I would rather eat my food than drive it. The use of corn ethanol for fuel is driving up the price of foodstuffs and the effect is to cause food to be more expensive. It is a mistake to continue in this direction. Now instead of solving the problem of energy dependency, we cause ourselves to be shortchanged at the grocery market. It sounds like a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The idea of using ethanol as a fuel to replace gasoline has serious drawbacks that should be honestly and faily examined. On a technical side, ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy value of gasoline so that it decreases the mpg of cars, i.e., you get lower milage so must pay for more fuel. Small boat engines have reliability problems when working with a 10% mixture. There has also been a greater number of motor replacements with vehicles using a 10% mixture.
Then with the price of corn being driven up, the cost of all forms of meat dependent upon corn based feeds increases. Also, you may soon expect the cost of other agricultural products to increase as competition for land area to grow corn decreases the amount of land that is available to grow other produce.
It is a viscious cycle and there is really no winner. We just end up sacrficing our agricultural system on the alter of transportation and the only losers are the American people.
Surely, the appeal of clean electric generation along with the advance of battery and EV technology must have an increasingly greater appeal as we see problems that the trend toward ethanol is presenting.
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Ethanol as a problem instead of a practical solution.
Submitted on May 19th, 2007 by InterestedReaderI would rather eat my food than drive it. The use of corn ethanol for fuel is driving up the price of foodstuffs and the effect is to cause food to be more expensive. It is a mistake to continue in this direction. Now instead of solving the problem of energy dependency, we cause ourselves to be shortchanged at the grocery market. It sounds like a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The idea of using ethanol as a fuel to replace gasoline has serious drawbacks that should be honestly and faily examined. On a technical side, ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy value of gasoline so that it decreases the mpg of cars, i.e., you get lower milage so must pay for more fuel. Small boat engines have reliability problems when working with a 10% mixture. There has also been a greater number of motor replacements with vehicles using a 10% mixture.
Then with the price of corn being driven up, the cost of all forms of meat dependent upon corn based feeds increases. Also, you may soon expect the cost of other agricultural products to increase as competition for land area to grow corn decreases the amount of land that is available to grow other produce.
It is a viscious cycle and there is really no winner. We just end up sacrficing our agricultural system on the alter of transportation and the only losers are the American people.
Surely, the appeal of clean electric generation along with the advance of battery and EV technology must have an increasingly greater appeal as we see problems that the trend toward ethanol is presenting.
adrianakau@aol.com