Quote of the Day

From this article....

If you fill up with ethanol, every time you pull that SUV into the gas station and pump 22 gallons, you starve a poor person for six months.

Well, I was just going to stop there and let the quote and article speak for itself, but I've got to get something off my chest.  I've talked about this with several people and I get more angry about it every time it comes up.

We need to give up on this ethanol stuff.  The idea of reducing our dependence on foreign oil sounded great when it was first presented, but we now all know that we will never produce enough ethanol to do that.  On top of that, study after study has proven that when compared to oil, ethanol is more expensive to produce, take more energy to create (and thus is worse for the environment), and gets worse gas mileage.

The optimist in me tells me that the last sentence above could all possibly be remedied with better technology over time.  And I believe that to be true.  But at what cost?

Well, we are already seeing that cost when we go to the grocery store.  Our Congress once again stepped way over their mandate by requiring that a certain amount of corn be set aside for ethanol production.  And we are all suffering the consequences.  This has affected virtually every sector of the food industry.

Also, we went from digging underground to get our fuel to getting it from an above ground source?  WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!!  We do realize that flooding, droughts, and other weather can affect the output of corn, right?!!

Anyway, I'm more and more convinced that our only options for energy are either hydrogen or nuclear.  Hydrogen mainly because we'll never run out of the resources needed to make it, and nuclear because we can make that ourselves.

We need to stop pursuing any energy source that depends on non-renewable resources (such as oil and coal) or anything that is very dependent on its environment (such as corn, sugar, etc).

As Mike and I have discussed several times, if we want to use corn, we need to figure out how to make corn in a lab first.