permaculture

["robscott@freeshell.org" <robscott@freeshell.org>]

I want to burst this bubble.

There are two decades of data on the energy economics of Ethanol fuel 
production in the midwest (USA). When produced using industrial 
agriculture methods, more fossil energy is produced than ethanol energy is 
gained.

In the best case scenario, petroleum to ethanol ratio was 0.8 : 1.0 when 
everything was taken into account. That's why you need big piles of U.S. 
Government subsidies to make it a worthwhile *financial* investment. To 
make it a worthwhile *energy* investment, you need to grow the crop, 
ferment, and distill without using all these powered vehicles, fertilizer, 
etc. In short, luddites could make ethanol a worthwhile project. But the 
average farm size in the midwest is >1000 acres, so clearly that's not 
what Fortune magazine has in mind.

There isn't a credible environmental scientist in the midwest that thinks 
ethanol is a "miracle fuel". When Dave Blume came to the University of 
Illinois with his "Alcohol can be a Gas" routine, he sat in a room with 
people who've generated 20 years of data testing ethanol systems and told 
them that all their data was wrong and somehow the whole thing will run 
itself. The only thing he convinced them was that Permaculture doesn't 
know what its talking about when it uses numbers to make a point.

In my county (Champaign, Illinois - highest corn yields in USA for 2004), 
the main promoters of ethanol are Republicans, USDA, Gas Companies, and 
the farmers who get the subsidies. This is a Republican attempt to buy 
votes, scoring environmental points while funnelling more subsidies to 
some of the most destructive industries on earth: US agribusiness and the 
petroleum industry.

So when I see Fortune magazine jump on the bandwagon, I'm not suprised.

Rob Scott
Urbana, IL

> Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:02:30 -0500
> From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
> Subject: [permaculture] ETHANOL: How to Beat the High Cost of
>         Gasoline. Forever! - February 06, 2006
>
> <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/02/06/8367959/index.htm?cnn=yes>
>
> How to Beat the High Cost of Gasoline. Forever!
> Stop dreaming about hydrogen. Ethanol is the answer to the energy dilemma. 
> It's clean and green and runs in today's
> cars. And in a generation, it could replace gas.
> Fortune Magazine
> By Adam Lashinsky and Nelson D. Schwartz
> January 24, 2006: 4:09 PM EST
>
>
> (FORTUNE Magazine) - You probably don't know it, but the answer to America's 
> gasoline addiction could be under the hood
> of your car. More than five million Tauruses, Explorers, Stratuses, 
> Suburbans, and other vehicles are already equipped
> with engines that can run on an energy source that costs less than gasoline, 
> produces almost none of the emissions that
> cause global warming, and comes from the Midwest, not the Middle East.
>
> These lucky drivers need never pay for gasoline again--if only they could 
> find this elusive fuel, called ethanol.
> Chemically, ethanol is identical to the grain alcohol you may have spiked the 
> punch with in college. It also went into
> gasohol, that 1970s concoction that brings back memories of Jimmy Carter in a 
> cardigan and outrageous subsidies from
> Washington. But while the chemistry is the same, the economics, technology, 
> and politics of ethanol are profoundly
> different.