Pushing ethanol is either ignorance or intentional damage to the health and well being of the people of the world. It will reduce food supplies and raise the price of transportation and those food supplies.
I have heard you should not attribute to malice what simple stupidity or incompetence can explain.
I no longer accept that.
When the brown stuff in the field oozes up between my toes I know I am barefoot and not paying attention to where I am walking.
There is too much brown stuff to attribute to stupidity or incompetence.
Here is an ethanol story.
Part one: the farmer.
It is a nice day, it is spring, the chance of frost is past, and it is time to plant crops.
The farmer fills the fuel tank on his tractor with gas or diesel.
He then prepares his field for planting.
A day or two passes.
The farmer fills the fuel tank on his tractor with gas or diesel. He then plants his field with corn.
Some more days go by.
The farmer fills the fuel tank on his tractor with gas or diesel. He then fertilizes his corn field.
Time goes by and the corn he planted sprouts.
The farmer fills the fuel tank on his tractor with gas or diesel. He then cultivates his corn field.
Time goes by and the corn grows high and it is time to harvest.
The farmer fills the fuel tank on his tractor with gas or diesel. Unless he has a harvester; if he has a harvester the farmer fills the fuel tank on his harvester with gas or diesel and he harvests his corn.
The farmer sells his corn on the open market.
Counting on government subsidies, an ethanol producer bids up the price and buys the corn.
The corn bought for ethanol is not available for food.
The supply of corn for food goes down; the price of corn for food goes up.
Part two: the plot sickens.
The ethanol producer transports the corn to his plant.
He goes through the fermentation process; which requires a lot of heat and a lot of water.
The heat comes from natural gas or the electric power grid.
The water would have been better used elsewhere.
He has a lot of waste plant fiber that has very little food value which he sells to feed lots.
He sells the ethanol to oil companies who are forced by the government to use it to dilute their gasoline.
The consumer buys this diluted gasoline.
If the consumer was getting 20 miles per gallon from pure gasoline; he will now be getting 20% less mileage than he did on that pure gasoline.
He will have to buy more of this diluted gasoline to get home.
He has now bought about 1.5 gallons of fuel to go as far as 1 gallon of gas would have taken him.
If you do the math; pure gasoline would have been cheaper.
Ethanol will destroy the fiberglass fuel tanks in boats.
Your lawn mower will not run for long on ethanol polluted gasoline.
Ethanol has a “shelf live” of 90 days.
It takes 1.5 gallons of ethanol to equal the power of 1 gallon of gasoline.
Using a source of food to power a vehicle is at the very least depraved indifference.
If you add up the points above you will see that it takes more than a gallon of gas (or diesel) to make a gallon of ethanol.
You will not get as much out of ethanol as you put into it.
The government gets taxes on each gallon of fuel you buy; if they can force you to buy more gallons they get more taxes.
This is the third time in my lifetime that ethanol has been pushed by the government.
It is still as criminally stupid now as it was the first time.
To end this story, consider this.
Our vehicle would have gone 20 miles on a gallon of gasoline.
We used 1.5 gallons of ethanol to go 20 miles.
It took 1.5 gallons of gasoline to make that gallon of ethanol.
That means it took 1.5 gallons of gasoline AND 1.5 gallons of ethanol to go 20 miles.
That is three gallons.
The government got taxes on 3 gallons of fuel.
The bottom line is that someone is going hungry because of some uniCORN dream that has no basis in reality and is total economic nonsense.