http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...ol-study_N.htm

Perhaps we should go back to MTBE. It has no known, negative environmental effects, besides ruining the taste of drinking water, and it should lower the incidence of ozone induced respiratory failure, which not only affects us, but local wild life as well, as they breathe the same air we breathe.

 

I've said it here before, that my instincts tell me that the over-emphasis on ethanol is very bad news for all of us. I've said several times that it will raise all our grocery bills. In my opinion, our government's strong support for ethanol is a direct result of lobbying by large corporations like Archer Daniels Midland.

Here is more, in support of my position:

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...316_016207.htm

"This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA). "This talk about energy independence and wrapping yourself in the flag and singing God Bless America—all that's going to come at a severe cost to another part of the economy."

The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists (see BW Online, 02/2/07, " Ethanol: Too Much Hype—and Corn").

Ethanol from corn is morally wrong. It's a result of lobbying, and that proves it is wrong. Ethanol from corn means higher grocery bills and hungry people.

Harry

 

...ok...I'm biased...but anything "environmental" that is perpetrated by the big oil man a the top smells bad first, and needs looking into before anything serious should happens. In the case of ethanol, that's too late, food prices are already increasing since. Even non-biased opinions should already have smelt the stink with Hydrogen..

 

I agree - Corn is a food first, or a feed.

MTBE is not great because it is a water pollutant. Even if it, "just" makes the water taste funny has to make it suspect. At that, who want to drink strange tasting water? If you've ever consummed water with a high iron content you know what I mean.

 

Perhaps cancer doesn't qualify as a "known, negative environmental effect," but it's certainly known to cramp ones lifestyle.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0516-06.htm

That's not to say I care for corn-based ethanol, but at least it's a step towards renewable energy.

 

The food v. fuel argument over corn-based ethanol is a false dichotomy. Corn is many things besides a food or a fuel, and saying that it should be one and not the other is simply to ignore reality. It is in no way novel for the corn industry to try to make other things, not just food products, out of corn, or to divert huge portions of the corn crop to those purposes. The corn lobbyists brag about the versatility of corn and the many uses it has in different types of industries and products. Here is a short sample from the South Dakota Corn Utilization Council website:

http://www.sdcorn.org/cornuse/example.cfm

Even though I've started to hear these sorts of arguments a lot ('corn is food, not fuel' or 'we shouldn't use corn for ethanol because it will drive up the price of food and starve hungry people'), they are both basically specious. Corn has been used for a lot more than just food for a long, long time, and that use has not caused widespread starvation; any impact it has had on prices has been generally treated as a good thing, to create demand and support farmers. Besides, it is really the government program of long-term corn subsidies that is responsible for the artificially inflated price of corn, not some short-term spike in ethanol demand. This policy is absolutely intentional and could be changed quickly if Congress had enough political will. They do not, however.

Better arguments against ethanol focus on the unsustainability of such a water-intensive crop as a fuel source and the relatively low energy density of the ethanol created from corn.

 

No they aren't. The price of corn has doubled, largely due to the huge demand of ethanol makers.

If the price of corn was up 10 percent, I could buy your argument.

A 100 percent increase in the price of corn says you're wrong.

Harry

 

For a little perspective, take a look at this:

http://www.farmdoc.uiuc.edu/marketin...ml/012604.html

Note that this was written in 2004- and the writer worried about the effect of ethanol on corn prices, though people now seem to think this concern is brand new or somehow sudden. It isn't. I direct your attention to this very important sentence:
I'm not meaning to imply that the price hasn't changed at all lately. I'm asking the question- what affects that price? Is it really because people shouldn't use corn for anything but food, and having it diverted for other purposes, including ethanol, is an inherently bad thing that well-intentioned idiots are doing but has the result of starving people? No. The root of the problem is really the subsidies- if it weren't for that institutionalized pressure, people would be putting their energy and deffort into better bio-energy sources than corn, but the subsidies are skewing it.

Anyway, food for thought.

 

Do you represent BP and/or work at Kirkland Ellis in Chicago? Or am I confusing you with LeahBeatle?

Ethanol has some problems; it's definitely not perfect -- but no combustible fuel is going to be perfect. It's a fact of combustion-- biodiesel or ethanol are always going to have drawbacks under scrutiny. Electricity is the most efficient fuel source, but suffers from storage and range problems. In the meantime, biodiesel or E85 hybrids are certainly a way of bridging the gap between storage/range and cost/weight.

Moreover, I strongly believe (read: know for a fact) it's wrong to think that ADM is the sole pro-lobbying force behind ethanol, when compared with the fact that almost anything bad that you hear about ethanol has ExxonMobilBPShellChevronTexacoConocoPhillipsValero 's seal of approval (read: oil dollars are being spent dissin' ethanol). Sure, ADM has a lot of power and loves the move toward ethanol... but for many, many years they've been outdone by the oil industry. To say the oil industry HATES ethanol is an understatement. It's like the debate on global warming: if the Oil Industry can succeed in creating enough questions or ambivalence in the public sphere with respect to ethanol, they'll have gotten their money's worth.

 

Following up on this, and also further explicating how ADM isn't totally behind this: high fructose corn syrup is TERRIBLE from a human health standpoint. ADM doesn't necessarily like the cost of their sweetner becoming un-cost-competitive with sugar or another sweetner. I for one would much rather drink coke sweetened with HFCS than drink water with MTBE in it. SO MUCH of the corn supply goes to making coke and candy bars, I can't even begin to tell you how little an impact from a health perspective taking corn entirely out of the food supply would actally exact.

But for the most important thing I can say here? I don't know if people on here understand or realize this, but "ethanol" is the same "alcohol" as what we drink in wine, beer or Jack Daniels. Just think of the general lee driving around on pure moonshine, and you'll start to understand why the oil industry was and always has been opposed to any fuel people could make for themselves.