permaculture

[Loren Davidson <listmail@lorendavidson.com>]

At 1:10 PM -0500 2/1/06, Dylan Ford wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>  "Toby Hemenway" wrote:
>
>  But I can't see ethanol ever becoming a significant long-term fuel if
> >  derived from crops.
>
>
> Toby,
>
> don't know if you caught my post the other day, but what about ethanol
> derived from food wastes, lawn trimmings, municipal tree trimmings,
> cardboard, etc., etc.,  There's a lot of it, the stream never stops, and we
> have to get rid of it somehow. That represents a lot of wasted calories.

Well, I'm not Toby...but it seems to me that a lot of the materials 
you suggest might be better used as compost, to rebuild topsoil. 
We're still losing topsoil at an alarming rate in this country, and 
replacing it with fertilizers derived from petrochemicals.

OTOH, there are probably other elements of the waste stream that 
wouldn't work as compost that *might* work for either methane or 
ethanol production.

Regardless, I think that substituting ethanol for gasoline is still 
the wrong solution to the wrong problem. We need to figure out how to 
structure our lives and our cities so that we just don't *use* as 
much energy. And therein lies a very big rub.

Loren

--
Loren Davidson          listmail@lorendavidson.com
Folk music with tropical attitude - http://www.lorendavidson.com
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