What IS the answer?

Just watched a program on TV about Alaska and the effects climate change is having on the wildlife there.  Still beating the global warming drum, these folks are, and there is no doubt in my mind that the climate is changing.  There is lots and lots of photographic evidence of where glaciers have melted.  Whole valleys that 50 or 100 years ago were full of ice that are now down to bare rock. Can’t argue that, it is obvious that its gone.  What gets me is that all these scientists are saying that every single person on earth contributes to global warming, so every single person has to contribute to fixing it.

Ok, so what would they have us do?  I agree that we all waste a lot of energy and water.  We can make conscious efforts to turn off lights, not leave the water running while we brush our teeth, etc.  That will make us aware of the problem, but it won’t fix it.  “Stop driving those polluting SUV’s!”….Ok, what do you do with it?  Trade it in for what…a Prius?  Manufacturing the battery bank for one hybrid or  “all electric” car does far more damage to the environment than a full size pickup will do burning gasoline or diesel over its lifetime, but you never hear about that.  You will never see any serious push by government entities to switch to an alternate “clean” fuel until a reliable way can be established to tax it.   What?  What does that have to do with anything you say?  Think about it folks…the biggest portion of the price of a gallon of gasoline is the various city, county, state, and federal taxes.  Until a method comes along to tax cars by the miles they are driven, governments are not going to give up their cash cow.   Think about the economic impact it would have if someone came up with a little black box you could attach under the hood and instantly double the fuel economy of any engine.  That would be great, right?  Except that it would have the instant effect of cutting tax revenue generated by “per gallon” sales in half as well.  Who cares, right?  Just be that much less that the politicians can’t waste or steal.  Sorry folks, it don’t work that way.  They will continue to waste and steal, but you won’t get your roads built and maintained, they’ll have to cut back on traffic safety programs and even fire and police protection.  Everything that lives off these tax revenues will suffer, except the waste and theft.

Back to the point of this bit however…what to do about climate change.  Do we suddenly reject all technology, go back to subsistence farming and hunting and gathering? Some of us can do that, but billions of people will starve trying to live that way. Inner city folks can’t farm, and there’s nothing to hunt or gather, so that won’t work.  Most of us can’t live within walking distance of where we work.  Round here, and throughout most of the south, public transportation is limited, so that’s out.  Agriculture makes up a big part of the south’s economy, as well as the Midwest and western states. That means trucks, tractors and other large equipment.  Farmers are just like everyone else…it makes no sense to have a several special purpose vehicles.  You know, a truck to use on the farm, but a little bitty car to run to town in.  You buy one pickup truck that will do it all.  We all gotta have heat in the winter, and most of us think that air conditioning in summer is a necessity. So what do we do?  The inner city folks are dependent on the farmers for food, so that means lots of trucks to bring food to the stores, and cars to get to the stores.  And of course, they will have to have jobs in offices and factories to make the money to pay for the food, so they are pretty well stuck.  These offices and factories will use lights and water and all sorts of chemicals and things, so what do we do?

You can’t let people starve to death.  Can we be more conservative?  Sure, we can and should.  Can we all just give up modern life and go back to being cavemen?  Of course not.  Wouldn’t even if we could.  We got all sorts of folks pointing out the problem.  How about some real solutions?

Biofuels aren't the answer, but they can help

Sometimes I have to wonder what, or even if people are thinking.   Everybody, myself included, decries using foreign oil, but nobody wants to use our own oil.  With our economy so dependent on something someone else owns, we’ve set ourselves up for disaster.  Yet we refuse to develop our own oil fields for whatever reason.  I guess we are saving them for a time when everyone else runs out.  Sure, deep water drilling is dangerous.  Everything to do with oil is dangerous.  We need something new…a new fuel source.

Some run to battery power.  Electric cars are the way.  If you are looking to reduce damage to the earth, electric cars are far more damaging to the earth than oil.  Lithium mining is probably the most damaging to the earth thing that humans do, save maybe nuclear weapons testing.  Others will suggest ethanol.  Great idea, in that it is renewable, doesn’t damage the earth much, is safe to handle and transport (well, at least as safe as gasoline) and all that.  The naysayers cry that it reduces our food supply, drives up feed costs for farmers and causes widespread starvation.  That’s assuming that the ethanol has to be made from corn. Still others rightly so say that not all cars can burn ethanol without damage to the engine. This is true, but fixable.  Change out the gaskets and a few other parts, and while you’re at it do a ring and valve job and you practically have a new engine.  Having to do this is interesting, because every major car company in the world already makes the cars that are ready for ethanol.  Have since the 80’s…they sell them in South America.  Most of the cars in South America already run either on E85, or  pure ethanol.  So why haven’t they been doing that here?  You can probably figure that out.  If not, I will put forth a theory later.

Let’s talk about the food thing for a minute.  Using ethanol for fuel would have very little impact on food prices if you make ethanol out of sugar instead of corn.  Where would we get the sugar, you ask?  Simple…sugar beets.  A crop not commonly grown in this country anymore, but would not be hard to get started in most states.  What I’m about to tell you is simply information easily gathered from various agricultural websites. I do not profess that it is the absolute truth, nor to I claim to be an expert on any of these matters.  I’m just a guy with an idea that if put in practice could help with our dependency on foreign oil, create a few jobs, and actually improve the environment.

Just for discussion purposes, let us assume that a mere 300,000 acres of beets were planted. This number, by the way, is the approximate amount of land wasted on growing tobacco in this country, but that’s a whole different topic.  Most of the government and agricultural websites I visited say that you can expect a yield of between 12 and 25 tons of beets per acre per year.  They go on to say that a large portion of the beet’s weight is sugar, and that it’s common for the extraction process to recover 10-20% of the total weight in sugar.  To make it simple, 100 pounds of beets will give you 10-20 pounds of sugar, which will yield 1 to 1.5 gallons of fuel grade ethanol.  Put another way, if we assume a 15 ton per acre (or 30,000 pounds) yield, you can get approximately 3000 pounds of sugar, which in turn would yield 300 gallons of ethanol per acre. Back to our 300,000 acres above, that’s 90,000,000 gallons of fuel.

What impact would this have?  A barrel of crude oil (42 gallons) will yield approximately 20 gallons of gasoline or roughly 2 gallons of oil per gallon of gasoline. Our 300,000 acres of beets would save something between 4-4 ½ million barrels of oil.  Granted, that’s not a huge contribution, but these numbers are just an example. Added to that, the pulp left over from extracting the sugar and the “tops” as they are called, the green leafy part above the ground are excellent ingredients for animal feeds and organic fertilizer.  This could help bring feed costs down and make food more affordable.

It is estimated by some of the naysayers that if all the fallow farmland in the United States were converted to growing various biofuels, that realistically we would only gain 8-14 % of our total energy needs.  Ok, so it’s not a magic bullet, but why not do it?  What would we have to lose? That would be 8-14% that we didn’t buy from overseas, it would keep our farmers working, keep Americans employed.  Nearly any car can handle up to about a 25% gasoline/ethanol blend.  Just to make sure, keep the mix at 10-15%, and no one should have a problem with it. 

Biofuels like ethanol and bio-diesel are certainly not the be all and end all for our fuel needs.  They can provide some relief both environmentally and economically at a time when we desperately need both.

So, why not?