http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...al_boondoggles

 

Interesting article.

 

ethanol is nothing but hype and one big scam and will do nothing to make us energy independent. all it will do is shift food prices sky high, make us rely on other countries for food (thats going good so far) and fertilizer.

plus we are one bad harvest away from having both an energy crisis and food crisis.

plus heck, we don't even have enough land to make it practical.

 

It's a scary world we live in, when a politician's wallet is more important to him than his country...

Yeah, I know, welcome to the wonderful world of politics. It just really bring to light the thinking of these morons we rely on to lead us.

 

If ethanol is a scam, then I don't know what I would call federal assistance to the biggest corn syrup producers, which is used in everything.

If anything, imo, for petrol engines we should encourage diesel everything.

 

Yea, I see a lot of "flex fuel" and e85 stickers on vehicles around here. (so cal) Where can you buy e85 outside the cornbelt? The automakers get to count those vehicles as having quite a bit higher mpg for purposes of cafe numbers. Talk about bunk on top of bunk. A vehicle that would get worse mpg on a fuel you can't get is allowed to boost the mpg rating of the fleet.....sounds like government in action to me....

Hey, nothing wrong with ethanol, just use it where it makes sense.

 

Ethanol is a joke as a fuel. It cant be easily pipelined which, along with other factors make it too costly.

 

Sure is a good year in the fertilizer business. Lots of projects for me.

 

Ethanol is an answer, but not the total answer. It makes sense for the corn belt, but each section of the country needs to seek out local energy alternatives.

Biodiesel, coal derived fuels, electric cars with wind/solar chargers, compressed air powered vehicles, hydrogen, propane/CNG and even methanol are viable alternatives for some areas but not the entire country.

 

Redford, exactly! I agree with that 100%.

 

oh i dont know, i like ethanol for a performance motor, still tossing around the idea in my duster. but it is certainly a boatload of shat the politicians fed us over it. never make a good "cureall" as promised, but there are some good 12-1 compression motors i would like to run on ethanol. Dan

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2169124/nav/navoa/


Pete

 

Guess what increased ethanol production will do to prices of a whole bunch of things? If you said make 'em go up, then you go to the head of the class. When more farmers start growing more corn instead of whatever they are growing, whatever they were growing goes up in price.

 

Here in Indiana we're about as deep in corn fields as you can get, but stations that carry E85 are very few and far between. They've just built a new plant a few miles from where I live to produce E85, and the farmers around here are investing BIG money in planters and other equipment to produce more corn than ever. They're basically banking their entire future on this E85 really taking off. Scares the crap out of me. I can see many farmers possibly losing it all on this deal, and that will be the death nell for this very rural area.

I just can't get on the bandwagon on this stuff. There is no infrastructure in place to distribute it and the cost of using it will probably be equal to or higher than the cost of using gasoline, based on "dollars-per-mile". When the general public figures this out, who'll be using it? I've had many discussions with people who have said that it costs less per gallon than gasoline, but they fail to consider that it takes more E85 to go the same distance as compared to gas.

Just my two cents...

 

More fuel for the fire, try here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1031/p17s01-lihc.html