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By: GARKO
The potential disaster facing us is not actually global warming but human stupidity and shortsightedness in implementing false and destructive solutions of which there are many. One of these dead end solutions is corn-derived Ethanol which is the favorite of politicians, corporations and media. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming. Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who was staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025. The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. It takes some talent to be such a good spin master that you can put the American farmer growing corn as “the top of the spear on the war against terrorism as a former CIA director (James Woolsey) did but he did it! So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol? Well, I love America but I sure as heck don’t love ethanol! As a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: You need to burn more of it in order to get the same amount of fuel. It also has properties that make it impossible to use the existing pipeline infrastructure to transport the Ethanol and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which majorly adds to the costs involved. Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog. The most seductive myth about ethanol is that it will free us from our dependence on foreign oil. Even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day -- only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use. Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel -- not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. What's more, when corn ethanol is burned in vehicles, it is as dirty as conventional gasoline and does little to solve global warming: E85 in full use would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by up to 15% at best and that’s nothing, while fueling the destruction of tropical forests. Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol. Still, biofuels are, at best, a huge gamble. They may help cushion the fall when cheap oil vanishes, but if we rely on ethanol to save the day, we could soon find ourselves forced to make a choice between feeding our SUVs and feeding children in the Third World. And we all know how that decision will go. Ok folks, sorry if I depressed you. But I am just trying to wake you up to the truth. Further on along those lines I do have good news! WATER4GAS is sharing information for a nominal fee which individuals can use in their garage or wherever to put together a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the gas/air mixture that their car runs on. The process makes bite sized particles out of the ones that the engine burns as fuel. So it is able to use a lot more of the gasoline. With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to improve your gas mileage by 30-50% or even more. Those molecules "musta" been pretty "blankin'" big in some engines before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can improve your gas mileage. It also helps to lower emissions significantly. This information has been purchased by over 9000 car owners already and the percentage of happy customers is about 99%! So how about you?
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Consumer advocate, songwriter, entrepreneur and activist, GARKO, shows you how to improve mpg on a 1500 Silverado and how to save gas on a Ford F150 5.4 Liter engine or any other engine. In other words, the best gas saving solutions For a list of current gas prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info
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