I’ve said it over and over — ethanol is bad. It’s a lousy substitute for gasoline, and it’s nowhere near as green as people think. In fact, making it does more damage to the environment than not making it.
Slowly but surely people are catching on, as grain prices skyrocket, rainforests are destroyed, and carbon is released all in the name of this ethanol bullshit.
From a March 27 article in Time:
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Told you so.
PS, from the same Time story:
The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.
and
The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can’t be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us.
The Fray
fthefarmer says:
GM ’s sudden stewardship of the environment is simply a way to continue to make gas guzzlers thanks to E85 an extremely inefficient fuel. The CAFE standards call for all car companies to acheive an average MPG for all vehicles. I believe the most recent number is 33 MPG. Well if you make the biggest money off of 10 miles per gallon SUV’s you would hate to say good bye to them wouldn’t you?
The CAFE standards has a loophole, that being that an E85 vehicle operating on E85 miles per gallon are ONLY figured against the actual amount of gasoline in the blend (15%) if you divide 100% fuel by 15% gasoline you get the multipler to the mpg (666) therefore a gas guzzling 10 MPG SUV is given credit for 66.6 MPG. If you sell one SUV like this you can have 3 vehicles only acheiving 24 MPG and this gas guzzling SUV and you average more than 34 MPG overall.
GM is not the only one taking advantage of this free ride Ford and Chrysler are too. The big three are heading down the toilet and this is just their hands clinging to the rim.
gnomic says:
fthefarmer,
No kidding?! Can you cite the source of this? I don’t doubt you, I want to learn more. Thanks.
Admiral says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy
The wiki shows that the MPG is multiplied by 6. Craziness.
TomL says:
The ultimate irony (to us living in Calif):
An SUV (E85, of course), filled with a family eating fast food beef burgers, fries, corn-syrup sweetened super sized soft drinks and xanthan gum thickened ice cream desserts, driving along US Highway 1 (Pacific Coast Highway) to see the beautiful Pacific ocean.
(A coastline where no new oil wells have been drilled since January 1969, date of Union Oil Co’s oil well blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel.)
For reference, read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, 2006, to see how corn has so thoroughly permeated the modern American diet.
gnomic says:
MIT study finds using crops for fuel bad for environment – http://web.mit.edu/mitei/news/newsletters/EnergyFutures_Winter2008.pdf
Bad? Crop yields fall by nearly 40% on average, but 60% in China. The global agricultural economy drops 10-12%. Ozone increases by 50%. Yes, Bad is one word you can use. Catastrophic would be another.