Energy Solution - Sacrifice Children to The Corn God!!

[Bill Call]

There are lot of sensible solutions to our dependence on oil, particularly foreign oil. Leave it to government to make the most damaging choice.

See:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/John ... of_ethanol

[Jeff Endress]

Bill

Something we agree on. If we were able to economically process waste/grasses/etc. to produce ethanol, and could run those stills with a renewable energy source (solar/wind) maybe it would make sense. But that isn't the case. The huge energy costs associated with actually growing corn (not to mention the effects on human food supply), together with the huge energy costs of processing it into ethanol ends up in a similar huge loss in the energy equation. In the mean time, every product which relies on corn will show significant increases based on market demand....and corn is pretty much in everything, either as animal feed, corn syrup, corn oil, Jack Daniels, etc.

It's a panacea. Sounds good. Sells good. But it makes no sense if look a bit deeper and actually run the numbers.

Jeff

[ryan costa]

Economic pressure will eventually downsize the average household's average number of cars. So we'll end up with most households in the 80th percentile of incomes having only one car. It will start with the 20th percentile and work its way up. this will reduce our national total fuel usage a lot. It would be less costly to promote infrastructure and retail scales which suit this.

Butanol so far seems a better substitute for gasoline than ethanol, but so far it is more difficult to make from biological substances than ethanol.

It is too much to ask for actual leadership these days. Both sides will generally drag their feet until actual legislation is past. So we can just copy and paste the conservation campaigns of the romantic industrial war past. During World War II there were posters, radio blurbs, and movie theatre blurbs all the time encouraging people to car pool, drive less, walk or bike more. We were an actual net exporter of oil then(!). The time Bush spends in his speeches quoting dumb-ass Reaganomics slogans would be better spent repeating those conservation slogans of the Romantic Industrial War past.

[Dustin James]

This is interesting. Imagine, Jews trying to come up with an alternative to petro-based fuel for cars. Boy, that would really piss off the Arabs.

http://www.isracast.com/Articles/Article.aspx?ID=43

[ryan costa]

I haven't examined the science of this yet, so can't estimate if it really is a viable replacement for oil.

But without Oil, Israel would have nothing to hold hostage with its nukes, other than lives. The population explosion of the Middle East has been such that lives there are getting cheaper all the time. The rest of the Middle East would have to become much more Socialistic to build so many water de-salinization plants or genetically engineer plants that grow in salt water.