By Doc Fromader

Editor, Webrodder.com

For what it’s worth, I saw a story just today on CNN that brought up some of the same issues, including the fact that the BEST estimate of the amount ethanol could replace foreign oil is at 10%. They mentioned that the best estimate of production and distribution costs means that it takes ¾ gallon of petroleum fuels to make 1 gallon of ethanol. They also pointed out that one big problem is that you can’t run ethanol through the pipelines as the ethanol will clean all the debris and impurities out and ruin the fuel, so it has to be trucked or shipped by train car. My pal Doc Hammett pointed out that there are other, more efficient ways than using corn to produce ethanol and he’s right.

So for what it’s worth, I just wanted to point out some of the pit-falls that this rush to ethanol creates and get you thinking about it. The problem with most of these tree hugger, world’s-gonna-end global warming nuts is that while they have the best of intentions, they just have a hard time understanding basic physics. Especially the part where every action has an equal and opposite reaction (my loose interpretation of the law of unintended consequences). Like the drop of mercury in each fluorescent bulb they are pushing these days that will significantly increase the amount of mercury in our water, food, landfills, etc, and that is also a known threat to health. Or the fact that if we stopped driving our cars it would only decrease the world’s CO2 output by 1%. Or how making a little ethanol is making a lot of other necessities more expensive. And on and on.

I think technology is the answer to many of our problems, but you gotta understand that as long as we are letting the tree huggers prevent us from being energy self-sufficient (drilling in most of this country is prohibited, like almost all off-shore, all national lands, etc, etc. and we are having a hell of a time getting nuclear power plants built) we are not going to get very far. There are a lot of misguided people who view other humans as a virus – an interloper on this planet – and want us to commit suicide. They lack the foresight to see that so many of their crack-pot ideas where we all live on eco-friendly communes and sing kumbiah all the time are simply not possible unless we kill off most of the population. Nice, warm-and-fuzzy ideas they’ve got, but they are dangerous for their ignorance of reality and their lack of comprehension about the consequences of their schemes.

But it’s not always about air-head logic. In some cases, it has to do with a willingness for everyone ELSE to deal with the problem but not the big shots. Teddy Kennedy, in one of his notorious departures from sobriety, killed plans for a wind farm off the Massachusetts coast because it would be visible from his mansion. Not in MY back yard! This happens all over the place.

Here in South Dakota we have a tremendous amount of open land and a lot of wind (not all of which comes from me!) and there’s a lot of talk about the tremendous amount of energy that could be produced, but the enviro-wackos will undoubtedly make any plans a living hell for all involved. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

There are serious discussions about banning wind generators because they MIGHT harm a few birds. I guess when you have morons who are trying to stop us from eating meat, wearing leather, and now even stopping us from eating fish (they’re people too!), or when some insignificant animal or insect can stop important work it gets a little harder to cope. When we have politicians who pander to this stupidity, it jumps over to insanity quickly. Frankly, if we knocked off every freakin’ spotted owl tomorrow I couldn’t care less if it made life a little better for PEOPLE. You want survival of the fittest – there it is. I figure any bird that is so stupid as to run into the generator props is probably part of the gene pool that needs to be scraped. So unless you can figure out how to turn spotted owls into gasoline suitable to run my hot rod or energy to light my shop, you are wasting your breath preaching eco-terrorism at me. Amen.

The reality is, though, that a lot of the ‘greenhouse gases’ come from animals. The biggest bunch of offenders include people (one enviro-airhead suggested we just all had to stop breathing for an hour a month but couldn’t see the flaw in that) and cows. So here’s the deal. We gather up and use the manure to create methane (natural gas) and alcohol, and we get the cows under roof and gather the flatulence (cow farts to us knuckle draggers) and use it for power. (There are actually people doing this successfully.) Heck, we could also tap the sewers of our cities instead of venting all that energy off into the atmosphere. Given this is supposed to be the single largest source of pollution in the world, it makes me wonder why it couldn’t also be a major source of recycled power as well. There. Because I am a glass-half-full guy I’ve just presented a logical and reasonable way to get a lot of energy from an ‘eco-friendly’ source that doesn’t come from Iran, is in large supply, free for the taking, and could reduce ‘greenhouse gases’.       No charge.