Jones Beene wrote:
It is all about infrastructure, 'stepping stones', stop-gap
solutions, and the ramping up of domestic farm production with what
we have now - in anticipation of what we will have in two to three years time.
As Pimentel has pointed out, if we were to convert every scrap of new
plant growth in the U.S. into fuel -- every leaf, branch and food
crop -- this would supply less than half of our energy needs. Our
entire food crop would not supply 20% of the automobile fuel we need.
Plantlife grown in natural conditions in North America does not
capture enough energy, period. All the technology in the world will
not change this fact. Growing algae in tanks is another matter.
A 25-gallon tank of fuel has as much energy as one adult consumes in a year.
In a world in which thousands of children die every week from
starvation, for the U.S. to convert food into automobile fuel is
unspeakable. It is inhuman. It is like gathering up the corpses of
those dead children and burning them for fuel. Of course we did not
kill them directly, but our irresponsible decisions and our lunatic
disregard for basic economics and physics contributed to their deaths.
As for developing improved ethanol, if we were to redirect the money
we spend doing that to improved automobile efficiency and plug-in
hybrids, we could easily cut our consumption to 20% to 50%, saving
far more than ethanol can every supply.
- Jed
