Ethanol Pollution Worse Than Gasoline!

[amicus]

Key word search: ethanol worse than gasoline for the environment

Key word search: 50 billion in subsidies for ethanol

At the top of the search list for the first, were articles by NPR and MSNBC, for those fond of left wing conduits of faux news.

A 1.3 Billion dellar 'STIMULUS' bill, with 8 Billion in Ear Marks, failed to make it to the Senate as Reid couldn't get the votes for it. '8' billion...now compare that eight billion to the 50 billion annually given as susidies to the Ethanol industry.

Try not to look at 'corn products', here and around the world, food, that has doubled in price because of the asinine Global Warming zealots

Now...if the new Republican majority in the House can sponsor legislation to abolish all the insane subsidies...then perhaps all hope is not lost in the mire that is Washington, District of Corruption.

Amicus

 

[Stella_Omega]

yep, the "usual suspects" have been talking about that for a while amongst themselves. And of course, we hear it on NPR.

Ethanol produced by corn is not the answer.

 

[bronzeage]

yep, the "usual suspects" have been talking about that for a while amongst themselves. And of course, we hear it on NPR.

Ethanol produced by corn is not the answer.

Ear marks.

Get it? Heh heh.

 

[TE999]

Ethanol is a blind alley in terms of fuel. It not only consumes vast resources...land, food supplies...it also pollutes with fertilizers and bug sprays. Ethanol also ruins many auto engines, especially older ones.

It's infinitely more practical to work on improving internal combustion engines to pollute less and get more miles per gallon of fuel without sacrificing performance.

Like it or not, oil is it for fuel in the foreseeable future.

 

[amicus]

How to say this, without offending anyone...impossible; I know.

Ethanol, is a government inspired and funded effort to satisfy the environmentalists and ecologists, who, essentially, wish 'man' and his needs, would just go away...see "Life After Man", some asshole program that, for background writing, I had to watch.

Petroleum, Oil, gasoline, petrol, natural gas, came into being because 'individuals' found it more efficient than Whale Oil and better than wood to light and heat their homes.

Government...played no part whatsoever, it was the free market, individuals, one at a time, by the millions, that chose.

You want to do something for yourself, for nature, for mankind, for civilization?

Get the fuck out of our way.

Amicus

 

[Handley_Page]

Now...if the new Republican majority in the House can sponsor legislation to abolish all the insane subsidies...then perhaps all hope is not lost in the mire that is Washington, District of Corruption.

Amicus

Are they the ones who've managed to reduce the Tax Bill for those earning Loads of Money, leaving the middles classes to bear the tax burden ?

[ I got this from a report I read ]

 

[amicus]

Are they the ones who've managed to reduce the Tax Bill for those earning Loads of Money, leaving the middles classes to bear the tax burden ?

[ I got this from a report I read ]

~~~

Nope, Handley, there is no reduction in taxes at all, for anyone, but, also, no increased taxes either. The Bush Tax cuts, legislated for 10 years, were due to expire, but Republicans fought to keep the tax cuts in place.

The 'marxist class warfare' the rich against the ppor, is a bullshit flambe'kept alive by the Marxist left in this country. No one ever gets a job from the poor; jobs originate with those who have wealth and invest it.

The top 10 percent in this country, pay 50% of all the taxes paid; a full half of he lower echelon of wage earners, pay no tax at all.

Been up all night, got some work done, but at 8am my time, I am not about to search and document my assertions...but feel free, I am accurate yet again.



amicus

 

[squarejohn]

One gallon of ethanol costs more to make than it costs to buy a gallon of gas. Gallon for gallon, ethanol contains less energy than gasoline.

 

[Pure]

citations

amiPetroleum, Oil, gasoline, petrol, natural gas, came into being because 'individuals' found it more efficient than Whale Oil and better than wood to light and heat their homes.

Government...played no part whatsoever, it was the free market, individuals, one at a time, by the millions, that chose.

You want to do something for yourself, for nature, for mankind, for civilization?

Get the fuck out of our way.
===========

sounds like you made this up, ami. got any citations? taking the most recent energy source, nuclear, Wiki estimates as follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies


In the US, the federal government has paid US$74 billion for energy subsidies to support R&D for nuclear power and fossil fuels from 1973 to 2003. Nuclear power R&D alone accounted for nearly US$50 billion of this expenditure.


the little matter of insurance against liabilities, for example, has led the nuclear industry to avoid a 'government get the fuck out of the way' approach. government backs up the exposure with taxpayers' dollars.

indeed, in the history of capitalist enterprise, favorable gov't policies--e.g. gift of a monopoly position-- have always been SOUGHT, and their retention fought for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson's_Bay_Company

The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay was incorporated on May 2, 1670, with a royal charter from King Charles II. The charter granted the company a monopoly over the Indian Trade, especially the fur trade, in the region watered by all rivers and streams flowing into Hudson Bay in northern Canada. The area was called Rupert's Land after Prince Rupert, the first director of the company and a first cousin of King Charles. This region constitutes 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million km²) in the drainage basin of Hudson Bay, comprising over 1/3 the area of modern day Canada and stretching into the north central United States. The specific boundaries were unknown at the time

---

another point acknowledged by most of citizens. businesses' profits should be taxed. the looney far right disagrees. but the point is that REDUCTIONS of tax, i.e. 'write offs' are a form of subsidy. substantial 'write offs' are routinely used by all the major oil companies, since their first days. in some cases, this has resulted in not paying any taxes at all.

"capitalism" in the imaginary world of Rand and Amicus bears no relation to actual capitalism in the real world.
--

ADDED: Yes, corn based ethanol was a bad idea. Newer biofuels, however, seem promising esp. those that can be grown without displacing food crops, for example, for switchgrass:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080109110629.htm

 

[Stella_Omega]

The biggest problem with pretty much all fuels, is the sheer volume of fuel that we consume.

One gallon of ethanol costs more to make than it costs to buy a gallon of gas. Gallon for gallon, ethanol contains less energy than gasoline.

Yep-- and a lot of farmland gets hijacked into fuel production instead of food, and a lot of research energy has gone into developing these very limited strains of corn, instead of working on diversifying the corn genome to make it stronger... or maybe not, but you know what I mean. Ethanol is an experiment worth trying, but the problem is getting the experiment to stop. The corporations and consumers and all-- like a dog with a bone.

 

[JackLuis]

Hemp oil is the fuel of the future!

Able to be grown on poor ground, no need for fertile fields, no fertilizer and very few pests. Oil from the seeds and ethanol from the chaff.

It's a win-win-win to legalize hemp!

 

[R. Richard]

I used to run a dune buggy on the street. Lots of dune buggys run on natural gas. Natural gas runs cleaner than gasoline and is higher octane. If you run an engine on natural gas, with the compression ratio kicked up to take advantage of the higher octane, you can run about the same mileage as with gasoline.
There may be other fuels for the future, but natural gas is the answer for the immediate future.
Corn produced ethanol is pollution insanity, financial insanity and jacks up the prices of food. WHY?

 

[Weird Harold]

Ethanol, is a government inspired and funded effort...

I suppose that it is coincidence that it was the "Corn Belt Senators" that extended the subisdies for Ethanol -- excuse me, that's CORN Ethanol; the susbsidies specifically exclude foreign Ethanol and domestic Ethanol from any other grain. They also put protective tarifs on Brazilian Ethanol (derived from Sugar cane)

Ethanol for fuel can be made from many plants -- many non-edible plants that don't require prime farmland and other increasingly scarce water -- but the US subsidies only subsidize ethanol from corn (raised by constituents of those "Corn-belt Senators" who staged a lat minute save of the subsidies.

Looks like good old American style Capitalism at work to me -- Agribusiness made substantial investments in Senators and are seeing a substantial return.

 

[Handley_Page]

That reminds me of the the old MPs who managed to choke England because they controlled the sugar from the colonies.
Bastards, the lot of 'em.

 

[Edward Teach]

I suppose that it is coincidence that it was the "Corn Belt Senators" that extended the subisdies for Ethanol -- excuse me, that's CORN Ethanol; the susbsidies specifically exclude foreign Ethanol and domestic Ethanol from any other grain. They also put protective tarifs on Brazilian Ethanol (derived from Sugar cane)

Ethanol for fuel can be made from many plants -- many non-edible plants that don't require prime farmland and other increasingly scarce water -- but the US subsidies only subsidize ethanol from corn (raised by constituents of those "Corn-belt Senators" who staged a lat minute save of the subsidies.

Looks like good old American style Capitalism at work to me -- Agribusiness made substantial investments in Senators and are seeing a substantial return.

Thanks, Harold. That is what I was going to say, but you said it much better. These wingnut Randers lie and twist evey fuckin' thing. I honestly think it is a form of sickness.

 

[Weird Harold]

Thanks, Harold. That is what I was going to say, but you said it much better. These wingnut Randers lie and twist evey fuckin' thing. I honestly think it is a form of sickness.

Well, it's not like the ecovangelists don't twist and spin everything to their viewpoint, too.

Burning Ethanol in Internal Combustion Engines just produces pollutants that aren't regulated as closely as the major (non-CO2) components of gasoline exhaust.

In the long run, it isn't Ethanol or Oil that is the problem, it is the Internal Combustion Engine that we need to find a viable replacement for. Alternative, renewable, fuels for internal combustion engines are only stopgap measures on the way to finding better means of powering our machinery.

 

[Pure]

thanks

nice postings, Weird Harold. i should have mentioned that "corn based" is a KEY part of the bad idea.

ADDED: thanks also for the lead as to pollution. ethanol creates problems with ozone. this is in part due to the PAN issue --peroxy acyl nitrates! a serious, nasty pollutant, i had not heard of.

http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/1997/A/199700109.html

the choice of corn and exclusion of other sources has everything to do with the nature of contemporary capitalism: making a buck with the help of the gov't is as american and capitalist as apple pie.

ross perot comes to mind, as a vastly successful entreprenuer, at one time 85th richest man in the US.

After he left the Navy in 1957, Perot became a salesman for International Business Machines (IBM) . He quickly became a top employee, filling his year's sales quota in two weeks,[9] and tried to pitch his ideas to supervisors who largely ignored him. He left IBM in 1962 to found Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in Dallas, Texas, and courted large corporations for his data processing services. Perot was refused seventy-seven times before he was given his first contract. EDS received lucrative contracts from the U.S. government in the 1960s, computerizing Medicare records. EDS went public in 1968 and the stock price rose from $16 a share to $160 within days. Fortune called Perot the "fastest, richest Texan" in a 1968 cover story. (wikipedia)

 

[mynameisben]

You know, if you arrange things in just the right order, one thing is always worse than the next.

 

[DeeZire]

....The top 10 percent in this country, pay 50% of all the taxes paid; a full half of he lower echelon of wage earners, pay no tax at all...

Good point, Amicus. Ever since Bush cut taxes, our country has been running a deficit. It's as if the R's are incapable of comprehending simple math - when you cut taxes without cutting government spending, your budget goes into the red. What's so hard to understand?

It might be worth noting that this country's most prosperous era featured tax rates much higher than what we're seeing today. It's also worth noting that the last time this country saw the income disparity between rich and poor as bad as it is today was in 1929. What followed 1929 was not exactly a reaffirmation of free market values.

 

[amicus]

A series currently on television, "Swamp Loggers", I think is the title, anywho, the bossman just invested in a new machine, three or four hundred thousand dollars, which will take years and years to pay off, as it and all his machinery is financed through a bank...banks do charge interest on loans, case you never thought of that.

Thus that one program as a reference point that reflects, I think, small business in general....neither the bossman, his wife or any of his employees ever speak of 'capitalism', or, their freedom to compete on the open market for means by which to support their families.

There are few if any guarantees in life, for either workers or owners, up and down the line, but they all depend on their freedom to choose to invest, work, and support an extended family. One might also refer to the men of "The Deadliest Catch" fishing in the Bering Sea off Alaska(and you can see Russia from there!)

There never has been a structure of free market enterprise, Capitalism, ever imposed on people; they just naturally gravitate to means of earning a living that works and they let the wonks observe and write about it.

Capitalism is not a system, not any kind of a system at all, merely a hodge-podge of economic and monetary truisms that offer an individual the opportunity to provide for himself rather than turn to the patronage of a King or a Pope.

Investments, borrowing and loaning money, is not a new concept, hardly, it has been around in the form of a 'barter' economy, long before any books were written about it.

There are positions of ownership, management and control that can be fraudulently performed, but that holds true for anything man does as some men are honest and some are not.

Command economies and societies have all failed and will always fail because of the nature of the individual man; a mindset of rational self interest is hard wired into people, humans, all of us, and if left free to set our own values and priorities, the general outcome is always beneficial to the society at large.

It is not the far right, the 'loons' and/or extremists, that motivate people to act, it is their own free will and the accumulation of individual choices.

We live in the most complex and complicated and technological age in all the era's of man. I suggest one might consider how we got here, through individual freedom and liberty, before you preach about changing over to some form of a controlled society.

Amicus

 

[oggbashan]

Fuel from Algae might have better prospects than fuel from corn.

As with all alternatives to fossil fuels, the unit cost is higher but research into mass production techniques might reduce the cost closer to oil derived fuel.

The price of a barrel of oil determines whether alternatives are a viable proposition. Algae-based fuel looks better than corn-based because it can be produced where no other crop will grow, takes much less land, doesn't need fresh water, and can produce many crops a year.

Og

 

[amicus]

I watched three different programs concerned with producing fuel from Algae, of all different sorts, each was funded by government.

You are quite correct that the price of petroleum based energy figures into the economical possiblities of all other forms of energy. Even the much heralded solar energy and wind energy, have costs far above petroleum and these 'alternative' sources cannot be built or operated at a profit and must, therefore, have continual infusions of public monies.

I am not as 'boneheaded' as you indicate from time to time; there will inevitably come a day when the cost of producing petroleum energy will become an economic liability. Nor am I deaf to the criticisms that coal and oil add pollutants to the environment, they surely do, as wood fires used to.

What does anger me intellectually, are the number of governments around the globe that finance such things as Ethanol, Solar, Wind and Tidal 'experiments, that consume huge amounts of public funds and end up raising the cost of all energy sources.

What is the ultimate answer? There will be no ultimate answer, but I know one thing for certain, that the innovation that moves us from a petroleum based economy to something else, will not come from Government, but from the private economy on a for profit basis.

Amicus

 

[oggbashan]

...What does anger me intellectually, are the number of governments around the globe that finance such things as Ethanol, Solar, Wind and Tidal 'experiments, that consume huge amounts of public funds and end up raising the cost of all energy sources.

What is the ultimate answer? There will be no ultimate answer, but I know one thing for certain, that the innovation that moves us from a petroleum based economy to something else, will not come from Government, but from the private economy on a for profit basis.

Amicus

The subsidies are helping to develop the technology that MIGHT produce viable, cost-effective fuel sources. Private companies, such as the currently unpopular BP, are spending millions on research into alternative fuels but they do need incentives from tax revenues - at present.

When the technology becomes close to worthwhile commercial production, then the private economy can do it for profit.

Locally wind farms are producing enough electricity to power our whole community and to supply massive amounts to the National Electricity Grid BUT they need to be matched by other generating capacity when the wind doesn't blow.

Dungeness in South Kent has an ageing nuclear power station that needs decommissioning. The vast majority of the local population want a new nuclear power station built next to the old one. Why? Because it provides significant well-paid employment and isn't as obtrusive as land-based wind farms. So far the government has ruled it out because the site is at risk from rising sea levels. (from geological changes over millenia even without projected rises from global warming) They might change their mind.

In the UK, nuclear power isn't profitable without government subsidy because of the cost of dealing with the waste products. I suspect that most nuclear power stations around the world are actually subsidised by governments even if such subsidies are concealed by creative accounting.

Profit is good but it isn't everything.

Og