A short rant on ethanol

And no, I don't mean the delicious CH3CH2OH that we love to drink in large quantities. I'm talking about fuel ethanol, and more specifically, corn ethanol, the substance many people seem to think will solve all our transportation problems. A presentation I saw tonight got me thinking again about how full of shit that idea is.

The only thing that will come from use of corn ethanol as fuel is we run out of water, and all the nations agricultural topsoil will end up in one of two places: the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

The problem, of course, is agricultural practices. You see, in this country we have a sustainable agriculture subsity that gives farmers money for using sustainable agricultural practices, like crop rotation, and letting fields lie fallow. Since there is "so much money" in ethanol compared to other crops, and since this extra money gives them no initiative to continue with the subsidy (why let fields go fallow and rotate crops when you can run corn on the same land ALL YEAR ROUND and make the BIG BUCKS?), they abandon these practices which keep the soil on the land and not in our water supply. The result? Large scale agricultural erosion from bad farming practices, the dust bowl all over again. Furthermore, the scale that such farming would need to be done to produce the amount of ethanol needed for our transportational system (which is only growing as time goes on) is more than we can spare, water included.

So get corn ethanol out of your head. Sugar cane, or cellulosic ethanol, on the other hand, might just have a future. Both have massive returns on energy in comparison to ethanol and also petroleum. They just might work, whereas corn ethanol doesn't have a chance.

So, lets use corn for what its always been for: eating. And how!