Biofuels-A failure of Leftist climate change panic
In order to “fix” a problem that Might not even be real the climate alarmists pushed biofuels like Ethanol on us. And as a result food prices are soaring because we are, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey puts it puts it we are feeding cars instead of people.
What makes this even more absurd is ethanol itself. It burns cleaner, but has significant problems as a transportation fuel. It has only two-thirds the potential energy of gasoline, which means more of it has to be used to get the same mileage. Ethanol has to be shipped by truck as it cannot be pumped through a pipeline, so much more energy has to get expended just to bring it to market. In order to use more than just a small amount in a mixture, car engines have to be designed differently to use it, which means more energy and resources have to go into producing the vehicles.
Every fill of the tank with ethanol uses the same amount of corn a child would eat in a year, and let’s not even talk about the amount of potable water used to grow the corn in the first place. Given the above, which is the better use of the corn?
If we produce ethanol from waste — such as with switchgrass, which shows promise — then no ethical problem would exist, although certainly the efficiency issues would remain. Until then, we should end the push to turn food into fuel, driven by the global-climate-change hysteria and pandering to the agricultural sector. Feed people ahead of cars. Is that really such a difficult concept?
Difficult? NO! But, the folks pushing the climate panic button don’t care about that. Hell, if some peple starve that might even be OK with them. Just listen to how they talk about overpopulation.