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The real hazard confronting humanity as we move further into the new millennium is that we could convulsely grasp for solutions in our hysteria about global warming which will muck things up even worse than they are right now. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn. 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. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." 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: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. 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 is tremendously inefficient. Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. 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. But as seen in an article in today's New York Times, residents of River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, saw a black viscuous goo that was drifting in the Black Warrior River. The crud was 450 times more than permit levels allow and the stuff had traveled two miles downstream. It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, waste from biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very quickly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as deadly to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't the only place dealing with this problem. In January a Missouri businessman was charged for a discharge that murdered 25,000 fish and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. Can you say... "OOOPS"??? Only a day ago, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that in increase in corn production for fuel will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life actually suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" reports that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 penalty--the biggest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been fined--for multiple environmental misdeeds surrounding illegal discharges. Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide. In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. 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 offering information at a low price which folks can use at home to build a small device which infuses hydrogen into the gasoline/air mixture that their automobile runs on. The process makes bite sized particles out of the ones that the system uses as fuel. Therefore the engine is able to use considerably more of the gas. With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to improve your fuel mileage by thirty to fifty percent or even more. Those goblets must have been pretty "blankin'" huge in some systems before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can improve your fuel mileage. It also helps reduce emissions significantly. This package of info has been purchased by over 9000 individuals already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?
Article Source: http://www.articletap.com
Consumer advocate, songwriter, entrepreneur and activist, GARKO, advises that at the present time you cannot buy a car that runs on water but that the ones coming on the market in the next five years are planning to charge too much for the conversion. But he can show you how to convert your car to run on water which is the best engine modification to save gas For a list of current fuel prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info
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