One of my co-bloggers just drew my attention to a highly relevant report on a Tulsa TV station's website, "Ethanol: It Looks Cheaper, But Looks Can Be Deceiving".
Not everyone is aware that even though E85, where available, sells for less than regular gas, the apparent savings are illusory. Those who have tried it have experienced reduced gas mileage on the order of 30%. Thus, in order to break even, the price of E85 would have to be much lower than it is today.
In my area, just one station sells the stuff. The price differential is only 30 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly, that E85 pump normally sits there in solitary splendor. Drivers – even those who own the new Flex-Fuel vehicles – tend to try E85 once or twice just to see how it works. Once they see how few miles they get per fillup, they quickly learn their lesson and go back to regular gas.
Ah, the enviro-whackos say, but even if it costs us more, burning ethanol in our cars helps the environment. As the article points out, that, too, is a lie. In truth, the situation is even worse than they say. To get an accurate picture of the overall effects of ethanol upon the environment, we must look at not only the result of burning it in our gas tanks, but the effects of growing the corn, converting it to ethanol, and transporting the ethanol in expensive diesel-powered tanker trucks, since it cannot be sent through pipelines. Every report I have seen by a qualified researcher comes to the same conclusion: the burning of ethanol as motor fuel, on balance, does far more damage to the environment than the burning of equivalent amounts of gas.
As if that were not bad enough, we now see another result of the Law of Unintended Consequences as applied to ethanol: skyrocketing food prices, shortages of essential foodstuffs, and incipient mass starvation.
Thanks, Al Gore – great job!
Hat Tip: Old Camp Cook
No comments:
Post a Comment