re: #10 KingKenrod

The only time most people care about ending dependence on foreign oil is when prices get too high, like in 2006 when Bush was talking about ethanol in his SOTU (BTW, Stewart, it had nothing to do with the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq). Anytime someone tries to organize a workable plan, the price of oil falls and we all say “oil alternatives are too expensive, never mind”.

We could follow Brazil’s example and move to ethanol-burning cars. The Brazilians actually had a plan and stuck to it. US cars could mostly be replaced in a generation (about 10 years), but replacing large transportation vehicles would take longer. Trying to produce and transport such a huge amount of ethanol at a reasonable price would also be a major challenge.

Robert Zubrin’s “Energy Victory” details a plan that could work. I’m not an expert on the subject, but it sounds pretty workable.

Unfortunately, Brazil’s “success” with ethanol is illusory. Distillation requires large amounts of energy, which in Brazil comes from burning the bagasse - the dried, fibrous remains of the sugar cane - in large, open-air facilities little more sophisticated than a charcoal pit. The pollution generated is enormous - not a problem in Brazil, which doesn’t have any meaningful environmental regulations, but a non-starter elsewhere.

And that’s before to unsustainable slash-and-burn destruction of rain forest that yields land suitable for cane production - for just a few years, until all nutrients in the soil are depleted and the high iron content bakes into something remarkably similar to concrete in the tropical heat. The only way to move forward and maintain production at that point is to pour fertilizer on the soil - and fertilizer production requires, once again, vast quantities of energy to produce.

In the end, ethanol is not a wise choice. It isn’t even a break-even proposition. It simply shifts energy uses around, out of traditional pathways, and in the end results in a net gain in energy use.