Ethanol is dead. Long live King Methanol!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy

hey ... good article

the question to be asked then .....

... is who in Blazes would want to be sitting in the Offal Office for the next few years with this Rogue Diesel LOCO-motive Barreling Down the Rickety Tracks toward 1600 Penna. Ave. ??

1. Andyinsdca: I sympathize. I have written several, many embarrassing Salon posts while all-but-plastered.

2. Everybody: Please bear in mind that the original idea for corn fuel was "Energy Independence," rather than efficiency. And, the people who promote ethanol are not lefty greenies, but corn farmers and agro-industrialists.

Corn fuel is an idea whose time came and went very quickly. We need time to catch up with reality.

I think there are 2 aspects to the speculation driven markets that come into play when politicians discuss them. Lying and ignorance. Ignorance on the part of so many politicians when clearly they don't even understand how the system works (how could they when it has been deliberately manipulated to obscure how it actually works). And lying when they just parrot whatever lobbyists have told them is the truth. When so many people in economics/finance are unable to predict what will happen or even to clearly explain what did happen after the fact, it indicates that the whole system is flawed and lacks transparency. It can't possibly be managed in a sensible way that benefits society.

It seems like a crime when we have an economic system that allows so much wealth to be extracted without actually doing anything productive, and it is not an abstract thing either since this effects us all at the grocery store and when we buy or sell a home. I'm not saying capitalism is the problem, just that we have allowed some really clever people to set up rules for the game that very few people understand and that allow those who do to make money from doing nothing, or worse doing something that actually undermines the value built by the hard work of everyone else. This has to stop, and it does not make me anti-capitalist to say that I am tired of getting screwed like this.

Since the economic system is set up for us and by us (well should be anyways) it should be something that we at least have a chance to manage in a way that benefits our long term goals as a society. Time to do a little tinkering to get the system to support long term thinking that leads towards a sustainable future and diminishes the casino night that we have allowed it to turn into.

Maybe it's 3 or 10 or 40 or more. But if you imagine that biofuels are free non polluting don't harm brown people and unicorns then you are huffing paint again.

BTW Rads, Income distribution in oil free Brazil is even MORE uneven than in the US. In Brazil there are a few obscenely weathly, a tottering middle class trying to hang on, and a huge underclass.

No doubt that the statistics of the metrics on the increase of food prices are more or less accurate.

Who is responsible for the price increase?

Is it speculators' fault? Not to the implied extent.

In an open market environment, risk takers are the plasma that smoothe out price and supply bottlenecks.

It has been such for 2000 years.

What do you think was going on at the Tempel in Jerusalem when the Baby Jesus was roaming the city?

The futures market.

Mungo Fetch

Who cares? We'd MUCH rather get to Wal-Mart to go deeper into debt buying next year's garage-sale stuff, than eat today! Get in the Hummer, Maude; we're gonna go get two hundred tacos!

I can't believe a word that comes out of the Bush people. These people wave the cross but are pathological liars. Of course Bush says that energy crops are only 10% of the crop.

And let it be clear - ethanol is another Republican bondagle in the US. One poster blames the environmentalists - yet another nod to Big Corn and the mid-west farmers.

Hmmm...looking at the posts for this column and others, I suspect that right-wingers are targeting liberal sites and adding their comments. Interesting, since they don't like to read. Perhaps their comments are based on the headline?

JohnnyMM, you nailed the real issue behind our energy problems exactly. But what you missed is the "entitlement" problem. The large, very wealthy corporations who are currently making obscene profits off providing energy resources to the United States absolutely believe they're ENTITLED to keep doing so. They're the new "welfare queens" but, unlike government programs over which we have some control, they get to charge us whatever level of private taxes they like to keep them in their "welfare Cadillacs", since we can't do without their product.

They are and will continue to use their massive profits to buy (oh, I'm sorry, "lobby") politicians to do things their way, but the fact is, as stated weeks ago by Andrew Leonard in a previous article, using currently-available technology, we could convert to suppling all the energy needs of the U.S. with photo-voltaic cells, wind power, etc. within twelve years. All that's required is that we start the conversion process.

Within twelve years, "peak oil" could be rendered irrelevant to the US economy and, as an added bonus, a group of very wealthy and powerful people who have done everything in their power to keep sucking maximum resources out of the rest of us while setting up bogus groups of bought and paid for "scientists" to lie to us about how they're destroying the planet in the process, would have the rug pulled completely out from under them.

What's not to like? I say we start in January 2009!

The oil companies (which usually do refining and distribution too) are NOT going to just quietly fade into the sunset. They are going to do everything they can to push us into using some type of liquid fuel for cars...

Yes -- this is the primary reason why we hear so much about hydrogen-fueled cars.

It's a liquid fuel, and they know how to deal with liquid fuels. Never mind the enormous inefficiencies that come from producing and even transporting the hydrogen, nor the fact that the practical storage technologies to date have no better energy density than Li-ion batteries ; you still get car companies pushing it as the main alternative to gasoline, and also some naive environmentalists tagging along.

... and from their point of view if it is petroleum based, then the upgrading might not even need to happen (oil from shale or coal or algae or plants).

Yes again. The primary source of hydrogen today is natural gas.