Yet one more reason to be suspicious of/absolutely loathe ethanol.
Is the EPA ignoring their own laws in order to push ethanol production into heretofore protected grasslands?
The NWF (National Wildlife Federation) alleges that crafting the Renewable Fuels Standard, which requires a certain amount of transportation fuel sold in the United States to contain renewable fuel, Congress limited biofuel feedstock production and harvesting to agricultural lands. Natural ecosystems such as grasslands, are not supposed to be converted for agricultural uses, they claim. However, the report notes, the EPA is flaunting this important provision by adopting an “aggregate compliance approach”, which allows protected ecosystems to be destroyed for biofuels production.(italics, ours)
“Plowing up our nation’s last remnants of native grasslands to grow more corn for ethanol is like burning the Mona Lisa for firewood,” says Julie Sibbing, Director of Agriculture programs for the National Wildlife Federation.
Nice analogy.
It's telling that our heavily-subsidized and inefficient head-long plunge into renewable energy also requires breaking the law.
And just how bad is ethanol? Even the high priest of Big Green, Al Gore, thinks its a crappy idea.
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."
Wishing to drive up the price of food worldwide in return for an alternative energy that you know is bad policy is just the sort of craven behavior a man needs to display in order to be President, we suppose.
For more reasons on why ethanol is quite possibly the worst idea ever, check out B-Daddy's itemization, here.
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3 comments:
Dean,
Thanks for the link. We often find that it is the federal government that is the worst polluter. Think Hanford Nuclear site, for example.
So we're destroying the environment in order to save it?
A link is on the way.
The really annoying thing about ethanol, is that it is just an attempt to make a "drop-in" fuel to replace gasoline with a minimum of changes. At the cost of throwing away most of the energy contained in the fuel in the first place.
What we really need is an engine that runs on cellulose (wood chips/sawdust/grass clippings, or even wood sugars made by hydrolysis of cellulose). We can't grow much of anything else up in the Frozen Northlands, but we can certainly grow trees.
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