVANT data.
If you are going to argue that Ethanol is good\bad for an engine THE SOURCE OF ETHANOL has nothing to do with that argument. I could potentially make Ethanol out of barbie doll, three Snickers bar, and a can of beer. It isn't efficent but it can be done. None of that is RELEVANT to how Ethanol interacts with engine parts.
If you are going to argue the economics of Ethanol you have to look at the complete picture, not just a small segment. You need to have a COMPLETE argument or you sound like a moron. Ethanol's political and economic impact can not be summarized in a paragraph. Trying to do so makes you sound like a tool.
Don't blame Bush, Clinton, Regan, or whom ever you bigots want to hate for you problems. The President in the US cannot originate a law, he is the LAST step in a long process. The economy now is the result of over 40 years of bad decisions and a lack of understanding on global economics. Republicans, Democrats, Unions, Media, and ourselves are all equally part of this. Anyone sitting down and looking over the last 40 years of policy can see clearly that everyone played a part. Stop blaming big oil, big corn, big whatever. It have never been, nor will it ever be simple. The only thing you do when blaming X is labeling youself as an ignorant bigot. Get informed and you'll realized that there are no mysterious conspiracies, illuminati groups, and big whateverindustryyoudon'tlike pulling the strings on puppets. It's a giant tapestry and there are 6 billion+ threads in it.
I lived through enough presidents and congress leaders to realize that when asked if you approve of congress and you only get 20% saying "Yes"; but when asked if you approve of your own senator you get 80% saying "Yes" then what you have is a lack of trust in "The Other Guys". Look at the mindless nonsense of "Blame Bush" "Blame Clinton" blame who ever. That really is just "Blame the Other Guys". You are headed towards civil war people. Grab a history book and look at both the Soviets history the American Civil War. Look at the language they use and you'll see, you are less then a decade away from that powder keg going off.
Wise up, if a simple article about Ethanol generates the comments we read here, we are in some serious trouble, and by serious I mean civil war, millions dead kind of serious.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Oh and don't forget the many Gas Stations that illegally cut the gas with another 10-20% ethanol.
Its so bad, that you probably should be testing your gas for Ethanol content.
And 15%+ ethanol has a nasty habit of holding water in solution, until saturation, when the whole of water and ethanol separates, and your engine gets a big gulp of water. Or in the case of a holding tank, you pump 20 gallons of $4/gal water.
And to add another distinction, I thought Brazil used the 'wastes' of processing sugar cane to distill Ethanol, after they get the good sugars for other uses.
They Live, We Sleep
Fact: Brazil has grown sugar cane for 500 years. It has expertise in doing it. It has never, ever, chosen the Amazon forest for it. It simply wouldn't work.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Actually, you get around 70% of the mileage driving with E100, not half. Also, you gain from 0 up to 10% more power using E100, depending on the flexible fuel engine, compared to our E25 gas. And Brazil's cheapest car, the 1.0L,67HP Fiat Uno Mille Economy, gets 52 mpg (22 km/L) on the highway.
Ideally, we could get the grasses that naturally grow in the plains to make ethanol because they are well adapted to the plains (millions of years of genetics work), and grow very efficiently with minimal intervention.
and even better yet, burn water as fuel!! ...a few interesting videos on the subject: Free Global Energy, The Hemp Conspiracy.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
Some maps
Red: Sugar Cane, Green: Amazon Forest
http://www.unica.com.br/userFiles/mapa-prod-port.jpg
pink, violet, whatever it is: land where sugar cane is viable:
http://www.funpar.ufpr.br:8080/funpar/boletim/novo2/images/Image/MAPA_BRASIL_CANA.jpg
Just a little bit of Rain Forest could produce sugar cane. About the same area that could produce any other food, except rice, maybe (anual floods!)
Of course, by viable we mean today: Maybe in 50 years when the Global Warming produce by stubborn gas-loving slashdotters make the Amazon Forest a desert, it may become viable!
Personally I'm biased against ethanol because it's bad for marine applications. The complex requirements for future cars are stupid; tax gas to keep it above $4/gallon like the folks in Europe do. I voted for Obama, but I'm pretty disappointed with him so far.
As opposed to the sweet, sweet smell of regular diesel exhaust. Give me a break.
This is "informative"? Looks more like a repetition of the same old platitudes to me. Yes, it's very popular among the right-wing set to gibber on about how "government programs never end", but that belief has the unfortunate disadvantage of not being true. In my particular area of expertise (defense contracting), there are lots of programs that get killed - full stop. Look up the A-12 Avenger, for an older example.
In the non-defense world, one frequently brought up example is the Rural Electrification Administration - people like to ask whether we still need such an organization. In fact, the REA ceased to exist as such years ago, evolving into the Rural Utilities Service... which provides assistance in setting up and maintaining electric, water, and sewer co-ops in rural areas. Which we still need because, you know, the much-lauded free market refuses to provide such services in rural areas.
Yes, it's true that some programs do outlive their usefulness. It's much more common, though, that as needs change through the years, government programs evolve to keep meeting them. That's not quite the same thing as "failed programs never get cancelled", though.
Not so, at least for shipborne aircraft. JP-8 is still too flammable for use aboard ship, so all your F-18's, etc, are fueled with JP-5, which is much more like straight diesel.
Check this map. It shows clearly where are the proper areas to grow sugar cane, and where the Amazon forest it.
Also, that is not "already-cleared land [that] has been converted to sugar cane production". The portuguese started the so called "Sugarcane cycle" there in 1530. That particular strip of land has no other possible use after our metropolitan overlords cut the original forest under it (Mata Atlântica, not Amazon forest). Claiming that sugarcane crops are responsible for the destruction of the Amazon forest is as illiterate as claiming that the Gulf of Mexico oil drills are responsible for the erosion in the Grand Canyon National Park. It just doesn't make sense at all. You and whoever modded your comment insightful are, at best, naive, letting yourselves tpo be misled by the anti-ethanol lobby and, at worst, plain idiots that should study more history and geography and spend less time lurking on Slashdot.
As a child, 10 years of age, I can recall the half-time breaks during a soccer match. All of the kids playing would leave the soccer field and run about 3 meters to the sugar cane fields... (natural Red Bull :p )
This might seem like a scene from Brazil, however it's a memory from South Louisiana. I'm not an agriculture expert either but I'd think the deep South of the US would be well suited for sugar cane farming.
Some research and calculations I did in 2005 ...
Replace oil fields with Corn fields?
Dr. Bartlett, retired Univ. of Colorado Physics professor, wrote that "Farming is merely a way of using land to convert oil into food". People either have forgotten or never realized the food IS energy. It takes 7 TIMES more petroleum energy to put a slice of bread on your breakfast table than you get by eating it. And, oil is used for many other things besides transportation. How long would squirrels survive if they spent more energy collecting nuts than they get from eating them? We are the squirrels, and we are about to find out.
One measure of how much oil we may still be able to find is the "Barrels Per Foot Drilled" metric. In 1946 oil companies recovered 45 barrels of oil for each foot they drilled. That metric, which is an aggregate measurement, has been showing a steady decline since 1946. It was obvious that at some time in the future it would take the same amount of energy to drill a well as the energy that is in the NEW oil produced by that well -- the "break-even" point. That time is now. The "Barrels Per Foot" value crossed below the break-even point in 2005. During the last 10 years only 38 billion barrels of oil have been discovered. All the cheap oil and most of the expensive oil has been found. Now we, and the rest of the world, are draining the bottom half of the world oil barrel and are beginning to cast about for other high density energy sources to replace oil, something we should have been doing 30 years ago when the current problem was accurately predicted. We will need oil to help us build an alternative energy resource before our oil resources are totally exhausted. Have we waited too long to act?
What else is available? Wind and tidal energy can't even replace 5% of our oil needs. Geothermal energy is not widely available and is usually located in unstable geophysical areas. People are rightly afraid of radioactive contamination from nuclear power, besides the fact that it takes more energy to make, maintain and decommission a nuclear plant than it delivers in its lifetime. Cold Fusion was an illusion and Hot Fusion has been a 50 year old multi-billion dollar pipe dream that experts say will take another 50 years of research and billions more before we'll see fusion power plants, if ever. That leaves solar energy as the only remaining source of renewable energy which could be harnessed in sufficient capacity to replace oil. One way of extracting solar energy is with Solar Power Tower II devices, developed in the USA but being installed by other countries. Another way to utilize solar energy is to utilize photosynthesis. That is why, in the USA, Corn is receiving considerable attention.
Initially, Ethanol from Corn was added to gasoline in small amounts to replace toxic fuel additives used to prevent pinging. As percentages increased farmers began to see Ethanol plants as big customers for their Corn. The Ethanol Industry set up front organizations to lobby Congress for subsidies and publicize Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Ethanol import tariffs and Federal subsidies support Ethanol production at slightly over $1 per gallon. Now that politicians have jumped on the bandwagon they are presenting an illusion that Ethanol is the answer to our energy problems. One politician had a campaign ad that suggests "corn fields may replace oil fields". One interesting aspect in the Ethanol dynamic is that demand for Ethanol has increased considerably over the last 5 years, but the price of Corn had remained essentially the same, about $2.55/Bu, for the last 50 years (but recently -6/2007- has risen as high as $4.04/Bu). Concerning the price of corn, what is interfering with the laws of supply and demand? The role of the multi-national agri-corps in annually suppressing the price of Corn just when farmers bring their product to market is a topic for another investigation.
Ethanol industry sponsored studies report that Ethanol p
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I've been keeping records of miles traveled and gallons of gasoline/gasohol purchased since I bought my most recent car at the end of 2007. When the state of PA started allowing "up to 10%" ethanol, my mileage started dropping. Last month I found a station that has ethanol free gasoline and my mileage went back up to where it had been. I figure that ethanol gasoline costs me almost 1 cent per mile more than regular gasoline despite the lower cost per gallon for the gasohol mix. Saturday I got my chain saw back from the shop. The fuel line was being eaten away from the inside and gunking up the fuel filter. Man said he's been seeing a lot of this since ethanol was introduced.
You can go look this stuff up in Wikipedia, but: the US burns something like 8 billion barrels of oil/year. We have proven reserves of something like 20 billion barrels. There are likely to be other sources of oil within US territory, but it probably won't be economically feasible to extract them until prices go up significantly from where they are now. So even if you didn't care about the other bad effects of drilling for more oil at home, doing so won't save us for long.
And this doesn't even take into account the externalities - the unpriced bad effects of oil consumption. The climactic effects of burning oil are well known and I don't need to repeat them. And there are also the effects of other sorts of environmental damage. There's a reason why states like Florida and California have banned drilling off their coasts - because the unsightly oil rigs and occasional spills cost the tourism, fishing, and other industries money. This not just a problem that you can wave away by complaining about the damn tree-huggers - these are real monetary damages... cf. Exxon Valdez for an extreme example (in which, oh by the way, Exxon skated away paying a tiny amount of damages, and left local businesses holding the bag).
Ethanol probably is a scam. That doesn't change the fact that extracting and burning even more oil is a totally stupid answer to our energy problems.
All land is not created equal - it's not like you can raise sugarcane in Iowa. It requires a fairly warm climate, if I understand correctly.
Switchgrass is another story... but I don't think we have the chemical engineering in place to turn cellulose into ethanol at a price that makes it economically feasible as a fuel source.
Ethanol isn't the problem. How we're making it, is.
It cracks me up how quickly some folks want to dismiss it. Like it has to be 100% perfect the first time out. Gee, gasoline has what a 100 year head start?
You don't have to mod the whole engine. Just from the injector rails on back. Mainly the supply feed. Otherwise it'll run it fine. And I anticipate the 10 vs 15% thing is BS too, other than the supply side of it.
I talked to the Chevy engineer who worked on the Corvette pace car at Indy last year. It ran E85. I asked him what all needed to be changed and that was it. Injector rails on back. Things that would have direct contact with the fuel for extended periods of time. They happened to use neoprene to get the job done.
And oh by the way, methanol has been an additive in gasoline for years. Also an alcohol based product. It would have the same "issues" - or not - as ethanol as a fuel additive.
Oh and the stuff you put in your tank to eliminate fuel line freeze up? Alcohol based.
Dude, give it up, it's not legal for you to sleep with your sister.
Ok, but are they energy independent? I suspect this is the source of the remark. If they are energy independent they are 100% free of foreign oil, which is really the only good ethanol can hope to produce.
I think that we're really holding ourselves back with this dogged belief in MPG, which, in the age of trying to green fuels is just irrelevant. The real question is, how many pounds of CO2 per mile at average highway speeds does the car emit? How many pounds per mile of NOx, or particulates? If the CO2 emissions are reduced even though the raw MPG of some alternative fuel goes down, then we've still come out ahead. Really the EPA is doing us all a disservice by having these MPG standards that really can't account for alternative fuels. Instead I think cars should have some kind of polution index. The higher the number the worse on the environment it is. Even better, have a split pollution index. One is cradle to grave pollution (including manufacturing and estimated shipping costs). The other would be your day-to-day net costs. I think a lot of Prius owners would be socked that their lifetime pollution index is going to be pretty high!
But basically any non-fossil fuel is going to have slightly less energy and require more gallons of fuel for the miles driven. Now of course we all know that ethanol in North America is a bust (I don't think it's good for the environment in Brazil either. They are really just running their cars on rainforest). But maybe something else will come along and will be good. But get used to lower MPG.
Off the topic, but he ironic part of the new high-mileage regulations will ultimately cause GM to import a lot of cheaper, more efficient vehicles from China. Shipping them on very dirty cargo ships. Probably releasing more CO2 and other emissions than our current, not-so-efficient cars do in their lifetimes.
No no. We need to import everyone else's oil now, and set up environmental blockades to use our own. No drilling in Alaska, no drilling offshore. Then when the rest of the world is out of oil, we rule.
When was this?
Gilded Age. Google it. I'm also curious to see how you would think a total laziezze faire market would have improved the S&L crisis or the credit swap market implosion.
Crack open history books and read about my red herring
The only thing a lack of government does is make corporations less accountable. No inspections, no regulations, no prosecutions, no anti-trust enforcement...
True but they don't get business from me or others either.
And when you can't trust any food you buy in a store?
There are still some of us who know how to hunt and fish if we want meat.
Good luck finding out if the fish are from uncontaminated water and finding game with disappearing habitat.
BS!
You BS. The top official in the U.S. government gets paid $400,000 a year. Contrast that to the top five security companies paying losing $26 billion dollars last year - while paying out $23 billion in bonuses. You can have incompetent bureaucrats as well as incompetent executives, but at least the bureaucrat isn't getting paid millions a year to waste your money.
Name one tyme a free market failed.
Oh, pretty much every time it's been tried in any industrialized area. Low taxes & regulations can have high costs.
People don't starve because of lack of food or infrastructure, they starve for political and economic reasons.
Case in point... Under Pol Pot, millions starved in Camboda. Would you like to make a guess as to what Cambodia's major exports are?
When the resources used to produce food become a major economic export, food prices go up as availability is reduced. In a country already facing mass starvation, ethanol really does take food out of people's mouths.
There is a great deal of danger in speculative trading on the resources required to support life. Look at what's happened due to speculative trade in housing and fuel: housing prices are now way out of line with rent prices.
In order to see that extra 212 horsepower, you actually need to buy the CCXR, which is a different model than the standard gasoline car. Ethonol can be burned in a flex fuel engine, but in doing so you must tune the engine for the lowest common denominator.
Seeing a horsepower advantage from ethanol requires a fairly flexible engine design. Turbocharging helps, because you have a lot of control over a turbocharger, but ideally the engine is designed specifically to run ethanol.
Super capacitors are the only way to go, at least then you can get the energy from any source then store it for later use.
Ethanol - food is for eating not using in cars, we don't all want to starve.
Hydrogen - Its way to expensive unless you are a billionaire. (the fuel cells cost $30,000 and need to be replaced every year)
Compressed Air - You won't be able to compress enough and the energy loss in compressing is huge then you end up with
a very heavy container.
If you want to go with another energy source I would wait for 2-5 years for these new technologies to come out. There are a number of new battery and capacitor techs just over the horizon. The energy can come from solar, nuclear, wind, or the current coal burning plants. Maybe cold fusion will be possible at some point, who knows?
Solar power - we also need to wait a while for new nano tube cells to come out at a descent price and we need to actually get more energy out of the cell then what we put into making them, this is not happening yet, the same goes with wind. Personally I think solar is the way to go as everything we use for energy has come from the sun at some point.
Lots of people have been playing with various gasoline additives. Alcohol does not come out high on the list.
Essentially, by adding ~10% ethanol to gasoline, people have measured reductions in gas mileage of around 10%. So it's a great way to create agricultural subsidies without really impacting OPEC all that much at all. Big win for everyone but the consumer.
This article about using acetone as an additive has always stuck out in my mind... too bad the guy's tone kinda veers towards sounding like a quack. But as an engineer, I commiserate with his exasperation in the face of stupidity.
http://pesn.com/2005/03/17/6900069_Acetone/
today the EPA is starting to go through the public comment phase on increasing the level of ethanol in our gasoline from 10% to 15%
I didn't see anyone else post this. Here is a link to the page where you can submit comments. Lots of other good items there too for those who want to use their voice. http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064809b5a9c
You can't grow sugar cane nearly anywhere. You definitely can grow it nearly everywhere in the U.S.
Hemp produces nearly 500% more ethanol per acre than corn WITHOUT needing mass chemical fertilizers and WITHOUT destroying the soil.
Henry Ford originally grew hemp fields, built the Model A out of hemp fibers, oils and cellulose. The Model A was DESIGNED to run on Ethanol derived from HEMP and lubricated with oil derived from HEMP.
Go look up the facts and stop listening to senseless anti-cannabis/hemp propaganda your 'govt' has been feeding you.
Look up 'Hemp for Victory' on Youtube.
Yeah, the free market has worked out so well over the past several months.
What free market? There hasn't been a "Free Market" since the corruption of checks and balances began, nearly a hundred years ago now.
You can't point to a bridge that's been hacked apart and castrated and say "There! You see?!! Bridges don't work!"
Paper from Wood is stupid. Measure the amount of toxic chemicals needed to make a decent sheet of paper from wood. Ask your local Dow Chemical rep how nice those chemicals are to the environment and approximately how many billion tons a year of it get dumped into our ecosystem.
Now measure all that toxicity against the water and starch you'd need to make a decent paper out of hemp. You know, like the kind the Constitution of the United States is written on?
The only bizarre thing I find going on here is that 90% of you are totally and completely in the dark when it comes to the real facts.
Switchgrass?
Are you kidding me?
Hemp. Do the research and then do the math!
All this bullshitting back and forth about which source to use for ethanol when the original (and still the best) is completely overlooked.
HEMP PEOPLE! FREAKING HEMP!
Hammer your local politicians until we get this ridiculous prohibition out of the way and we can GET ON WITH OUR LIVES!
Thank you very much.
The people.
The same people who say congress is bad but their own politicians are ok? Most of the tyme people reelect their senators and representatives. But ask them about congress and they have a low opinion of congress.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Apparently some of the 51% have access to Slashdot.
An atrocious decision by SCOTUS and an abuse of eminent domain.
I agree, it was a bad decision. However some good came out of it. A number of states and local governments changed their laws on eminent domain.
It would have been nice if the Constitution had the word "directly" in a couple places, as in "directly for public use" and regulating actions that "directly affect inter-state commerce".
The Constitution of the USA itself says nothing about eminent domain. The only place there is a reference, and only indirectly, is the 5th amendment's no taking clause.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Net zero gas tax sounds great. They propose to reduce income taxes with tax credits at the bottom, right? :-)
The proposal itself has less money being taken from employees' pay, so they end up with more money when they get paid. Then the total income tax is lower when filing.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
When was this?
Gilded Age. Google it. I'm also curious to see how you would think a total laziezze faire market would have improved the S&L crisis or the credit swap market implosion.
The Gilded Age was neither libertarian nor laissez faire economics. For instance some of those robber barons made their money from the railroads. And guess what? The railroads were given land by the government. That is neither libertarian nor laissez faire economics.
Crack open history books and read about my red herring
I see. Since you want to make things up and not have a rational debate I see no reason to continue.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
How is there not a free market with operating systems?
I said "There is no freemarket", meaning in general, not "there not a free market with operating systems". I can't buy the power to run my laptop from anyone I want. I only have one choice, Excel. I don't have a choice for my cable, all I have is ComCast. If I wanted landline phone service I could only get it through Qwest. Luckily I can choose among a number of cellphones and services instead.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My mazda protege, 1996, died shortly after they increased the legal limit of how much ethanol could be in a gallon of gasoline.
I was the original owner and bought from only a major oil company, Chevron, that had detergent in the gasoline. Car ran good until they upped the ethanol percentage.
This was bad as the car got 30+ mpg, manual transmission, and ran smoothly.
Well, I live in Brazil, my car is bi-fuel. With a full tank of ethanol, I spend half of the value of a full tank of gasoline, in city, to the same number of kilometers.
So, I always prefer ethanol to gasoline.
On the road, I spend the same values, so gasoline would be more convenient, because have more autonomy, and you need to full the tank at less times on the road.
When the prices of ethanol grows, I simply change the fuel to gasoline.
Although already was not so, the power of choice today, with bi-fuel cars is making the prices of ethanol self-controlled, and always advantageous.
In our country, when you buy gasoline, it comes with 25% of ethanol.
So, that article is complete bullshit.
I remember seeing an old 60 Minutes about Archer Daniels Midland and they showed the CEO getting off Air Force One. They have a lot of pull and they are a major player in Ethanol.
Archer Daniels Midland has been liked to as a corporate welfare queen.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?