This Slate article is from 2005 [1], but the topic is one that desperately needs to be reported accurately. It’s about ethanol, and the story is that it takes much more energy to make ethanol than one can get from ethanol.
Ethanol won’t significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol to our gas tanks adds further complexity to our motor-fuel supply chain, which will lead to further price hikes at the pump; and, most important (and most astonishing), it may take more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it actually contains.
If you find these these claims to be disturbing, check out these additional statistics [2] produced by David Pimental, a Cornell University agricultural expert. Ethanol can only “work” with massive government subsidies. Ethanol is not quite the panacea it is touted to be by politicians and the corporate media, eh? Here’s one of the shockers:
If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.
With numbers like these, why isn’t conservation constantly promoted on page one of every newspaper?
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