Please keep all comments and debates civil, no vulgarities, ECT... While I think that ethanol has some very limited potential as a fuel it's far from practical at this time and is questionable if it could be with such high populations and automotive usage. One of the follies of ethanol is that it produces a lot of smog emissions. The major pitfall is that it takes a lot energy to take the raw materials of agriculture and convert them into a burnable ethanol. It's one of the problems with producing hydrogen also, unless you take a shortcut and produce hydrogen from petroleum, that doesn't take as much energy or cost as much; but it hardly weans us off of petroleum. Not only does burning ethanol produced more smog than petroleum, since it requires so much energy to process ethanol, the energy source also probably produces masses amounts of emissions. So not only will be the burning the ethanol, we will probably increase our burning of coal and other fuel sources to process the ethanol. The one fuel but I know of that might be able to make the processing of ethanol economical would be nuclear. Unfortunately it would probably take decades to get approval and build the nuclear power plants, something I feel that we should start doing now. If we wait until we get desperate, that means we would rush things and that could be dangerous. Another problem with nuclear power is there it is so much bureaucracy that it can reduce its a cost effectiveness and in some cases safety. Al Gore and his liberal fascists are creating global warming hysteria, instead of playing politically correct global warming games. We should be working with industry to keep us in oil until big business can get the infrastructure and technology for alternative energy sources. Unfortunately Bush the weak Republican which I think his quasi liberal has partly given into the global warming hysteria by jumping feet first on the ethanol bandwagon. I think it was good to increase our production, however I'm not sure the rate of change and extent of change is wise. Because it is surging our food prices, increasing emissions, and could possibly be devastating to our farmland by depleting the soil in the long-term. I don't know if it's practical or feasible; but from what I hear there are vast fields of methane ice that is thought to be able to renew itself faster than we are consuming energy at the moment. If we could find some way to harvest it and get it to the user economically, I think it would be a good alternative energy source. Though it would likely wreak havoc on the ocean life. However by using the source it may prevent a catastrophic sudden release of global warming gases that could cause an extinction event.

• published: 19 Mar 2008
• views: 44633